Library Scofflaw!
August 22, 2008 at 5:20 pm | In Book Blather | 2 CommentsDid you see this article?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26335283/?GT1=43001
It looks like libraries are finally getting serious about abusive patrons. You may already have heard that unpaid library fines can now affect your credit report. Well, in Wisconsin they can even land you in jail!
The subject of this article, a young gal of 20, seems to be having the time of her life. Probably she’s laughing because she thinks it was absurd to be arrested over White Oleander and Angels and Demons. What she doesn’t know is that the literature police came after her for reading Dan Brown. She was only released because she balanced it out with an Oprah book, and Oprah personally called the governor and asked for clemency.
Seriously, it amazes me the attitude many people seem to have toward library books. A few weeks ago I sat and watched a poised, professional looking, well dressed man try to talk his way out of a $12 library fine. His argument was that he had checked out two copies of the same book so that he and his son could read it together, and only one “got turned in” while the other was still in his car. I guess he thought that libraries only fine people who don’t take reading seriously enough. Or maybe the fact that they had another circulating copy was supposed to exonerate him. I thought, Dude, you’ve probably spent $12 in one trip at Starbucks. Next time just buy the dang book. Or, here’s a thought, sit next to your son when you read and turn pages together.
Here’s another thing: the stuff people do with their books once they get them. You know what I mean. Chocolate thumb prints. Smashed bugs. Chew marks. Dog-eared pages. Missing pages. (Arrrgh). Underlining, highlighting, and margin notes – in ballpoint. Contrasting margin notes from a later patron in response to the first set. Filled in quizzes and workbook exercises. Broken spines. Water damage. Sun fading. Chipped and scratched audio books.
Probably the worst, though, is the books that go MIA. How does someone lose something that weighs over a pound, I ask you? You make a special trip, walk into the library, choose a book, stand in line at the circulation desk, take the book home, and… Then what happens? What do you do, use it to prop up a crooked table leg? I once had a coworker give me a stack of books (almost all Grisham paperbacks) that included a library book. He said a friend had passed these on to him, and now he was paying it forward. I checked the library catalogue, and sure enough, the particular book was marked Missing. I turned it in. (It was Deliverance, if you’re curious. Why a man would lend it to his fishing buddy…)
This is what I think. I think the library should put up a bulletin board of missing books and the patrons with whom they were last seen. Then other patrons who want to read these books can form vigilante committees. We can offer to go in, clean out from under the bed, in the bottom of closets, and under the seats of cars until all the missing books are returned home. Then we can take a big pair of scissors and cut up any library cards we find lying around.
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When I was little we misplace a children’s board book. My mother paid the fine, but found it several years later under our back deck. The squirrels had chewed on it! My husband accidentally left a book on a train once- and I misplaced on in a rental car one time. His got found and returned to the library by an unknown fellow passenger. Mine never was found and I paid the fine. It happens- people just need to be responsible for it!
Comment by Jeane — August 23, 2008 #
Oh, I’ve lost books before too. I managed to drop one on the way home from school – 101 Dalmatians – and what drove me nuts was that a) it was already missing some pages, b) I really wanted to read the end, and c) I had to tell my Mom.
Then I lost one as an adult. It’s so embarrassing! I was reading a true crime paperback about the Menendez Brothers, and it just vanished, either at the bus stop or on the bus. I had to ride all the way home with nothing to read, and then pay $15 for this horrible smutty little book I shouldn’t have been reading in the first place. I called every lost and found in the entire mall, went back and looked through all the bushes for it – and the garbage cans – and it never did turn up.
Comment by Jessica Coleman — August 23, 2008 #