Books belonging to Thomas Jefferson were discovered more than three years ago in a dumpster in Nevada by a collector who only recently learned their origin and true worth.
Max Brown told the Sacramento Bee he happened upon the books while picking through a dumpster in Incline for a community service project in December 2014. Noticing the worn books in the trash, he said he grabbed all he could carry – about 15 books – and carried them away before a snowstorm ruined the rest.
Six months later, he became a book detective after finding an inscription "from the library of Thomas Jefferson" on one of the books, the Bee said.
Jefferson is a true American icon as an author of the Declaration of Independence and the third U.S. president, according to History.com.
The first appraiser who looked at the books told Brown they were fake, telling the collector that the signature on one of the books did not match Jefferson's, the Bee said.
Brown restarted his investigation after an episode of the reality television series "Pawn Stars" highlighted a similar book that was hailed as a Jefferson relic.
With the help of the Library of Congress and Google searches, he found that Jefferson had indeed purchased two of the books – the second and third volumes of Pierre Charron's "De la Sagesse," a 17th-century meditation on morality and wisdom – and rebound them, the Bee said.
According to its website, The Library of Congress was restarted with more than 6,000 volumes from Jefferson's personal library after the initial 3,000 volumes from the library were lost when the British burned down the Capitol in 1814,
Endrina Tay, a staffer at Jefferson's presidential library, concluded that the books Brown found were once owned by Jefferson, the Bee said, but that news came after Brown had auctioned off some of them.
"Eight-thousand dollars seemed like a lot at the time, but it's nowhere near the value of American history," Brown told the Bee.
Brown needed another two years of digging before learning that the books had became part of the Kellogg family collection. Kellogg descendent Violet Cherry last registered the books as part of her collection in 1976 before dying.
On July 17, Brown returned some of the book he had not sold to one of Cherry's living relatives, who confirmed members of her family in a photo album Brown had also found, the newspaper said. He said the family was grateful to receive the albums that they never knew existed.
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