No 1: No renewal
I’ll confess: I’m a library renegade. My life has been one long trail of overdue notices. If they had remedial work programs for libraries, I’d probably have been sent to the hard labor camps . . . when I was seven or eight years old.
Recently, I got right with my local library system, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and obtained a new library card. The Free Library offers the ability to track your library account online, which helps keep a recidivist like me on the straight and narrow. Whenever I log into my account, forgotten titles appear, and I’m left to greet them like a bewildered, slightly embarrassed party hostess: “Well, fancy you turning up at my house today!”
Last night I went to the library to make a round of returns: several books, a couple of DVDs (”Cold Mountain“, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” — whom I would have happily taken by the hand for his ability to apply good, firm hyphenation, at least on top of a DVD case). I paid some overdue fines, then asked to renew a book that I had left at home, Tom Zoellner’s Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire.
I wasn’t permitted to renew the book, since another library patron had placed a hold on the book and was waiting for it to be returned. In fact, I wasn’t even allowed to pay my existing fine on the book, which was already a few days overdue. “Here’s your quarters back,” said the librarian, deducting the fine for the Zoellner from my overall total. “You’ll have to pay the whole thing when you finally return the book.”
You know you’ve truly sinned when they rebuff any attempts at penance.
