Posted on July 10, 2023 at 10:00 AM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
A library book has been returned well over a century after it was due back.
An Elementary Treatise on Electricity was checked out of the New Bedford Free Public Library in Massachusetts on February 14, 1904, and has only now made its way back, reports the Associated Press.
Stewart Plein, the curator of rare books at West Virginia University Libraries, found the title as he was sorting through a recent donation of books.
This copy of An Elementary Treatise on Electricity isn't considered a rare book, so to speak, but the fact that Plein found where the book needed to go back to — 119 years after it was checked out — is fairly noteworthy.
For some context on what the world was like when the book was checked out and for speculation on how it spent the past hundred-plus years, read the AP's article on it.
(And just for fun: If fines didn't max out at $2, the book would have cost its original borrower more than $2,100 for being so late.)
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Categories: Today in Books