· 1 min read
A Due Date from 1987
A secondhand copy of Middlemarch still has its library card in the back. Someone renewed it four times.
The copy of Middlemarch I bought last week for two pounds still has its lending card glued inside the back cover. The library that owned it closed in 2004. The card has room for twenty stamps and uses nine.
Most of them are three weeks apart and belong to different borrowers, going by the handwriting on the reader numbers. But in the spring of 1987 one person took it out on the 2nd of March and renewed it on the 23rd, then again in April, twice in May, and finally brought it back on the 8th of June.
Fourteen weeks. I have no idea who they were. I am on page 212, and I have started to think of them as a pace to keep.