SF library fee waiver lures lax back to the stacks

San Francisco, CA (AP) -- Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger may have the best excuse for overdue library books; his got rather damp following a spectacular jet landing in the Hudson River.

But people from all over the San Francisco Bay area came up with some decent, or at least inventive, explanations for their tardy tomes under a recent amnesty program aimed at luring the lax back to the stacks.

Take borrower Antonio, who claimed, "I was abducted by aliens, they just brought me back after 2 months."

The (optional) written excuses — and video promos by local celebrities including Sullenberger — were to raise awareness of the program and add some fun to the process, said Michelle Jeffers, spokeswoman for the San Francisco Public Library.

But the return of late books and other materials had a serious mission. Library use is up amid the recession and officials wanted to make sure that the people who need access to free books the most weren’t being kept away by old debts.

It’s not a crime to have a book out late in San Francisco, but borrowing privileges are suspended once you hit $10. Fines are capped at $10 per book, but if you took out a lot of books before getting suspended, that could mean quite a bill.

In all, 29,000 overdue items were returned during the two-week May amnesty program, including about 3,100 that were more than 60 days late and were assumed lost, library officials reported Thursday. That meant more than 3,000 people got to turn over a new leaf while the library saved approximately $730,000 in replacement costs. Typically, there are about 123,000 items overdue at any one time.

San Francisco isn’t the only place seeing more faces at the library, according to the American Library Association.

The Chicago-based group’s 2009 State of America’s Libraries report found that people visited libraries nearly 1.4 billion times in 2008 and checked out more than 2 billion items, up 10 percent from data collected during the economic downturn of 2001.

A number of libraries have been running amnesty programs including "food for fines" campaigns, forgiving fees in return for canned goods.

Although he lent his name to the San Francisco book return campaign, Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who safely landed his jetliner in the Hudson River on Jan. 15, checked his books out from his local library in suburban Danville.

All four books were salvaged and are intact, although their days in circulation appear to be over. "They have had quite a ride," said family spokesman Alex Clemens.

The books included some borrowed on the network system and one, about professional ethics, came from California State University, Fresno. The conscientious Sullenberger got in touch with the school to explain the delay and officials responded by waiving fees and promising to dedicate the replacement book to him.

Among the older items returned in San Francisco was a copy of George Bernard Shaw’s "Man and Superman" with a due date of Jan. 29, 1964. (With the $10 cap, even after 45 years this wasn’t a case of Man (or woman) and Super Fine.)

The book "just showed up," said Marjorie Brean, manager of the Presidio Branch Library. "We got lots of other books but nothing like this, this is great."

Excuses listed by amnesty claimers ranged from simple forgetfulness to raging bibliophilia to just love in general.

Kristen blamed a cleaning spree with causing her to put books on a shelf where they accumulated hundreds in fines. "This is why my room is best left ’uniquely organized’," she rationalized.

Ka’ala waxed poetic about a book called "India’s Past": "Oh like an emerald pool on a hot day, I need this book on my too long shelf, dear librarians, not to read in a hurry, or even to have forever and ever, but to be able to pick up on a whim, having spotted it and feeling in the mood for its pages."

And then there was Gretchen who checked out "The Jewish Book of Why," in the summer of 1994 after starting a romantic relationship with a Jewish woman. "Fifteen years and three Jewish girlfriends later I still don’t have the answers," ran the note. "But I now have the Internet."