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Posted on 08/08/2026 10:22:42 AM PDT by BenLurkin
A book borrowed 150 years ago has finally been returned to an Australian library, with the culprit linked to the Houses of Parliament in London.
Antiquities of Athens was borrowed from a local library in Kiama, a seaside town about 120km (75 miles) south of Sydney, some time in the mid-1870s.
The book on classic Greek architecture was stored in a tea chest hidden behind a boarded-up fireplace for decades before it was recently discovered by a family member.
Ross Simmons, 77, thinks his great-grandfather, John Simmons, might have borrowed the book to help with his career, having worked as an apprentice stonemason in Westminster in the mid-1800s before becoming an architect in Australia.
...
Kiama Library staff worked out that the fine would be £97 - or in today's currency AU$28,000 ($20,000; £15,000), allowing for inflation. But luckily for the Simmons family, the fine has been waived.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
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Libraries sell off and discard their books routinely, they don’t keep the same books, so returning a 10 or 20 year old book to them is meaningless, sell the 150 year old book on ebay so that someone who is interested can buy it, or so that AI can scan it and destroy it.
Seinfeld: The show that keeps on giving.
> Seinfeld: The show that keeps on giving. <
Yep. It doesn’t matter what the topic is. There will be a Seinfeld reference.
Should be no fines due.
I’ll be they cannot even read the book, beings as it is 150 years old language and reflective of those 150 years old times.
This is one of those shows I watch if I happen to come across on television.
On my top television shows of all time list.
I have owned a lot of 150 year old books and even much older, they read fine and often become favorites.
In a tea chest in a boarded up fireplace.
I read 150+ year old books all the time. Dickens, Austen, Twain...................
That’s a classic!
I believe for library books, the statute of limitations is 5,000 years.
I read books that are more than 2000 years old (the Old Testament, Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle), but admittedly mostly in translations.
An inscription survives giving the rules for a library in Athens built in the 2nd century A.D. But none of the books survive so they weren’t very good at enforcing the rules.
The Septuagint (Old Greek) is the earliest translation of the Hebrew Bible, produced in Alexandria, Egypt, starting in the 3rd century BC.
Homer , possibly born c. 8th century BC was an ancient Greek poet who is traditionally credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic from ancient Mesopotamia that is the world’s oldest surviving example of narrative literature. The literary history of Gilgamesh begins with five Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, some of which may date back to the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2100 BC).
Cookbook?.........
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