Totally agree. Once a book is in my hands and heart, it is mine. End of story.
Both the Brandywine Library and the Mathom House have demanded I return my cards.
On the subject of Tolkien, I once checked out “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” on interlibrary loan and they mentioned that it apparently hadn’t been checked out for like 11 years, which made me really, desperately want to keep it. I even asked if I could buy it off of them, but they wouldn’t sell it to me. It just grieved my heart to think of that lovely, beautiful-smelling, well-illustrated book of Tolkien poetry sitting, lonely and forgotten, in a sad little corner of the library with no one giving it the attention it deserved. I seriously considered “losing” it, but my mom wouldn’t let me. I eventually bought a different copy on e-bay, but it just wasn’t the same. The griefs of an English major…
Something I miss in these days of barcode scanners and online catalogs is the curious delight of checking the due date slips in library books and seeing when a book was last checked out. Sometimes it seemed like a great injustice that no one had opened this book in so long. Other times, it was like opening an undisturbed treasure from some lost civilization.
Tabula Candida 
All. The. Time.
Solidarity, sibling.
Totally agree. Once a book is in my hands and heart, it is mine. End of story.
Both the Brandywine Library and the Mathom House have demanded I return my cards.
On the subject of Tolkien, I once checked out “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” on interlibrary loan and they mentioned that it apparently hadn’t been checked out for like 11 years, which made me really, desperately want to keep it. I even asked if I could buy it off of them, but they wouldn’t sell it to me. It just grieved my heart to think of that lovely, beautiful-smelling, well-illustrated book of Tolkien poetry sitting, lonely and forgotten, in a sad little corner of the library with no one giving it the attention it deserved. I seriously considered “losing” it, but my mom wouldn’t let me. I eventually bought a different copy on e-bay, but it just wasn’t the same. The griefs of an English major…
Something I miss in these days of barcode scanners and online catalogs is the curious delight of checking the due date slips in library books and seeing when a book was last checked out. Sometimes it seemed like a great injustice that no one had opened this book in so long. Other times, it was like opening an undisturbed treasure from some lost civilization.