Somebody returned a copy of 'Beowulf' to a library 54 years after it was checked out. It would have accrued $1,000 in fines.
- Somebody returned a copy of "Beowulf" 54 years after it was checked out.
- At the time, the library charged 5 cents per day for overdue books.
Somebody returned a copy of "Beowulf" to a public library a staggering 54 years after it was originally checked out.
Sewickley Public Library in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, said in an Instagram post that the book, a translation by Chauncey Brewster Tinker of the Old English epic poem, was checked out in January 1969.
At the time, the library imposed fines of 5 cents per day.
With some 20,000 days having passed since January 1969, the overdue book would have accrued a fine of about $1,000, not adjusted for inflation.
However, the library said that it had been missing for so long that the borrower would have simply been expected to cover the original purchase price of the book, which was $0.98 back in the 1920s.
"There's overdue...then there's OVERDUE," the library said in the Instagram post.
Fortunately, whoever returned the book will not have to pay anything, because the library has adopted a fine-free policy.
The library said: "As long as library users return borrowed items, their account will be cleared and they can continue to check out materials to their heart's content."
It added: "Let this be a reminder that it's never too late to return those overdue items!"
While the book was decades overdue, it didn't break the record for the longest time a library book had been missing.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the record for the most overdue library book is a German book about the Archbishop of Bremen that took almost 300 years to be returned.
Colonel Robert Walpole, the father of Sir Robert Walpole, who became Britain's prime minister, borrowed the book in about 1668.
His biographer, Professor Sir John Plumb, discovered the book centuries later, returning it to Sidney Sussex College's library in Cambridge, England, in January 1956.