Book 'em, Danno!

There’s late, fashionably late, and then library-book late.

A recent New York Times story told of a Wisconsin resident who returned a library loan after 63 years. The book was some 23,000 days past due, wrote reporter Sasha von Oldershausen.

The patron had kept “Ol’ Paul, the Mighty Logger,” through various milestones in her life, including a Ph.D in English and a teaching career. When the long-standing guilt became too much, she sent the volume back, along with a $500 donation, to the Queens library it had originally called home.

(And no, books can’t call anything “home,” but you can grant me a little literary leeway here, can’tcha?)

I feel this Wisconsinite’s mortification. Especially since I have a title of similarly sketchy provenance in my own collection.

I came by “my” book — quotation marks because I can’t lay claim to legitimate ownership — as a child, via an older friend with a larcenous sibling.

The title in question is a paperback, “The Illustrated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe.”

On the cover is a lurid collage. A woman in an evening gown shrieks. Horror stars of an earlier generation — Boris Karloff, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre — leer. Pallbearers escort a coffin to its final resting place. (Although, in Poe, few bodies remain at rest, with apologies to Newton.)

The contents are typical Poe. Stories include “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” Apropos — pun intended — of nothing, the last is probably my favorite short story.

Poems include “Annabel Lee” and, of course, “The Raven.” Because it would be a crime much greater than the theft of a book not to include “The Raven” in any Poe collection.

The book is obviously a library expat. It has a call number on the spine and the telltale tracings — but not the tell-tale heart — inside. “Tracings,” by the way, is the super-cool library term to denote card-catalog information recorded inside a book.

On Page 68 is a different kind of tracing. Some wit from decades past has drawn something very inappropriate in the vicinity of Roderick Usher’s mouth, along with misspelled and anachronistic dialogue attributed to the lady Madeline, busy choking the life from him.

All that is missing, from the inside back cover, is the borrowing card and the name of the lending library.

So even if I wanted to return the book, I wouldn’t know where to take it. Nor would I feel inclined to make a monetary donation, since I’m not the one who lifted it in the first place. And since I’m cheap.

At one point, when my wife and I paid a visit to Poe’s gravesites — he has two — in Baltimore, I considered leaving the book as an offering to one of my literary idols. But I didn’t because, well, I just couldn’t part with it.

What’s especially intriguing is that the volume doesn’t seem to exist officially. An internet search netted different collections of Poe’s work, but not this one.

All of which sounds like the plot of a Poe story: A rare book comes into the hands of an unwitting reader who slowly falls under its thrall until one day, the object reveals that it is not really a book at all, but instead …

Well, let’s just say that if I disappear anytime soon, check for me in the walls of the basement or under the floorboards in the living room.

Then take the book, if you can find it, back to the library — any library — and clip a check to it before it’s too late.

And let’s hope that last sentence isn’t my final pun.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter