So, our local library has a rule that no airtight boxes may be taken inside. Bags are okay, paper carton is okay, just nothing that would actually contain something small and alive. A bit ago I wondered why, asked a librarian, and she told me a genuinely insane story.

In the early 2000‘s, a renowned history professor and researcher in the city‘s archives got a book from the library. Because he owns so many old, valuable books, he places all his new books in the freezer overnight. Usually this is an unnecessary precaution, but not this time. This time, he found dead booklice in his freezer. And good thing that he did, because some of the books he has were genuinely invaluable as he was researching deported and killed families during the second world war and had some of the only papers and archived material on deportations done by nazis in our city.

He luckily noticed, and rather than just counting himself lucky, he told the library about it. The library was alarmed, bc they didn‘t know. They closed down for a couple days to look properly and found an infestation the likes they had never seen before. The librarian told me she has been doing this job for 45 years and to this day, this counts as the most insane infestations they had ever seen. The reason no one caught it earlier was because the infestation was largely targeting a section that, frankly, isn‘t as popular. It was mostly outdated academic books that were no longer used, second hand books, damaged editions… Other genres and shelves were infested largely too, but at least they were not decimated.

So, the library closed down. Not only was a significant portion of their books damaged, they also didn‘t know how many people had accidentally taken these books home and brought bugs to their own personal book collection. The library stayed closed for almost a month as it was fumigated again and again, the carpets bleached, so many books thrown away and burned, each one had to be checked by hand… Finally, the spook was over, but it took genuinely 10 years for the library to fully recover in the amount of books being checked out because people were scared of bringing bugs home.

So, that‘s it, right? Nope. Couple years later, a letter arrived at the library from someone whose friend had told them that he back then intentionally brought a little box filled with booklice to the library and released them. For no reason. He thought it was funny. Literally, that was it. He thought it was super funny, and when it all went down he just ducked his head and never said a word.

This launched an investigation and apparently many of his friends were eager to rat him out because he just overall sucked. He was charged with something or the other and had pay for the entire efforts to get rid of the booklice. Don‘t know if he got any jail time or any other punishment, though I sure hope so because what the HELL.

Well, I hope you enjoyed my little retelling of one of the most unnecessarily harmful and gross things that have ever happened in my local library.