It’s not the most-overdue library book we’ve written about lately. That honor goes to ” The Microscope ,” returned to England’s Hereford Cathedral School in December 120 years overdue.
America is a much younger country, so it perhaps makes sense that the US’s recent whopper of an overdue book is only an even century late. But it’s the title that makes it.
The short-story collection returned to the San Francisco Public Library on Friday was due in 1917, but its very name implies that it wasn’t going to get returned on time. The book, by F. Hopkinton Smith, is called ” Forty Minutes Late. ”
Webb Johnson of Fairfield, California returned the book, the San Francisco Chronicle reports , inspired by the library’s current period of overdue-fee amnesty.
