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Irish Examiner
3 days ago
- General
- Irish Examiner
‘Grandma won't be able to pay for it anymore': Library book from 1943 returned
A library book has been returned nearly 82 years after it was borrowed from a library in Texas. The book – Your Child, His Family, And Friends by marriage and family counsellor Frances Bruce Strain – came with a letter noting that 'Grandma won't be able to pay for it anymore'. It was checked out in July 1943 and returned this June by a person in Oregon, the San Antonio Public Library said. I hope there is no late fee for it because Grandma won't be able to pay for it anymore 'After the recent death of my father, I inherited a few boxes of books he left behind,' the person wrote in a letter that was shared by the library on Instagram and signed with the initials P.A.A.G. The book was a guide for parents on helping their children navigate personal relationships. It was checked out when the person's father was 11 years old. 'The book must have been borrowed by my Grandmother, Maria del Socorro Aldrete Flores (Cortez),' the person wrote. 'In that year, she transferred to Mexico City to work at the US Embassy. She must have taken the book with her, and some 82 years later, it ended up in my possession.' The book had received write-ups in various newspapers at the time. The Cincinnati Enquirer described it in June 1943 as a 'complete guidebook to the personal relationships of the child with his family and the outside world'. The New York Times noted a month later that Strain was a psychologist and mother of two who was 'best known for her wise, sensitive, but unsentimental presentation of sex education'. Three cents a day The warning of the fine for overdue books stamped on the inside cover The person who returned the book wrote in the letter: 'I hope there is no late fee for it because Grandma won't be able to pay for it anymore.' The library said in a news release that it eliminated overdue fines in 2021. The inside cover of the book was stamped with the warning that the fine for overdue books was three cents a day. Not accounting for inflation, the penalty would amount to nearly 900 dollars (£663). Three cents in July 1943 amounts to 56 cents (41p) in today's money, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics' Inflation Calculator. That would add up to more than 16,000 dollars (£11,800). The library noted that the book is in 'good condition'. 288 years The length of time for the most overdue library book, which was returned to Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge in 1956 It will be on display in the city's central library throughout August. It will then be donated to the Friends of San Antonio Public Library and sold to benefit the library. Eight decades may seem like a long time for an overdue library book, but it is nowhere near the record. Guinness World Records says the most overdue library book was returned to Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge in 1956. It was borrowed in 1668, some 288 years earlier. No fine was extracted.
The Guardian
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Clive Wilmer obituary
Clive Wilmer, who has died from a stroke aged 80, was a poet and scholar best known for his advocacy of the work of the Victorian artist and critic John Ruskin and of the poet Thom Gunn. He taught for 25 years at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where in 2012 he was made an emeritus fellow in English literature. Clive edited the Penguin Classics edition of Ruskin's Unto This Last and Other Writings (1985) and from 2009 was master of the Guild of St George, a national charity 'for arts, craft and the rural economy' founded by Ruskin in 1871. Clive built up the public awareness of Ruskin by launching engagement projects and exhibitions linked to the guild's Ruskin Collection in Sheffield and its property, Ruskin Land, in the Wyre Forest, Worcestershire. Rachel Dickinson, who succeeded Clive as master of the Guild in 2019, said: 'Wilmer saw how John Ruskin's ideas could help make the world better.' The other great influence on Clive's life was the Anglo-American poet Thom Gunn. Clive first met Gunn in 1964 and they remained correspondents and friends until Gunn's death nearly 40 years later. They shared a belief in poetry's moral purpose – to tell the truth and to have the courage to do so. Clive edited a selection of Gunn's essays, The Occasions of Poetry (1982), and in recent years, had been working on Gunn's legacy, editing an annotated Selected Poems (2018) and, with Michael Nott and August Kleinzahler, The Letters of Thom Gunn (2022). At the time of his death, he was preparing Gunn's Collected Essays. He edited Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Selected Poems and Translations (1991), and William Morris's News from Nowhere and Other Writings (1993). His more contemporary political heroes were figures such as Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins, who, he felt, embodied Ruskinian values, fighting for the common good in public life. He once said to me that the current Conservative party was misnamed, because they conserve nothing. Clive also championed the work of Ezra Pound, and his own poetry was influenced by Pound's notion of the poet as sculptor, working against the grain of language's resistances. He was the prime mover of the Pound centenary exhibition Pound's Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy, at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge and the Tate Gallery in London in 1985, and organised conferences, symposia and colloquies, including, in 2011, one for the quatercentenary of the King James Bible. For many years Clive worked as an EFL teacher and was, from 1989 to 1992, an interviewer for BBC Radio 3's Poet of the Month series. He wrote for many learned journals, notably the TLS and PN Review, and was also a translator, primarily of Hungarian poetry in collaboration with his fellow poet George Gömöri. Translations of poetry by György Petri, Miklós Radnóti and János Pilinszky showcased Clive's technical gifts and, in 2018, he received the Janus Pannonius prize for a lifetime's achievement in translation from Hungarian. Born in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, Clive was the son of Eustace, a civil servant, and Sybil (nee Rogers). His father died when he was three, and Clive grew up with his mother and elder sister, Val, in Streatham, south London. One of his early heroes was Robin Hood. Tooting Bec Common, on his doorstep, was transformed in his imagination to Sherwood Forest. His acting skills developed at Emanuel school, Wandsworth, where, directed by an inspirational English teacher, Charles Cuddon, Clive played Brutus in Julius Caesar. He won a scholarship to read English at King's College, Cambridge, and graduated in 1967. He joined Footlights and was later a member of the National Youth Theatre, playing Bottom alongside Helen Mirren in A Midsummer Night's Dream. But his vocation was poetry. A fellow poet, Michael Vince, recalls Clive James, already a budding journalist, chatting to them at the Footlights bar and admitting: 'I leave the poetry to you boys.' Clive's first collection of poems, The Dwelling-Place, appeared in 1977. Of Earthly Paradise (1992), The Falls (2000) and The Mystery of Things (2008) are his most critically acclaimed collections. His final book, Architecture & Other Poems, will be published by Worple Press later this year. Gunn praised Clive's writing for 'its unfaltering clarity … and its faithfulness to its subject matter'. The Falls, a 2000 poem about Niagara Falls, explores a theme central to all Clive's work: the search to find divine pattern in apparent randomness: 'immutable change / made and remade / laws finer than any known of men'. Clive was generous and warm, a gentle giant of a man, with a great capacity for playfulness. A walk with him around Cambridge, his home for most of his adult life, was often an education in itself. Abroad, I recall him leading a group of us around Venice in the footsteps of his hero, Ruskin, and listening in awe. Clive is survived by his partner, Dr Patricia Fara, by his children, Tamsin and Gabriel, from his marriage to Diane Redmond, which ended in divorce in 1984, his grandsons, Patrick and Oscar, and his sister, Val. Clive Wilmer, poet and scholar, born 10 February 1945; died 13 March 2025
