They don’t call it alma mater for nothing. Times change, places change, people change. One’s alma mater also changes, but a kind, nurturing mother always welcomes her children back home, just as Davidson did for alumni this past weekend.
Libraries, too, welcome their children back home. Those who haven’t checked in (or checked out) with mom in a while might need some minor adjustments in order to accommodate changes since their last return home, but they will always be welcome.
Thanks to Davidson’s honor code, library books usually leave “home” the same way, checked out to a student. They don’t always return the same way, however. Some are carried back, strong and healthy; some are transported back noticeably frailer. Others, like prodigal children, don’t make it home on time or return bearing scars of a rebellious youth.
Very rarely, a book wanders off and is not seen again, at least for a long, long time.
This past week, four long-lost, prodigal children found their way home, over forty years after they were last seen.
The books, all novels by Thomas Wolfe, arrived in a box, without a note or clear indication of their whereabouts for the past four decades. The titles made me smile:
- The Hills Beyond
- Look Homeward, Angel
- The Web and the Rock
and last, but not least,
- You Can’t Go Home Again
Each volume still contains the library’s ownership marks, although they obviously disappeared long before the advent of the online catalog. After a bit of research, I discovered, in an old file, traces of their early years in Grey Library. A note in pencil indicated that they were found missing after the 1974 inventory of the collection.
Yes, we have records that far back. Libraries are good about keeping that sort of thing.
In the forty years since these volumes were last home in the collection, much has changed in the library: we moved from Grey into Little; the catalog moved online; e-books came to outnumber print books in our collections. And all four novels are now also freely available online (see, for example, You Can’t Go Home Again in Project Gutenberg).
Was Thomas Wolfe right? Is it true that you can’t go back home again? For a library book, the answer is no. You can go home again, even though both you and “home” will have changed.
Have an overdue or otherwise “borrowed” library book? Found a book that isn’t yours? Send it home. Make your alma mater happy.
