Detroit Library Lets Man Keep Book That‘s Five Decades Overdue

While some libraries no longer collect late fees for books, charging per day for overdue items is still standard. That means payments can reach triple digits if people ignore due dates. Fortunately for one Chicago resident, a library in Detroit let a him keep his long-overdue book free of charge decades after he checked it out and failed to return it in 1974.

Chuck Hildebrandt, now 63, borrowed Baseball’s Zaniest Stars from the Warren Public Library when he was a 13-year-old in town for Thanksgiving. The item was due on December 4, 1974, but he never got around to returning it. He only recently realized the book belonged to the Warren Library while he was packing up for a move. “When you’re moving with a bunch of books, you’re not examining every book,” Hildebrandt told the Associated Press. “You throw them in a box and go. But five or six years ago, I was going through the bookshelf and there was a Dewey decimal library number on the book.”

When Hildebrandt saw that it was meant to be returned to the Warren Library in December 1974, he kept it until December 2024 thinking the 50th anniversary of the due date would warrant publicity. He was right. 

In addition to getting to keep Baseball’s Zaniest Stars, Hildebrandt’s outstanding fees were also forgiven. He is now raising $4564—the approximate amount owed for a book overdue by 50 years—for Reading is Fundamental, a non-profit organization set on improving child literacy rates nationwide. 

Fifty years is a long time, but it's not the record for the world’s most overdue library book. That distinction goes to a German publication about the Archbishop of Bremen. The text was published in 1609 and borrowed from the University of Cambridge’s Sidney Sussex College in 1667 or 1668. A professor in the UK stumbled upon the book 288 years later and returned it in 1956 without being charged. 

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