In an unusual twist of an overdue book story, 63-year-old Chicago resident Chuck Hildebrandt attempted to return a book he borrowed 50 years ago from a library in suburban Detroit. The Warren Public Library, however, offered an unexpected response, "You can keep it — and no fine." According to WZZM13, the book in question is the hard-to-forget titled "Baseball's Zaniest Stars," initially checked out when Hildebrandt was just 13.
Upon visiting the Warren library over the Thanksgiving holiday, Hildebrandt found that the library had long let his book and its due date lapse into the abyss of the forgotten. Oksana Urban, the Warren Public Library's director, told WZZM13, "Some people never come back to face the music. But there was really no music to face because he and the book were erased from our system."
The story of the belated return began, as Hildebrandt recounts, with a move that included a box of books where every book was not examined. It was only five or six years ago, he claims, upon perusing his bookshelf, that the Dewey Decimal System number caught his eye, indicating its library origins. "What is this?" he said to the New York Post.
Transforming this oversight into a charitable cause, Hildebrandt has launched a fundraiser aiming to amass $4,564 for Reading is Fundamental, a non-profit focused on promoting literacy. The amount, whimsically, mirrors the theoretical fines that would have amassed over a half-century of neglect. Hildebrandt himself kickstarted the donations with a $457 gift, he told NBC Chicago. The campaign as an estimate of what the overdue fee, if the library had taken back the gear, symbolizes a book's journey from a misplaced library tome to an emblem of literacy support.
