The National Trust is always turning up odd things in its many properties whose contents defy rapid archiving. Last time I was at Nunnington Hall – one of the pleasantest days out in Yorkshire – they had a display of family bits and bobs found under the floorboards of just one small room.
They had slipped through cracks or possibly been stuffed there by children; small toys, buttons and the like. Nothing dramatic but a curious addition to the fascination of such ancient places.
Now the staff at Townend House in Troutbeck have made a good discovery: a library book which is overdue for return by 123 years. A check on the fireside shelves in the lovely old Lake District farmhouse has turned up a copy of Good Words for 1888 which was borrowed in that same year.
It would have been in demand at the time as a miscellany of articles on Victorian novelties, including the effects of Darwinism and advice on caravan holidays. The then owners of Townend, a farming and landowning family called Browne, clearly found it absorbing because they never took it back to the Troutbeck Institute library.
Katrina Zanhak, the trust's custodian at Townend, says:
It would have quite a fine on it by now. It is a huge amount of time for a library book to be overdue. The Institute still has a collection of books and I wonder if they know it is missing.
She is surprised that it was overlooked by the family whose late Victorian members were known for their love of books and had a 1,500 book library of their own.
George Browne, who lived at the house with his wife and three daughters at the time, was an extremely keen reader. I would not expect them to forget to take something back but if it was him, he has been very naughty.
He might have been distracted by other naughty things, mind. Two years ago, the trust discovered a stash of saucy 'chapbook' pamphlets, gently erotic stories sold by travelling pedlars, tucked behind more respectable tomes on another shelf. Doggerel accounts of seductions, they included such lines (from one called The Crafty Chambermaid's Garland) as:
He stript of his clothes and leaped into bed
Saying: Now, lovely creature, for thy maidenhead.
The trust has taken time itself in discovering the oddities of the Browne library. It acquired the farmhouse in 1948.
Zanhak wonders if the overdue loan is the longest ever, but sadly this is not the case. In April 2010, the New York Society library did an audit of its records and found that a book on the Law of Nations and a volume of House of Commons debate had been taken out on 5 October 1789 and never returned.
The borrower was George Washington who famously never told a lie but clearly had other faults. He theoretically owes the library, the oldest in New York, over $300,000 (£195,000) in fines. Worse, the books have disappeared.
Back in the Lakes, the secretary and treasurer of Troutbeck Institute John Wharton is relaxed. Holder of his own post for 40 years – isn't it nice to visit a world of such permanence? - he says:
I do not think we will need the book back, I do not think anyone even looks at our books in the reading room anymore, they are just there for old times' sake.
Have you a hideous library borrowing secret? Or a modest record to add to the roll? Happy New Year either way.
