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A True Story from the Fiction Shelf |
 While on vacation in Kenya in 1937, Hemingway lost several books from a university library's Gertrude Stein collection and was fined $1,500. He never paid his fine because he claimed a leopard ate the books. |
Want to really get hassled?
Lose just one library book
By JOYCE KIEFER
of TheColumnists.com
It was a fall afternoon on the campus of a famous university. The freshmen were checking in to the old dorm which had housed generations of freshmen before them. Their parents unloaded vans and rental trucks that sagged with the possessions of their sons and daughters’ 18 years on this earth. Early leaves fluttered to the ground.
The scene reminded me of my first days at a different college. I thought about them as I put down my tote bag to unlock my car and drive home from work. It contained a book I planned to return to the campus library the next day. I am employed at the university, but not as a scholar. On my own time, I hole up in the library to find books and newspapers and magazines on the variety of things that interest me at different times. I can always find what I want among the 5 million books that comprise this amazing smorgasbord for the mind.
I gloat at all the money I save. Not even Amazon can beat the price of “free.” I’ve always been the perfect patron, no burden to the library at all. I return my books on time and in perfect condition. Until last month.
Somewhere in the ‘40’s the university library purchased two copies of “A Farewell to Arms.” It surely bought others for students both eager for Hemingway and assigned to read him, but only two books have survived. One features pictures from the 1932 film starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes as the tragic lovers–the soldier/ambulance driver and the English nurse--who were caught in Italy during World War I. The other has notes written in the margins by generations of students. Several pages had been torn out of that copy.
When a friend heard I was going to Italy, he asked if I had read “A Farewell to Arms” and promised the book would provide literary ground for my trip and that the end would bring floods of tears. Curious to test him on the latter, I ducked out of the campus conference I was handling to see if I could find the book. The online listing said that one copy was in the main library; the other was stashed in off-site storage. All I wanted was the most accessible copy so I could grab it quickly and get back to work.
I chuckled when I had a chance to flip through the pages of the tattered version I had checked out. In a flight of fancy I pictured the engineering student I dated as a freshman reading this book under duress. He had burst my illusion that all students at this institution were intellectuals. Perhaps he was the one who tore out the pages--angry because his evaluation of the book was graded poorly. Thoughts of his immaturity and mine made me feel young again.
I finished the book quickly in order to get to its tragic end. More nostalgia: I felt my own go-rounds with childbirth as I read Hemingway’s words of anguish. As I got in my car that fateful afternoon, I began to reflect on the eagerness of the freshmen moving into the dorm and the contrasting sadness of their parents who watched part of their own lives close with their children’s departure. With my mind so busy, I forgot to pick up the bag. When I got home, I remembered it. My husband kindly went back to look for it in the place where I parked the car.
The tote bag and Hemingway were gone.
I left my name with the campus police Lost and Found Department and went to Italy.
I thought the library might forget this old book that it should have replaced long ago. Surely the incoming freshmen would not be searching for Hemingway, a dead white guy who was a womanizer and wrote choppy sentences. No one would miss it. The system would be forgiving.
I was wrong. While I was actually visiting the country that provided the setting for the book– the follow-through curiosity that libraries seek to promote–the book bureaucracy went to work. These are people who would send a person to prison for ripping the tag off a pillow.
When I returned from Italy, they fired off the first letter. I received a computer-generated notice from the Loan Division, which threatened to cut me off from the remainder of the library’s 5 million volumes if I didn’t renew or return the book. “Unpaid library bills may result in a block against further circulation transactions.” And then came the false accusation: The call letters given for the missing book were those of the edition with pictures of Gary Cooper.
I was devastated. I sent an e-mail protesting the accusation that I had lost the more expensive book, the one that languished in storage. I hinted that long ago the library should have replaced my battered book on its own nickel.
The Loan Department fired back another letter, this time under the name of the night supervisor. He demanded a police report “in order to adjudicate this matter.”
I went to the campus police and filed a formal report for items lost or stolen. In Italy filing such a police report is easy. It’s done all the time. All my husband had to do to report a wallet filched by a pickpocket in Rome was fill out a one-page form in English. He handed it to the desk sergeant who made him a copy and then said “finished.” Twenty minutes max.
But not at the famous university. I waited over an hour for the police person who was required to take my report. Then I was told to return a week later to obtain a copy. A case number alone would not do for the night supervisor of the Loan Division. As the week went by I imagined my daily overdue fines piling up like the national debt. Finally, with a sense of mission accomplished, I hand-delivered the police report to the Loan desk, attention Night Supervisor.
The next day I received another letter from the library, this time an anonymous one. It did not bear the name of the night supervisor or of any other human being. It said I was now formally billed for the replacement cost of the book plus a $5.00 billing fee. The threat was no longer veiled: “Further circulations transactions against your record may have become blocked as a result of this bill.”
The continuing insult was that the library still charged me for replacing the Gary Cooper edition, which would cost $75.00. Clearly the night supervisor had dozed through all my responses.
Would renewed access to 5 million books be worth $80? I reflected on this matter. I wished I’d bought Hemingway from Amazon.com. I made one last try.
I offered to meet with
the night supervisor and everyone he listed in the copy notation
portion of all his letters. And I offered to have my own supervisor
attest to the fact that the book I had checked out and read on
the job had no pictures of Gary Cooper.
The entire Loan Division relented. The night supervisor wrote
one more letter. “We have decided to remove your charge
and overdue fines from this book. I see no need to have a conference
about this matter.”
It was high noon and I stood them down successfully. How did that happen? The Loan Division, like any bureaucracy, is a great bully on paper. Through its weapon of choice it can threaten and scare a mild-mannered patron such as I. But when I offered to show up in person with my boss as my witness, the Division was suddenly disarmed. Personal encounter must not be listed in their rules of adjudication.
The sun also rises after all.
© 2002 by Joyce Kiefer.
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