In 1872, You Proved You Could Read To Borrow A Book; Now You Can Borrow A Person

Somewhere in Kiama, a small seaside town on the New South Wales coast, a library book spent 150 years bricked inside a fireplace inside a tea crate. The book, Antiquities of Athens, was found during home renovations by Ross Simmons, who suspects his great-great-grandfather John Simmons, was the original borrower.

Understandably, John was not available to confirm this or to explain his architectural approach to overdue fees. The accumulated fine, calculated with inflation, sits at around $19,500, which is the most expensive act of literary procrastination in recorded Australian history.

If the book could report on its 150 years in the dark, the first thing it would probably note is that it left a very different world and came back to a completely alien one. When it was last held by human hands, the people reading it did so by gaslight. Queen Victoria was on the throne. The telephone had not been invented yet. Darwin had published On the Origin of Species only thirteen years earlier and was still causing considerable upset at dinner parties.

The book went into that fireplace in a world that was entirely analogue, certain of its own social order, and blissfully unaware of what was coming. It came out into a world of mobile phones and streaming services and a library that, in the intervening century and a half, had transformed itself into something its founders would find completely bewildering. The card catalogue is gone, and the silence is often negotiable.