Catching up with Catcher: library book return three decades in making By: Malak Abas Posted: 2:55 PM CST Thursday, Feb. 9, 2023 Last Modified: 5:06 PM CST Thursday, Feb. 9, 2023 Updates

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When Jennifer Walton went last weekend to the St. Vital Library to return a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, she warned the librarian it was overdue — by 33 years.

Quickly, a small crowd of a half-dozen library employees crowded around. One exclaimed the book had a physical check-out card (with an original return date of Nov. 10, 1989), something they had never seen before.

“The best part of it, honestly, was seeing the look on the librarian’s faces,” Walton, 50, told the Free Press at the same branch Thursday.

It’s a story of the Winnipeg Public Library’s relatively new fine-free structure taken to the nth degree. The book was returned in such good shape it may be put back into circulation, possibly after switching out the dust jacket. Walton, instead of paying late fees, brought chocolates for the staff.

“I was thinking of them as chocolates of contrition,” she said. “It was priceless.”

Walton was 17 and a student at nearby Glenlawn Collegiate when she checked out the copy of the American classic novel by J.D. Salinger.

It was then packed into a box at some point by her mother, and only again saw the light of day when her husband pulled out a box labelled “Jen’s books” while cleaning out their basement earlier this month.

Walton posted news of the find on social media, joking she owed so much money in late fines the library likely legally owned her by now. Friends encouraged her to return it; one, a librarian, informed her there would be no fees.

The Winnipeg Public Library later posted a photo of the book, complete with check-out card stamped with a decades-late due date, on social media, explaining it had just been returned. (The date listed on the first tweet is a decade too early — the date stamp was smudged and reads 1989, not 1999, as initially thought.)

It’s not the first book to be returned to a local branch decades late, but it’s one of just a few. Winnipeg Public Library administrative co-ordinator of collections and borrower services Barbara Bourrier-Lacroix recalled a book 50 years overdue that was returned in 2018, and two Sesame Street vinyl records brought in 32 years late.

The city library system removed overdue fines for library materials and borrowing fees for DVDs starting Jan. 1, 2021 following a trend across North America. While fines will be put in place for materials more than three weeks overdue, they’re to cover the cost of the item being lost and will be cancelled if it is returned.

Bourrier-Lacroix said libraries in Winnipeg have only seen one big change in the years since.

“For the most part, we haven’t seen an increase in overdues, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of materials that get lost, that has stayed pretty much constant,” she said.

“We have seen an increase in people applying and getting library cards, and that, to us, is probably the biggest indication that we’re now a much more welcoming place for people who used to see fines as a barrier to using the library.”

Walton, who said she considers herself a longtime book lover, remembers enjoying The Catcher in The Rye — “It’s about an angsty teenager, right? So when you are an angsty teenager, there’s aspects of it that are quite relatable” — and recommends it.

“You should go take it out. But then you should return it, so someone else can read it,” she joked.

That the main character is a teenager constantly pushing back against adult society is not lost on her.

“Honestly, holding on to a copy of Catcher in the Rye for 30 years is about as rebellious of a teenager I ever got,” Walton said with a laugh. “So maybe it was my grand act of rebellion.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

Every piece of reporting Malak produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.