The Library Cop

March is National Reading Month

Digital collage art by Stella Kalaw

The day the library cop showed up unannounced saying he had come to pick up our overdue books, my first thought was, what the fu*k, an expletive I would normally use when the cat peed on the sofa, but not as a greeting to a stranger.  Instead, I asked him if it was a joke or a scam.  Neither, the young man assured me as he produced an ID badge from the Toronto Public Library. The badge showed his name—Robert something—and his title: Book Collector.

Thirty-six years later, I remember Robert as soft-spoken and neatly dressed. He wore John Lennon glasses and looked like a librarian himself—a specialist in something arcane like the mating habits of small mammals. He did not look like a cop. He did not behave like one either.

He explained apologetically that the record showed my family was failing to return borrowed books by their due date. He was here to collect as many of the twenty or so titles on his list. As if to soften the blow, he said that there would be no fines and our library memberships would not be revoked.

By this time, my three kids had come to stand behind me, curious and protective. Anna, the 5-year-old, asked if we were going to jail. Her brothers chuckled at the idea. “Book 'em, Dano,” whispered 11-year-old Dermot, our resident wise-ass and fan of the cop show Hawaii Five-0.

I invited the book collector to step inside and take a seat on the hall bench while we scurried around the house hunting for delinquent books.

Dermot and his 10-year-old brother Kevin headed to the basement to what we referred to as “the book fridge,” a small cold storage room the Italian builders had included in the design. Since I was not a Martha-certified homemaker, I seldom produced a batch of anything that needed to be kept cold. The room had only one chair and a ceiling light on a string with a single naked bulb. The walls were bare and had no shelves. Hundreds of books were stored in boxes or piled haphazardly on the concrete floor. 

Science books and biographies and novels and children’s classics and self-help best sellers were all jumbled together. We owned most of them. The boys had to ferret out the ones belonging to the library.

Upstairs, I quickly grabbed several borrowed collections of short stories from my bedside table and brought them down to the hall. I remember they were by writers I loved—William Trevor, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro. Teary-eyed, Anna handed over Charlotte’s Web. We’d had it for years. The book collector seemed almost reluctant to put it in the bag.

It took several trips to the basement for the boys to finish their task. They had gathered close to twenty books, enough to satisfy Robert’s quota. At the last minute, I saw that Kevin was about to put the Chronicles of Narnia in the bag. I reminded him that I had bought him the series at a Cole’s bookstore.

By this time, we had grown almost fond of Robert. I made him a cup of tea, and the kids and I gathered at the kitchen table to hear some of his tales about libraries. One was about the longest overdue book on record—a tome about the Archbishop of Bremen, published in German and borrowed from a library in Cambridge University in 1667. It was found 288 years later by Sir John Plumb in the library at Haughton Hall in Norfolk. He returned the book to Cambridge. No fine was levied.

Our favourite story was about Robert’s largest haul of overdue books. Some four hundred were found stashed in a steamer trunk plastered with destination labels from all over the world. The trunk was in the home of a super-rich Torontonian. He said we would know her name if he mentioned it. He did not mention it.

Days later, I discovered that Anna had hidden Ootah’s Lucky Day under her bed. This brightly illustrated book was from the library’s Learning to Read collection. It was the story of an Indigenous boy and a walrus he had brought home from the hunt when the older hunters had failed to kill anything. Anna agreed that we should return Ootah to the library, pay the overdue fine, and renew the book. I remember we kept borrowing it until she was able to read it fluently.

I realize now that I have dined out on this story for decades. Skeptics think I’m making it up—I’m not—others are amused by it. In truth, I was mortified that I had let the situation get so out of hand that they had to send a “cop” to retrieve the books.  I was a single mother at the time. My husband had abruptly left the marriage, saying he was tired of domestic life. I functioned in a daze for a couple of years, but reading stopped me from resorting to wine in the evenings, and I knew it was important that the kids grow up in a home with books.

One of the moments of grace for me and my kids during those difficult years was the unexpected kindness of a library cop. Embarrassment at not being able to pay the growing fines kept my family away from our local branch for years. The Toronto Public Library has since found that borrowers are better at returning books on time now that they can renew them online, and late fines have been scrapped. I’m told the home collection service has not operated since the 1990s.

Now retired with a blessed amount of time to read, I nestle my books on shelves in my well-heated office. I don’t use the Dewy Decimal System to categorize them (there are limits) but at least they are not on the floor. And I would never dare return a book past its due date. Lesson learned, Robert.