http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100520/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_book_library_washington
Actually, if you read carefully, they didn’t return the copy he borrowed. They don’t say so directly, but I suspect they can’t find it. They gave the library a copy of the same edition.
Jean Valjean as librarian.
That’s really not going to rectify the problem, now is it?
I suggest they permanently ban him from checking out more books from that library.
But not first without charging him $6,290,175,418.37 in fees!
Must be a slow news day
Kind of gives the lie to the whole cherry tree story.
So yet again, the conspiracy theorists were correct.
Don’t book fines usually cap out at like $20 bucks? If that is the case I would be more than happy to pay for him.
$20 in 1789 dollars.
I’d pay for it if has signed the little slip in the back.
He probably never returned the book out of embarassment because he dropped it in the water while reading in the bathtub and it was all wrinkly.
Great general. Great statesman. Great human being.
But not a quick reader.
First in war, first in peace, and last to return “The Law of Nations.”
I’ve always seen them cap out at the price of the book. At that point, you might as well not return the book when you pay the fine, as they are likely going to buy a new book anyways.
At least, that was the policy at the library I worked at. Oddly enough, they had another policy of never actually billing people if they didn’t return the book. I always thought that was weird.
Here’s a obscure piece of library fines trivia: Prisoners in New York State prisons cannot be charged for overdue books from prison libraries. For some unknown reason, the department’s director of prison library operations decided to enact a policy that prisoners can only be fined for damaging a book not for borrowing it and failing to return it.
Sunspace wrinkly book 
…Failing to return it? Couldn’t they just get it back from their cells?
That’s how we did it. When we searched cells, we’d send any overdue librbary books back to the library.