Inter-library loan was invented for people like me. People who can never find every book they want to read at one library. It gets especially hard when you read one book and find out there’s a sequel, yet the library doesn’t have it. I’ve never quite figured that out…why a library has the first book but not the second. Or why it sometimes has the first and third books, but not the second. Anyhow, I had that happen to me about a month ago. So, I went to the reference desk and filled out a paper in order to get the second book.

A couple of weeks later I got a call on my cell phone, some nice recording telling me that “Sturm, Melissa M. has a book on hold at the Tippecanoe County Library.” Being in Texas when I received the phone call, I had to wait until that weekend to go get it. I expected to be handed some little paperback resembling the first of the two books I had read – really good books always being hidden by some cheap-looking cover. Instead, the librarian handed me an old burgundy colored book with gold writing I thought was going to fall apart in my hand!

Walking out the door, I very carefully opened the cover of the book and found the swirly handwriting of someone and the date “1899”. Upon further investigation, I found the copyright of the book was 1898! I held in my hand a book over 110 years old! An interlibrary loan book over 110 years old! I could hardly believe it. Who would imagine any library in the modern US having a book even fifty years old, let alone 110? And if a library did have such a book, why were they letting it out on interlibrary loan? I’m not saying this particular volume is worth any grand sum of money, but still. I have several old books in my collection, the oldest of which is probably 100 years old; but I would hesitate to lend them out to just anybody. Do you know what some people do with books? Toss them about with a shrug? Set cups on them? Take them to the beach? That’s fine for those cheap romantic paperbacks or sci-fi thrillers, but it is not okay for a book of over a hundred years old, bound in cloth and imprinted with gold lettering.

Who could have thought you could feel honored by receiving an interlibrary loan book? Well, I feel quite honored. And I have taken good care of the book as I have made my way through the adventure of Rudolph Rassendyll, the woman he loves, Fritz, Sapt, and their arch-enemy Rupert of Hentzau. I’m just going to hate returning it to the library. I wish I could keep it for my own collection!