University of Liverpool cheese bookmark sparks Twitter jokes Published duration 22 January

image copyright University of Liverpool Library image caption The person who found the dairy bookmark was both amused and disgusted

A cheese slice bookmark has given librarians and thousands of social media users a Gouda laugh.

A tweet about the slice, found at University of Liverpool Library, has been shared more than 20,000 times.

Associate director Alex Widdeson said the "disconcertingly warm and liquid" slice was discovered "somewhere between American history and geography".

She said while library users were Brie to eat cold food, "we prefer them not to use snacks as bookmarks".

She said the person who found the cheese on Tuesday night was "so stunned" that she "forgot to note" the book it was inside.

"It's fair to say they were a mix of amused and disgusted," she said.

"I'm not sure even the mice would have been interested."

She said staff thought it might make a decent tweet, but never imagined it would receive so many shares.

"We might end up adding it to our special collections as a monument to the success of the tweet," she said.

The social media post about it has certainly had a dairy good response, and many Twitter users and other university libraries curd not resist cracking jokes.

It is not the first time an unusual item has been found in the library, Ms Widdeson said.

"A few years ago, we had the 'shelf-wich', a sandwich wrapper that was being used as a bookend, and it's not uncommon to find satsumas on our computers," Ms Widdeson said.

She added libraries could be "strange places", but the slice discovery had "given us a laugh".

image copyright University of Liverpool Library image caption Library staff discovered a "shelf-wich" between books in 2014