The library due-date stamp

A well-used due-date stamp holds eleven small rubber date-bands, enough to cover any month without requiring the librarian to special-order a rare '31,' and a base inked most often in a purple that stains the pad of the thumb for a full day after handling. The specimen catalogued here, retired from a branch library in 2019 and now displayed rather than used, shows a distinct list to the left, the accumulated lean of forty years of right-handed librarians pressing down at the same slight angle, thousands of times, on the same corner of the same card. Its function was never really the date. It was the sound: a soft double-thock, ink-then-paper, that told a patron the transaction was complete in a way a screen never quite manages. Digital systems have replaced it in most branches, and the stamp survives mainly in bins of surplus office equipment, or bolted, decoratively, to the checkout desks of libraries proud enough of their history to keep the old ritual visible even after retiring it. A few holdouts still stamp the inside cover for the pleasure of it, alongside the barcode scan, doubling the paperwork for no reason the software would recognize. Whether this counts as sentiment or simply muscle memory in a librarian who has done it since 1987 is, this reviewer suspects, a question the librarian herself could not answer.

H. G. Plimsoll