When I visit towns I like to poke around their libraries, and I recently discovered a book in a public library — city undisclosed for the book’s protection — which astonished me. It’s hard to make out from this graphic, but the first due date stamped is November 23, 1931.. That wouldn’t be unusual for a university library, where great swathes of the collection sit undisturbed for eons, their treasure of 1930s farm reports unvisited, but for a public library where books are constantly being destroyed or declared missing by patrons, it’s kind of incredible. The book in question, for those curious, is Michael and his Lost Angel, a play. Many of the books in this section also hadn’t moved since the 1970s, despite frequent and steady borrowing throughout the forties, fifties, and sixties. It’s as if the people in the town decided, in the 1970s, to give up on reading and watch Family Feud instead.
Let’s see an eBook file last that long without its data being corrupted!
Reading Freely 
This is fascinating and impressive. My library no longer stamps a card in the back of the book. But I always wonder how old a book is and what people took it out in the past.
Really? No stamping to tell you when it's due? I've been in some public libraries that have a fairly up to date tech setup (a website that allows people to view their account, place holds, clear fines, as well as those seals in books that make an alarm goes off if someone exits the building with a book that's not checked out), but those always had a due-date slip. How does your library do it?
our library is like that too, it's all on computer; i guess the book has a code on it that is scanned by the reader thingie… anyway, you're lucky; our library gets rid of books by the wheelbarrow load and is replacing them with graphic novels and computers… not many good books left; and all the good old ones are gone(picture me grinding my teeth…). Don't go there much any more…
That is really cool, kind of bittersweet… I miss the stamps; I used to get a thrill from checking out a book that had been sitting on a shelf for months (or years). One of the oldest books I've ever borrowed was Seven Pillars of Wisdom, an early hardcover from the 1930s or 40s. It appears to have since been removed from the library system. That's what I get for not going to the library sales. I have a love-hate thing for old books though (the smells and stains).
7 pofw: great book, i thought… some old books can be bad, true, but i still like them…baking soda helps some times…
An unfortunate sign of the times…even in our library, where no one is inclined to get rid of books, we've had to condense the collection as demands for physical space have increased. Our middle school PC lab sits where a massive sports/music section used to be. (It was the 700s-800s section, which has been relocated in a condensed form.)
Even at my university they still stamp the books so we know when they're due back. Interesting.