A man walked into Concord Public Library with a magazine it lent out in 1894

Earlier this month the Concord Public Library in New Hampshire announced that it would stop charging overdue fines for a full year, through September 2027, and not long after that a man named John Hanson walked up to the circulation desk and said he thought he had something to return that might be the oldest thing the library had ever taken back.

He was right. It was the September 1894 issue of The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, bound as a book, more than two hundred pages of it under a marbled hard cover, and inside the front was the library's own bookplate with a line printed in capital letters saying the volume MAY BE KEPT FOR ONE WEEK. It had been out for 48,220 days.

The fine

Jennifer Needham, the archivist who took it in, did the arithmetic that everyone asks about first. At twenty five cents a day, the rate the library charges, the fine would have come to $12,055. Because of the freeze, Hanson paid nothing at all, which is a coincidence of timing rather than a plan, since he had not been waiting for an amnesty and did not appear to know there was one.

Needham has worked a circulation desk long enough to have a view on what comes across it. "Every day on a public library circulation desk, you get a lot of surprises," she told NPR. "But it was a pleasant surprise." On the instruction printed inside the cover she was blunter. "Then it outlines in capital letters, may be kept for one week," she said. "So obviously they didn't follow those directions."

Nobody knows who took it out

This is the part the library cannot answer. Hanson did not know where the magazine had come from, did not know who had originally borrowed it, and could only say that it had been in his house for decades. The bookplate proves it belonged to Concord Public Library and the date on the cover proves when it was printed, and between those two facts there are a hundred and thirty two years that nobody has an account of.

What the volume itself records is more legible. It is full of essays, poems and illustrations, and behind them the advertisements of the autumn of 1894, for tobacco, for chewing gum, and in one case for a bath tub. One illustration has been cut out of it, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and it is the only thing anyone has removed.

Where it goes now

It will not go back into circulation. The library is putting it in the Concord Room, where the city's archival material is kept on display, and Needham says the reason is that it documents two things at once: a magazine title the library used to lend out in the late nineteenth century, and what the people of Concord were reading while they had it.