Library book found in fireplace returns 150 years late

An Australian library has welcomed home a book roughly 150 years overdue after it was discovered inside a tea crate bricked into a sealed fireplace.

Ross Simmons found the water-damaged copy of “The Antiquities of Athens” while renovating a house in the seaside town of Kiama, south of Sydney. The book was published in 1858 and carries the number 506, placing it among the roughly 1,000 volumes held when the Kiama Library opened in 1872.

Simmons believes the book may have been borrowed by his great-great-grandfather, John Simmons, who owned the house when the library first opened. The library’s original borrowing records have been lost, however, leaving the identity of the delinquent reader — and the reason the book was sealed inside a fireplace — a mystery.

Had the library applied the overdue rate printed in the volume, the theoretical fine would have reached approximately 28,000 Australian dollars, or about $19,500 in U.S. currency. Fortunately for the Simmons family, the library no longer charges late fees and has no intention of pursuing a 19th-century borrower’s descendants.

The old lending rules discovered with the book offered another glimpse into library life during the 1870s. A household needed at least three people capable of reading before borrowing, and patrons were prohibited from collecting a book while intoxicated.

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Despite some water damage, the volume survived its century and a half inside the fireplace and has now been added to the library’s local history collection.

It will not, however, be returning to circulation.

“We’re not going to allow it to go back out again,” library manager Michelle Hudson said, joking that staff did not want to wait another 150 years for its next return.

The discovery gives Kiama Library an unusually complete local mystery: an unidentified borrower, a hidden fireplace, a theoretical five-figure fine and, after approximately a century and a half, a very late happy ending.