Collecting Date Due Cards From Old Library Books

"I used to taunt my brothers with a song called "Date Due" based on the date due card in the back of library books. Example: "David is a date due, date due, date due. David is a date due all day long." From Gajin Girl's Blog.

While I love to collect books, I also love to collect artifacts, ephemera and other items related to books. These include bookmarks, bookends, bookplates, items people leave in books (I have found old advertising, a Freedman's Bureau pamphlet, and locks of hair among other things) and date due cards.

Actor Kirk Douglas was born and grew up in the city where I live. I moved here about forty years after he moved out. Since there were many old books in our library, I thought I might come across his signature on an old date due card, but no matter how many books I checked I never found it. A librarian at Milam Junior High School in Tupelo, Mississippi was luckier than I was. She found a date due card in Steel's English Fairy Tales with Elvis Presley's signature on it. She found it in 1956, nine years after Elvis had taken the book out when he was in seventh grade. Her find is the oldest Elvis signature in existence.

I recently began collecting date due cards, not just ones with famous peoples names on them. Date due cards are one of the many casualties of computerization in libraries. Actually, they still exist, but they can hardly be called cards. They are slips of paper, spit out of a printer. Instead of individual cards for each book, the slip lists all of the books a person is borrowing.

The date due card I am thinking of is made of card stock not paper. The book's title, author and Dewey Decimal information is printed or written on the top. The rest of the card contains lines with spaces to record the borrower's name and the date the book is due to be returned. There are variations, but this is the card I remember most.

When a person borrowed a book, he or she had to sign each card. One thing I enjoyed doing when I borrowed a book in the past was to look down the list of previous borrowers. Because I live in a relatively small city, sometimes I would recognize a name and feel a sense of kinship with that person.

Date due cards were often used for other things than they were intended for. Their main secondary usage was as a bookmark. Now that they have become literary artifacts, they have found other uses. Arizona artist, Natalie Schorr, has a wonderful series of art called Library People. Each drawing is done on an end page from a discarded library book. She doesn't use a blank end page. Instead she draws the person on a page that has a date due card pocket or some other library ephemera. My goal is to add at least one of her works to my collection.

Jon Lanham is an associate librarian at Harvard and collects late return due date cards. In 2003, a book was returned to the Lamont Library where he works. The book was more than fifty years overdue. The card from the book is now Mr. Lanham's oldest speciman of overdue date due cards.

One of the most interesting stories about overdue date due cards I found was in an article by Carol Tarsitano in Illinois Periodicals Online. Ms Tarsitano is Program Director at the Portage-Cragin Branch of the Chicago Public Library, which specializes in Polish language materials. On one occasion the library received a letter "...from Poland with our book pocket and date due card enclosed. The man informed us that he had purchased a copy of one of [Czeslaw] Milosz's works on the black market in Krakow, Poland. He regretted that he could not return the book to us since it had cost him a week's salary."

A man who would pay a week's salary for a book, not to add to a rare book collection, simply to read it, is my kind of reader.

The date due card he returned is one I would be proud to add to my collection.