Check behind your nightstand, in your car’s back seat, or under your bed. A long overdue Phoenix Public Library book recently found its way home 54 years late, carrying decades of mystery, memory, and quiet forgiveness.
It was 2023 when a long-lost item from the library’s collection, “The Trial” by Franz Kafka, appeared in a return bin with other returned items. Staff could clearly confirm that the book had been checked out of the Phoenix Public Library system in 1969, although given that it had simply been dropped into a return box anonymously decades later left the mystery of who returned it – not to mention the story behind its sudden return – unsolved, like a whodunit with the last page missing.
“We are always excited to welcome back a long-lost item from our collection, no matter how long it takes,” Lee Franklin, Phoenix Public Library community relations director, wrote back in 2023. “We no longer have the records telling us which Phoenix Public Library location Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ was checked out from or who checked it out. We don’t know who found it and got it back to the library.”
