Book borrowed 150 years ago finally returned to Australian library

A book on classical Greek architecture sat hidden behind a boarded-up fireplace in a coastal Australian home for roughly a century, waiting to be rediscovered. When it finally emerged during renovations about thirty years ago, no one quite knew what they had. It wasn't until recently—just a couple of weeks back—that Ross Simmons, seventy-seven, decided to examine the volume more carefully. Inside the front cover was a stamp from Kiama Library, a small seaside town about seventy-five miles south of Sydney. The book had been borrowed sometime in the mid-1870s and never returned.

Simmons believes his great-grandfather, John Simmons, is the culprit. The elder Simmons was an apprentice stonemason who worked on the Houses of Parliament in Westminster during the mid-1800s, having studied in London between 1839 and 1844. In 1857, at twenty-seven, he emigrated to Australia and eventually settled in Kiama after overseeing construction of a sandstone church there. The book—titled Antiquities of Athens—was almost certainly borrowed as a professional reference. A man building in stone would have wanted to study the proportions and methods of the ancients. The volume probably sat on a shelf in his house for years, then somehow ended up in a tea chest alongside other family papers. When that chest was sealed away in the fireplace and the opening was boarded shut, the book went with it.

The discovery itself is remarkable enough. But the fine attached to it is almost comical. Kiama Library's borrowing rules from that era were strict: members could take out only one book at a time unless they could prove six people in the household could read, in which case three books were permitted. Anyone who showed up drunk was turned away. And late fees were steep—three pence per week overdue. Working backward from the mid-1870s to the present day, accounting for inflation, the Kiama Library staff calculated that the outstanding fine would come to twenty-eight thousand Australian dollars, or roughly fifteen thousand pounds. The Simmons family was spared, though. The library waived the debt.

Michelle Hudson, the council libraries manager, said the find has drawn unexpected attention. People have driven forty minutes just to hold the book and see it in person. The cloth-bound volume bears some water stains from its years in the fireplace, but it remains in decent shape. Its pages include beautiful illustrations and fold-out diagrams showing precise measurements of Greek monuments—exactly the kind of reference material a stonemason would have valued. The book was catalogued as number 506 when the library was established in 1872 with a two-hundred-pound grant and fewer than a thousand volumes in its collection.

The library's borrowing records from that period have long since vanished, so there is no way to confirm with absolute certainty who took the book or exactly when. But the circumstantial case for John Simmons is strong. Hudson said the volume will not circulate again. It has been moved to the library's special collection, available only by request. The joke, she offered, is that they cannot afford to wait another hundred and fifty years for it to come back. Simmons himself imagines his great-grandfather would find the whole affair amusing—a book borrowed for professional reasons, lost to time and a sealed fireplace, and finally returned to its rightful place more than a century later. It is the kind of story that reminds us how the past has a way of surfacing when we least expect it.