While browsing old newspapers, I've come across multiple reports of a book titled How to Train Your Dog being returned to libraries, chewed.
These reports span thirty years, and specify different locations where this happened, but the stories are otherwise identical. So I figure that the chewed dog training book must be an urban legend of libraries.
Over the course of a decade, from around 1965 to 1975, Joseph Feldman managed to steal 15,000 books from the New York Public Library. He was caught when firemen entered his Greenwich Village apartment while responding to an alarm in his building and discovered all the books, piled up everywhere. When asked why he had taken them all, Feldman responded, “I like to read.”
Arizona Daily Star - Sep 27, 1975
In the 21st century, playwright Erika Mijlin was inspired to write a play, Feldman and the Infinite, about the incident. It was first performed in 2008. Her description of it:
In 1975, Feldman, a 58-year-old lawyer in New York City, was discovered to have stolen 15,000 books from the New York Public Library. He had rented two or three apartments in the West Village specifically to store these books, and it took 20 men, 7 truckloads over 3 days to remove them all. Feldman and the Infinite is a play that ultimately invents Feldman’s motives, and speculates about the universality of his quest - seeking knowledge and enlightenment, and finding what appears to be randomness and chaos.
Crossword puzzles first became a fad in the 1920s, and immediately created a problem for libraries as puzzle devotees thronged reading rooms, putting a strain on library services, wearing out the various reference books, and generally being a nuisance to regular patrons of the library.
In February 1961, Harold Roth, director of the East Orange Library in New Jersey, made news by having arrest warrants made out for 14 people with overdue books. The degree of overdueness ranged from four months to one year. But what really attracted attention was the manner of the arrests. The police showed up at many of the houses around midnight to rouse the scofflaws out of bed and drag them down to jail.
I think this 1961 case remains the largest mass round-up of people with overdue library books, but people still occasionally get arrested for not returning their library books in a timely fashion. The site publiclibraries.com has an article about "Jail time for overdue library books" that lists some more recent cases.
In 1974, the public library in Upper Arlington, Ohio added scratch-and-sniff scents to its card catalog. They called it the "Stick Your Nose in the Card Catalogue" program.
The idea was that the card in the catalog would have a scent, and then the book on the shelf would have a matching scent. So you could find your books by smell. There were about 60 scents in total, including apple, chocolate, garlic, lemon, roses, root beer, leather, pizza, orange, strawberry, candles, pine, cheddar cheese, clover, and smoke.
I was curious what became of the scented catalog, so I emailed the library and asked. The reply came just a few minutes later:
Unfortunately, the UA Library no longer has this catalog, and has not had a physical card catalog since around August 1989. We aren't sure what exactly happened to the scented catalog, but we guess that the cards eventually lost their scent over time, but remained part of the catalog until it was decommissioned.
And they also emailed me a news clipping about the catalog (in extended, below) from the local Upper Arlington paper.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.