Confession: I hid $20,000 in a little black book.

Confession: I hid $20,000 in a little black book.

If you found it, you’re welcome. Curious?

Let me say first - admittedly, 20k doesn’t go far these days. It would barely cover payroll for my small business. But for someone else just starting out as I did thirty years ago, it could be life-changing. It could be diapers, rent, no worries for a couple of months. It could be Jamaica, a wedding, a divorce, a car.

Hiding money in books was the gift that perpetually gave back. Wondering where and how the money I stuck in books became more fun than buying a lottery ticket. It became a story that could go anywhere, and affect any life. Would a child find it or an adult? Would a gambler? A nun? The wonder very often lulled me to sleep better than any book could.

I’m sure if you’re the lucky one who found it, you’ve been wondering why someone would think of hiding money in a book.

Here’s why:

This habit of sticking money in books began when my kids were teenagers. I was the mother of five, and the mother of invention. It was my job to keep little grabby hands and hormone-induced tempers in check. (You’re welcome, society.)

In short - I found this to be a fun way to keep young minds buried in the books I wanted them to find to read. I just didn’t want to hand kids books. I wanted them to know how to look for them - how to dig, if necessary, in piles of books.

I was growing tweens and teens with a soundtrack of grunge music and disco Fridays. I was the chromosomal Lead Nerd of a bookish, nerdy brood who needed some 3D and real world distractions from constant D&D and Magic Cards. We spent our Friday nights at Barnes & Noble sampling books, lattes, and chocolate cake - a hip place back then. That’s where the money in the book thing started. It’s what a nerd mom does when she has extra cash and smart kids to challenge.

The best friend of my oldest daughter described us as ‘the richest poor family she knew’. That’s because after I won a major contract for my advertising studio I’d splurge a bit on all of us, as well as secretly tucking cash in books.

“Everyone gets Nikes!” “Pick out whatever coat you like!” “Lattes and cakes for everyone!”

I suppose this was nothing more than glorious, small-time materialism. It was pre-Oprah’s car giveaways, but acceptable by the IRS and every bit as dramatic. During our poor years it made life worth living at times. Feeling a need to pay it forward during paydays, I “tithed” by dropping twenties in the parking lots of grocery stores in poor neighborhoods. However I started thinking donated cash was best spent - literally - in books.

Originally it made for a fabulous scavenger hunt for the younger, bored kids in a bookstore. Later, as they grew up, it became a marvellous pay-it-forward kind of thing for the unsuspecting and imaginative thinker - or so I imagined.

One book might contain a twenty, carefully placed on a page which offered a clue. Since I was an artist, I carefully illustrated yellow post-its to cover dead presidents on bills with masks, wigs, or sunglasses. Sometimes they were comic books. Sometimes they were religious books. Sometimes they were wordpress keywording books. But most of the time, they were books that challenged our reality in some way, and pointed to another to consider.

Call me positively passive-aggressive, but this way I could reward the deepest thinkers of that decade with Lincolns, Jacksons, Grants, and Benjamins buried in the center of books. It would take one book to get hooked. Was that bill a bookmark? Did someone leave it there? I hoped, strongly hoped, they noticed what I carefully wrote on each bill.

I decided to begin with the novel, Illusions, by Richard Bach. It was the 1970s version of the Matrix’s Little Blue Pill vs the Little Red Pill. These led to coffee table books featuring Titian, Mucha and Klimpt. I’d write a clue on the bill, which lead to a greater sum, somewhere else. When I traveled for work, I continued this fun habit, and some bills even contained references to more money in other cities. Later it crept into sci-fi and psychic sections, into public libraries, used book stores, or whatever place I could find in the city I travelled. From Spokane to Philadelphia, from Billings to Dallas.

I found a fabulous book which was about the accounts of children in India who claimed to have past lives. They perfectly described the conditions of their adult life - where their home was, who they were married to, what their names were. These often checked out. As it turns out, cultures which accept reincarnation listen to these comments made by children. Comments Americans consider ridiculous. In went $40.

Then I stumbled on Dolores Cannon, the most fabulous of her books had to do with Nostrodamus - and really should be made into a movie. There, via her hypnotized patients, Dolores asked Nostradamus questions about his quatrains, and Nostradamus asked her questions about the future in return. Whether or not this truly occurred, according to the trilogy his writings were made, in part, by a lady conducting hypnotherapy in the 1970s - the perfect time travel story.

I didn’t have an agenda, I merely wanted to encourage thinking. I wanted any adult, or any child, in as many locations as I could manage, who were capable of reading, to be encouraged to read more. Even if it meant paying them - well, anonymously.

For those of you who didn’t make out with $20k, my story ends with a blank, black book, leather bound with 20 rare Hamiltons randomly tucked within.

Why a blank book?

Well, first I figured if you scored an easy 20k from a randomly selected book you bought, you’d have a very interesting story to tell.

If you won it the hard way, by reading clues and gathering information then you probably have a lot to share with people right now.

Finally, if you threw it away, shame on you! Maybe this will teach you to never throw a book away!