Libraries that speak volumes

One year, however, three books went missing, which, to my horror, I discovered lying on the bookshelf of an Indian friend. Even so, they did not change their policies. Now they have a computer instead of that old desk. Of course, there are other libraries in Oxford where cameras and detectors are strategically placed. The Bodleian is famed for having chained some of its very precious books to the bookshelves. Understandably, these are hand painted and handwritten middle-age classics like Beowulf, or a historical document like the Magna Carta.

The Samuel Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, is open to visitors rarely and its contents are secured behind iron bars. The loss of any two books will transfer the rights of housing the library to the next college in the queue, St. John’s. But, for the last 500 years, Magdalene has taken care to not let a single book go missing. More modern libraries like the English Faculty Library have the sirens. If per chance, somebody carries a library book out, it is announced by a sophisticated alarm system. The culprits, however, are seldom accused of stealing books (unless a book is discovered under someone’s shirt) because it is believed to be a genuine lapse of an absent-minded scholar. I remember an evening when I was pursuing my doctoral research at Trinity College, Cambridge, and happened to be returning a book at the University Library. In front of me was a middle-aged man from Italy carrying a musty book. This gentleman explained to the clerk that his grandfather, who had been a professor at Sorbonne, had borrowed that book on an academic visit to Cambridge soon after which he had died. After 36 years, the book bearing a ‘Cambridge University Library’ stamp had been discovered in the attic of his ancestral home and he was in Cambridge to return it. Needless to say, his act elicited many sighs of wonder from the library staff, less because of his honourable intent than for the hefty fine he was willing to pay. I wondered whether I would have brought back a book my grandfather might have borrowed if I had to pay a fine of nearly 1,300 pounds!

Our libraries, on the other hand, have a rather dexterous way of pursuing defaulters across the world. An old friend of mine, who had settled in the US and was working in NASA, recounts the receipt of a letter from the librarian of a local college in Ropar where he used to study in the 1950s. They had managed to trace him 12 years after he had failed to return a book on precis writing and demanded a payment of fourteen rupees and two annas. I hope he goes back some day to clear his debts.