Today someone returned a book that was checked out from us about ten years ago. This is only the second time I've seen an item gone this long returned.

The sad thing is it's a 1966 biogrpahy of Adlai Stevenson. It's probably not worth putting back on the shelf at this point!

Did they charge the fees?

For something like that we just forgot the whole thing. The fees would have been close to $200.

So if I have an overdue book, the best thing to do is just keep it for years. Noted. Thanks DL!!

That works IF you move away or something and don't try to use the library any more, I might add. If you don't return a book and keep trying to use the library, you'd better bet you're going to get billed for it!

In this particular case the guy who borrowed it got it to work on a high-school paper. He forgot all about the book and about the library itself. I think he moved away for a while. Years later he got married. Eventually his wife found it and returned it. SHE's the one using the library. We couldn't penalize her for it!

Got it, so I should check out ALL books that I like and never return them for years. Thanks again!

Hey look it's lunchtime already, and I haven't done anything today. Maybe I should stop at the library and borrow some books to keep.

Sad to say, I think there are people in town who have that attitude. Cost of doing business, I guess.

I know of one librarian who publishes lists of patrons with major overdues in the paper. I suspect the loss in goodwill probably outweighed any benefit she got.

I just paid a $135 fee for my daughter. It went to their Collections Department. I went on a Saturday to pay the fine because, you know, normal people like myself are pretty busy doing work for a living on weekdays, but because they don't have someone there on Saturday's to take the payment, it went for a few more weeks.

Yes, my daughter is paying for it. I take it out of her allowance every month until it's paid off.

They didn't have anybody there on Saturdays to take the payment? How does that work? I would think anybody at Circulation could accept payment of fines.

We've let people with really big fines like that pay in installments.

Since it went to "Collections" they didn't, which I still think is crappy.

Oh, I see--bureaucracy rears its many heads. We're such a small-time operation we have no such division of labor. Anyone can accept payment of fines. Although if someone wants a special dispensation they do have to wait to talk to me. I've waved charges for things before, such as when the books in question were lost in a house fire. That poor family had enough to worry about without having to pay for lost books!

Is there a Pay for the book or Fine option, I can't see some of these books being more than $20 but to have $100 fine against it seems unreasonable.

How does it work. Its been years since I've been to a library and was usually good about returning things. (except that Disney Robin Hood book in 2rd grade that I lost and cried about-It was in my book bag when I went to school darn it.)

Used to work as a Financial Coordinator for a University Library. The thing about a book is...it costs a lot more than "cover price".

Lets say a book is $20.00. We have to pay someone (purchasing) to buy that book, a reviewer to review it, a cataloger to catalog it, and when it's taken, someone to do the whole damn thing all over again to re-purchase it. The cost for a $20.00 can easily range up near $60.00 or so.

A book kept for 10 years tho? Something like that (something from a year ago actually) is usually just either: Charged to the persons bursar account (college) or written off (Public library). Nice thing about the public library way is that hey...guess who's paying for the PUBLIC library to exist?

Yep, YOU! TAXES!

Nonfiction books frequently cost WELL over $20 nowadays. Specialized monographs of the sort found at university libraries (I used to work for one too, BTW) are especially expensive, since they don't have very large print runs.

We don't have as much overhead, since we don't have a separate purchasing department (I'm basically it) and mostly buy books patrons have requested. There's still the cost of labeling, covering, and barcoding. We don't make any allowance for that when billing for lost books. We just charge the cover price. Since we usually buy them wholesale, it probably works out about right in the end.

The real hassle is when they claim they brought the book back and we have to ransack the building looking for it. And it still isn't here!

In College, I did a big research paper on George Bush and the end of the cold war. I had maybe 15 books I took out from the library-Colin powell's memoris, Gorbachev's, some obscure stuff too.

Then at the end of the semester,they said I owed like, I don't know $1200 or something because I never returned the books.

But I had! Into the book drop. a long time befor.e

They didn't believe me, and would not send someone to check.

So i had them give me the numbers, and then I hunted them down, book by book. All were on the shelf!

The local librarian once told my father in law to "lose" a couple of books on purpose.

These were books he, for some OCD reason, had checked out for years! Literally, renewing them every month. Finally, the library switched to a one time renewal policy.

He brought them back and was talking to one lady, and the librarian said something like "you know if you lose them, they'd be yours. You could either pay the cost of the books or just take out books in the future on your wife's card."

I stole two books from my elementary school library when i was 7.

One was on King Kong, one Dracula, in movies.

I put them with books I had checked out, and slipped them out.

I came across them when I moved.

I think it's my one theft.

what about when you stole my heart?

I've had to go looking for books on the shelf to prove I had brought them back too. I know mistakes can happen. So if anyone says they brought something back, we always make sure to look for it. If necessary, we'll check more than one spot. Sometimes we find them. You have to be careful when discharging a lot of items at once--it's easy to miss something.

They've solved that particular problem in our Metro system. All the libraries are outfitted with scanners and the books have a small chip in them (mostly embedded in the spines and can be tracked throughout the library to find its location.

Good for checking them out too. You pass your library card under a card scanner and set your books on a bin and it scans them all at the same time all at once and checks them out to you.

Who needs libraries when you have Wikipedia?