Book Returned To New York Public Library Almost 55 Years Overdue

It may disappoint fans of the TV program “Seinfeld,” but the New York Public Library doesn’t really have its own detectives who track down biblio-scofflaws with severely overdue books. If it did, it would have long ago tracked down the patron who checked out a copy of Fire of Francis Xavier in 1958 and didn’t return it until this week.

Today, many libraries send substantial missing or overdue book accounts off to a collection agency, which people find a lot more menacing than a humble letter on library stationery.NYPL does this now, in fact, but didn’t go back retroactively and try to track down people who checked out books during the Eisenhower administration.

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