silver

IIRC the oldest library label I ever found still in a book on the open shelves in a public library was from just after the Second World War and had a paragraph about how books being returned from borrowers with notifiable diseases (i.e. highly infectious) must be fumigated. Penicillin has changed our world.

The bus ticket is "collectible" (about £1-50 according to t'interwebz) and has an interesting history. I wrote a whole post about it but haven't got around to posting it yet.

My local library in London claimed they'd found an unused condom in a book (bedside reading, heh).