An 84-year-old New Hampshire man walked a September 1894 magazine back into the Concord Public Library more than 130 years after it was checked out, and paid nothing, thanks to the library's fine freeze policy.
John Hanson of Barrington brought the September 1894 issue of The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine back to the Concord Public Library after spotting an article in the Concord Monitor about the library's decision to freeze late fees. The magazine was 48,220 days overdue. Without the freeze, Hanson would have faced a bill of $12,055, the New York Post reported.
Hanson, who said the magazine had hung around his home for decades, told NBC News that the fine freeze made the decision easy:
"Yeah, when I saw that, I said to myself, 'Boy, this would be a good time to bring it back.'"
The library will not put the 1894 issue back into circulation. It posted about the return on its official Facebook page:
"We've witnessed many happy faces since announcing our fine freeze! Of course, we expected long overdue books to be returned, but certainly not something from the late 19th century!"
The fine freeze, whose exact start date and full terms were not detailed, clearly achieved at least one result the library did not anticipate. Staff expected patrons to trickle in with overdue books from recent years, not a periodical published when Grover Cleveland was president.
How the magazine originally ended up outside the library's walls remains unclear. Hanson is 84 years old, which means he was born decades after the issue's 1894 publication date. Whether a relative checked it out, or whether it simply changed hands over the generations, has not been explained publicly.
The library also did not disclose what per-day or per-period rate produced the $12,055 figure, only that 48,220 days of accumulation added up to that sum. Whatever the math, Hanson's timing saved him a five-figure bill.
Library officials said the magazine will be kept out of circulation, though they did not say what they plan to do with it, display it, archive it, or simply set it aside.
Fine-freeze policies have become increasingly common at public libraries across the country in recent years, with administrators arguing that accumulated penalties discourage borrowers from returning materials at all. The Concord library's experience suggests the policy worked exactly as intended, at least in one memorable case.
Give a man a path back to doing the right thing, and sometimes he'll walk through it, even if the book is 132 years late.
