If that sounds familiar, you are in good company. John Hanson of Barrington, New Hampshire, had one too. His was 132 years overdue.
How Does a Magazine Stay Out for 132 Years?
According to the Concord Monitor, the volume sat on Hanson’s bookshelf for decades, first in Boscawen and then in Barrington. Its faded brown cover was held to the spine with tape. It was so familiar that he hardly noticed it.
Inside were markings from the Concord Public Library and a polite instruction: “may be kept for one week.”
It was the September 1894 issue of The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. How it reached Hanson is a mystery, even to him.
“I have no idea where I got it,” he told the Monitor. His father grew up in Concord but did not have a library card. Hanson wonders whether he picked it up at a sale or from a pile of old books.
Hanson is a Concord native who graduated from Concord High School in 1960 and spent his career in the power equipment business. His reading life began in the children’s section of that same library.
“I usually have three books or so going at once,” he said. “When I was in school, I could remember the page number on each one, and I never used a bookmark. But I can’t do that anymore.”
In early September, he spotted a Monitor article at the grocery store. The library had frozen overdue fines for one year, through September 2027.
“I saw that they were taking in books with no fine, and I said, ‘Boy, this is a good time to bring it in,'” he said.
What Did the Librarian Say?
Jennifer Needham, the library’s archivist and outreach coordinator, was at the circulation desk when Hanson told her he probably had the library’s longest overdue item. She guessed it would be something recent.
“I was like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be from like the 80s or 90s,'” she told the Monitor. “And he pulls it out, and I’m like, ‘No!'”
First, she checked that the magazine had never been deaccessioned (library talk for formally removed from the collection). The bookplate, issue number, and date settled it. This one had simply never come back.
It had been gone 48,220 days. At 25 cents a day, the fine would have reached $12,055, though the library would not have charged him.
“Every day on a public library circulation desk, you get a lot of surprises. But it was a pleasant surprise,” Needham told NPR’s All Things Considered.
“I am just so curious,” Needham told the Monitor. She wondered whether the borrower lost it and then felt too ashamed to return it.
What Was Inside?
Plenty. The magazine runs more than 200 pages of essays, poems, and illustrations, plus advertisements for tobacco, chewing gum, and even a bathtub. (“Your first bath in a porcelain-lined tub will be a revelation,” Needham read on the air.)
“I read quite a bit of it,” Hanson said. “And it’s odd because some of it had been colored with Crayon, as if a kid had it at one time or another.”
Needham found one more curiosity. “The illustration of Abraham Lincoln has been cut out, and that’s the only thing that’s been cut out in this whole magazine,” she said.
To her, the magazine records two things: a title the library lent out in the late 19th century, and a snapshot of what people were reading at the time.
It will not return to the shelves. The library hopes to display it in its Concord Room, home to local archival material.
“This is a special thing,” Needham said.
As for the book in your spare room, Needham’s advice is simple: “Just return it.” It does not have to be 132 years late to be a pleasant surprise.