I have always joked about founding a library mafia to kneecap particularly rude customers who keep books well beyond their due dates with no reason beyond "but I needed the book."
Now James Turner, a Toronto illustrator, has created Rex Libris, "the adventures of a librarian charged with traveling across both space and time to retrieve unreturned library books."
This might actually make me get a subscription going at my local comic vendor. First issue ships in August.
22 July 2005
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Hey, thanks for the introduction to Rex, Cheryl. My sister is a librarian-in-the-making, so she really enjoyed the link.
Overdue books?
*looks at the floor in embarrassment*
I just found the other day, mixed in with my cookbooks, a book I checked out in 2001. Oops.
It was checked out around the time we moved into a larger apartment to accomodate our growing family and I guess it got packed instead of returned. I feel like a heel, and don't know how I missed it when I was unpacking everything here at the new place.
So if you need to send the library mafia my way, I accept my fate.
I don't know if it redeems me at all, but the book was still in great condition, including the due date card in the pocket, and it's been returned now.
Our council library had an "amnesty" last month; that is, you could return any overdue books and have fees waived in return for donating a can of food for charity. I had $25 worth of fees due, so I gave a big can of peaches in mango and a big one of lovely tuna in olive oil. Everyone got a bargain that day.
That sounds cool. I wish we would have had an Amnesty day. My book was so overdue I was charged the replacement cost and although I returned the book, they didn't remove the charge from my account. So I owe the library a $70 fee before I check out books again. Ugh.
We had an amnesty once, about ten years ago; it was very successful. I have found books from our library in used bookstores as far away as Nanaimo. Odd.
The people who bother me are not those who are honestly absent-minded (hell, I've paid $100s in overdue fees), but those folks who refuse to share their books with fellow students. Mostly because it was my job for six years to phone those people. :)
Post a Comment