Recent years have reminded us with such force of the importance of libraries as a social good that there's something strangely nostalgic about the CNN report that police in Charlton, Massachusetts have swooped on the home of five-year-old Hailey Benoit for her overdue books.

The books, How to Tie My Shoes and Eloise's Birthday, had been checked out since the previous April. (In a blame-the-parents footnote, the story add that her father Tony also had some $100 fines owing for overdue audiobooks.) Hailey, standing by her mother when the officer arrived, is said to have burst immediately into tears.

"Is that policeman going to arrest me?" she asked her mother.

A Charlton public library employee, Cheryl Hansen, told CNN that she had "asked the chief 'when does something borrowed become stolen?' The chief said, 'When it's overdue!'"

Sad though it is to consider poor Hailey's tears, it does rather remind me of an earlier era, which might now be thought of as libraries' imperial age but went without saying at the time; a time when librarians inspired fear, if not awe; when Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell's obscene graffiti in Islington library books caused a genuine scandal (these days it is celebrated); when young borrowers like me trembled to approach the checkout desk with "grown-up" books; and when libraries were such a universal provision that you would bump into people when you visited them.

Maybe I'm getting a little too misty-eyed, but it's still a good excuse to remind myself of the Seinfeld clip above (sadly you can't embed the full clip, but you can link to it), to wonder where on earth my own library card is, and to reflect guiltily on the books I've never returned.