Motown Record Returned to Boston Library After Nearly 50 Years

Last week, the Boston Public Library received a long-overdue record returned in its drop box: a Motown record that had been checked out for just over 47 years.

"Anthology" by Junior Walker and the All Stars returned to the library with a pocket inside listing that it had been originally due back on Oct. 27, 1976, NBC10 Boston reported.

"Not sure who dropped it off or exactly when, but we were going through the book drop checking things in and it was sitting at the bottom," librarian Shane Gellerman told the news station. "We had a book sale the same day, so we've been getting lots of donations. Maybe they thought it was a good time to return an old item, too."

The punch card in the jacket of the record may reveal a clue about who borrowed the record all those years ago, but the library no longer has the equipment to read the card, he said. Now the library uses computerized systems to keep track of the comings and goings of its material.

"These are sort of a very early form of inputting and exporting data into a particular system, and each of these marks actually refers to either a letter or a number, and so what you would do is you would feed the card into a machine and then it would export at the other side either on a screen or as a printout what this was," Lisa Pollack, chief of communications for the Boston Public Library, told the news outlet about the old library punch card in the jacket.

The library stopped lending vinyl records over the last decade, so the returned piece will find its new home in the library’s history section, Gellerman said.

“It seems a shame to throw out a 50-year-old record that looks like it’s still in good shape, and it’s part of the library history with the punch card in it,” he told the outlet. “It’s a reminder of when the library lent out vinyl records.”

If the mysterious record-returner was concerned about facing a hefty late fee for the nearly half-century late return, they need not be concerned. The library eliminated late fees two years ago.