EVANS, Colo. — A library in Evans is still shocked about a book returned this month. People who work there said they’ve never seen anything like this.
Someone returned a book almost 37 years late to the Riverside Library and Cultural Center on Wednesday, March 13th. The library can’t track down who returned it because they have switched to a digital records system since the book was checked out on May 30, 1987.
“The general vibe of Riverside Library here is pretty calm,” said James Melena, the community relations and marketing manager for High Plains Library District.
But a book with a big personality stirred up quite the commotion.
“This is a book called ‘Psychedelics,’” Melena said. “We certainly have had a lot of fun with it.”
It was checked out almost 37 years ago.
“So this card, you know, indicates when it was last checked out on May 30, 1987,” Melena said.
It just made its way back home to the library this month.
“The book has been overdue for 37 years,” Melena said. “That kind of made our eyes go a little bit wider because we had never heard of a book being that overdue.”
It definitely gave the people who work at the library a good chuckle.
“Very funny, I couldn’t believe that the person was willing to return it,” Melena said. “We can’t tell if this is the person who checked it out, or one of their relatives.”
Riverside Library stopped charging late fees in 2015.
“Typically after it’s 42 days overdue, in the past, it would be 10 cents per day added to the account as a fee,” Melena said. “Which would equate to over $1,300 today.”
The library will likely never know who returned the book.
“We tend to purge our patrons’ records every ten years and that’s for all inactive accounts,” Melena said. “So I’m sure this person would have been purged long before that and long before we migrated to a digital account system.”
The person who returned the book left a note.
“So this is the note we first saw,” Melena said. “’Sorry so late. It’s been a long strange trip,’ with a smiley face, of course nodding to the book. So of course we got a real chuckle out of that.”
Melena said the second most overdue book was from 2017, which was ‘If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.”
More reporting by Lauren Scafidi:
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