While the book’s dust jacket boasts Brautigan’s fantasies are “ingenious, blithe and beautiful,” it didn’t exactly fly off the shelves and subsequently went out of print.īut interest in it reignited when Brautigan’s 1967 novella, Trout Fishing in America, was a critical and commercial success, selling more than four million copies worldwide and putting the author at the forefront of the decade’s counterculture youth movement. It’s about a man named Lee Mellon who believes he’s a descendant of a Confederate general from Big Sur, California, who may or may not exist. A Confederate General from Big Sur was his debut novel, published in 1965. Richard Brautigan was an American novelist, poet and short story writer who died by suicide in 1984. That’s almost 3,000 per cent more than the book’s original cover price of £1.50.

Otherwise, they would be on the hook for £4,406.75, or $6,934.88 CDN. Fortunately for the borrower, the maximum fine is £8.50. on BBC One.Īccording to the Tooting Library’s website, its late return charge is 25p per item per day. “Who knows, we may yet get on The One Show,” she said, referring to a popular live magazine program featuring studio guests and topical stories that airs nightly at 7 p.m.

It’s even caught the attention of the BBC. Shepherd said getting borrowed books back in the mail isn’t unprecedented for her library, as the Tooting area of London “has always had a very mobile population.” In fact, last year the library received books from a family that had moved to New Zealand.īut, Shepherd said, the long absence of the book returned from Port Moody has caused a bit of a stir, predating all of the library’s current staff by almost a decade. “On closer inspection we realized it had come all the way from Canada.” “But then I noticed the ticket and our address in the front and my colleague pointed out the French label,” Shepherd told the Tri-City News in an email. Heather Shepherd, the manager of Tooting Library, said when she first saw the envelope, with no return address, she thought it was an interlibrary loan which customers can request from any library in Britain. The questions is, how did it get there? /5qb1wCHPod Thank you to whoever sent it back to Tooting Library from Port Moody in Canada.

Wandsworth Libraries has a new longest overdue book. The pink check-out slip was tucked into a brown envelope that warns ominously, “If this book is not returned to the library on or before the last date shown on the card, a fine will be charged in accordance with the Libraries Regulations.” Inside was a copy of A Confederate General from Big Sur, by Richard Brautigan, that was due Feb. The Tooting Library, which is one of 12 libraries that comprise the Wandsworth library system in south London, posted the manuscript mystery on its Twitter account Monday after it received a plain brown mailing envelope posted from Port Moody. A library in London, England, is trying to determine how a book 48 years and 107 days overdue made its way to Port Moody.

Overdue library books