Alison Healy on overdue library books – The Irish Times

The recent death of veteran actor Philip Baker Hall was a reminder to revisit the old Seinfeld episode where he played a library research officer. The aptly named Mr. Bookman was on the case of library offender Jerry Seinfeld who had failed to return a book he had borrowed 25 years earlier.

Although Philip Baker Hall’s appearance on the show was brief, his detective book made such an impact that virtually every obituary referred to his breakout role.

He was the hero of librarians everywhere, fighting the good fight against people who walked into the New York Public Library without shoes and drew genitalia on the Cat in the Hat books. But his main business was chasing down hooligans who didn’t return library books and making them pay hefty fines.

Poor Mr. Bookman would be twiddling his thumbs if he were still working today, now that many libraries have done away with fines. They were withdrawn in Ireland in January 2019, which was good for the person who returned a book to the Gweedore library in May of that year.

The White Owl, by Annie MP Smithson, had been searched almost 82 years earlier on 23 July 1937. It was found in an attic during a house cleaning in Falcarragh. Now safely housed in the Letterkenny Library, it will be on public view for Culture Night in September. It can also serve as a gentle reminder that it’s never too late to do the right thing.

That book was only slightly out of date when you consider the indifferent book-lending habits of our closest neighbors. The Guinness Book of World Records states that the record for the oldest library book was set by Colonel Robert Walpole, who borrowed a book from Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge around 1667. He did not return for 288 years.

I’m sure you’re wondering what book could be so fascinating that you couldn’t part with it for almost three centuries. It was, of course, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum septentrionalium, vicinorumque populorum diversi (Various historians of North Germans and neighboring peoples). I doubt there would be a queue of people eagerly waiting to read that potboiler.

His son, also Robert, became Britain’s first Prime Minister and there is no evidence that he inherited his father’s delinquency when it came to book lending. Neither did Col Walpole’s biographer, Dr. JH Plumb. It fell to him to do the decent thing and return the book to Cambridge after he found it in the Colonel’s papers while researching the biography.

I don’t know if the book ever helped Col Walpole in his efforts, but it’s likely that another overdue book helped its borrower. The Microscope and its Revelations, a 700-page doorstop, was borrowed from the Hereford Cathedral School library by a teenage Arthur Edwin Boycott in 1894. It was returned by his 77-year-old granddaughter, with apologies, 122 years later.

After reading that book on microscopes, Arthur Boycott grew up to become a distinguished professor of pathology and naturalist. And unlike his unpopular namesake, Capt Boycott, the professor lent his name to a more positive phenomenon. The boycott effect describes the effect responsible for the way bubbles sink into a pint of Guinness. He followed up on a discovery he made while observing the sedimentation of red blood cells.

With all those important scientific matters on your mind, you could be forgiven for forgetting to return your book. But it’s harder to forgive book readers who use unorthodox bookmarks.

If a reasonable person doesn’t have a bookmark to mark their place in a book, they could use a piece of paper, perhaps a receipt. Not in the US, where several librarians have complained about patrons using slices of processed cheese as bookmarks. What were they reading? A collection of poetry by WBrie Yeats? Waiting for Gouda?

This cheesy controversy came to light a few years ago after American writer Anna Holmes pleaded on Twitter for people to stop the practice. She said a Washington DC branch library had found three cheese markers. Other librarians chimed in with the strange items they found as bookmarks. There was a small circular saw blade, a bitten chicken leg, and lots of banana skins. But above all, there was a disturbingly high number of bacon strips being used as markers, both cooked and raw.

Fortunately for Irish librarians, food markers appear to be an American phenomenon. Irish readers prefer to leave commemorative cards and bus tickets in their books.

Probably the most shocking thing you could find in an Irish library book these days would be a recent electricity bill. Ten times scarier than discovering an Easi Single.