Library book 36 years overdue is returned
WHEN Alastair McIntosh ordered a second-hand book on eBay recently, he was thrilled to get a first edition with the dust cover still intact.
However, he was less impressed to find that the volume that had cost him £7.49 had within its covers a Western Isles Libraries stamp and was 36 years overdue.
There was no official stamp to say that it had been withdrawn. On inquiring with the library, however, he found the book was down as long overdue and had actually been taken out in 1982.
‘I hugely value the library’s collection and the helpfulness of its staff,’ he later said. ‘Like many people, I rely on that oasis of learning in the heart of Stornoway for my research as a writer. I am, therefore, very glad to be able to see this copy returned.’
The book is called Father Allan’s Island by Amy Murray, first published in 1937. Alastair describes it as ‘an elegant and elegiac account of life on the Isle of Eriskay in 1905’.
Author Amy was a young American musicologist. She had visited the island for a summer and recorded village life as it surrounded Fr Allan McDonald, the renowned parish priest.
In 2002, the Gaelic scholar Ronald Black published a bilingual collection, The Poems of Fr Allan McDonald (Mungo Books, Glasgow).
Black describes Murray as having been ‘a competent and sensitive transcriber of folk music’ (p. 508). She is not to be confused with another visitor, Miss Ada Goodrich Freer, who, in 1894-5, had also visited the Hebrides.
Remarking on his chance recovery of Murray’s book, Alastair pointed out that it had not necessarily been stolen and could simply have been a case of somebody who had passed away and their belongings, library books and all, being cleared by dealers.
But he added: ‘In school days, the fine for being overdue at Stornoway library was tuppence a day. Were that to be collected now, after so many years, and with interest compounded, it would give the library staff a happy day.’
Commenting on what the fine would be if levied, a spokesman for Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, said the fine would have amounted to £374. ‘But we are just happy to get the book back,’ he told us with a laugh.