Stuart Plein, curator of rare books at West Virginia University Libraries, was sorting through new donations when he found a copy of James Clerk Maxwell’s that had clearly, at one point, been in the collection of the New Bedford Public Free Library. It did not have a “withdrawn” stamp to indicate that the library had disposed of it, so was likely to be extremely overdue. Plein contacted Jodi Goodman, the special collections librarian in New Bedford, who discovered that this particular volume had been borrowed from the library in 1904 and never returned, so Plein sent it back. “This came back in extremely good condition,” said library Director Olivia Melo. “Someone obviously kept this on a nice bookshelf because it was in such good shape and probably got passed down in the family.” She said that the library sometimes receives books as much as 10 or 15 years overdue but has never before received anything even close to a century overdue, let alone 119 years. She added,value of the printed book is it’s not digital, it’s not going to disappear. Just holding it, you get the sense of someone having this book 120 years ago and reading it, and here it is in my hands, it is still going to be here 100 years from now.
