No fine for copy of Century Illustrated returned 132 years late to library
Local man John Hanson walked in with it, reports NPR's Sophia Palaza-Carre, and the given excuse that he did not himself withdraw the item was impossible to refute, him having not been born for another half a century. Hanson, 84 years old and a resident of nearby Barrington, remembered the Concord Public Library's plate and inscription in the magazine. Were it not for the amnesty, whoever originally took it out might have been on the hook for $12,000 at the 25c-a-day fine, though one assumes after all this time a waiver would be a sure thing.
- ▪Local man John Hanson walked in with it, reports NPR's Sophia Palaza-Carre, and the given excuse that he did not himself withdraw the item was impossible to refute, him having not been born for another half a century.
- ▪Hanson, 84 years old and a resident of nearby Barrington, remembered the Concord Public Library's plate and inscription in the magazine.
- ▪Were it not for the amnesty, whoever originally took it out might have been on the hook for $12,000 at the 25c-a-day fine, though one assumes after all this time a waiver would be a sure thing.
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| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/09/28/no-fine-for-copy-of-century-illustrated-returned-132-years-late-to-library.html |
| Publication time | Mon, 28 Sep 2026 11:04:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-28T12:01:07.494Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-28T12:01:07.494Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | JDDtNV5wYiQV · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
No fine for copy of Century Illustrated returned 132 years late to library Rob Beschizza 4:04 am Mon Sep 28, 2026 Photo: Concord Public Library When Concord Public Library in New Hampshire announced a yearlong amnesty on overdue fines, hoping to get some of its many purloined publications back, it didn't expect to see a 1894 issue of Century Illustrated. Local man John Hanson walked in with it, reports NPR's Sophia Palaza-Carre, and the given excuse that he did not himself withdraw the item was impossible to refute, him having not been born for another half a century. Hanson, 84 years old and a resident of nearby Barrington, remembered the Concord Public Library's plate and inscription in the magazine.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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