Half-Eaten Cookie Found Inside A 16th Century Book

We all have our own habits when it comes to reading books. I, for one, use a laminated bookmark to get back to the page where I left off. Others not so much, I suppose, as one librarian just found a half-eaten cookie in a 1529 edition of a manuscript.

If this sounds strange to you, it’s because it totally is. The story went viral when a tweet from the Cambridge University Library Special Collections tweeted a photo of the half eaten cookie inside the book. This section of the university’s library houses manuscripts, archives, maps, music, rare books, and photographs, as stated in the Twitter account’s bio.

The cookie was found inside of a copy of St. Augustine dating back to 1529, and the library posted the photo with the caption: “Today’s unexpected discovery in a 1529 volume of Augustine. For future reference, we have acid free paper to mark your place. Please don’t use baked goods.” Fair!

Although the cookie appears to be of the chocolate chip variety, it’s clearly aged and you can spot a stain around it, likely from the years it’s been pressed between the pages. According to The Vintage News, the cookie is believed to be from about 50 years ago, since before being in Cambridge’s collection, this specific manuscript was owned by a grammar school. It is thought that a young schoolboy dropped the cookie between the pages, and the manuscript was not previously checked thoroughly until this moment.

As always, Twitter got a bit of a laugh out of the whole thing with some people blaming Cookie Monster and wondering if anyone took a bite of the aged cookie. Others were just worried about the book, hoping it was still intact.

So there’s that. If you needed a gentle reminder to not use food as a bookmark, here it is: Just don’t do it, guys!