Usually housed in the course reserve section of the Clapp Library, a sixth edition microeconomics textbook sauntered out between 9 and 11:30 p.m. Monday night. Unabashed about its behavior, the book made no effort to hide its escape.
“It just walked out of the library and winked at me,” said Library and Technology Services (LTS) student employee Ginny Gin ’15. “I was so shocked that I couldn’t do anything.”
This is not the first reported incident of textbooks voluntarily leaving their designated spaces. At the start of every school year, books reportedly choose to escape from the course reserves, a communal space designed to aid students who do not yet have access to their schoolbooks.
“The books just don’t want to be in their spaces,” Gin said. She reportedly spends most of her library shifts tracking down books that hide in ill-frequented parts of the library where the German drama folios are located. Other books, worried about sounding off alarms, are known to pry open the windows of the ground floor and jumping out.
“We know it’s the books and not the students,” said LTS Manager Sally Sall ’15. “The students are definitely not getting up and sneaking them out of the library themselves. We have faith in the Wellesley College community’s ability to respect the Honor Code. We know that no one on this campus could possibly be so competitive and so self-absorbed that they would hide or steal books from course reserves.”
This particular microeconomics book’s motives are unknown, but some people have their theories.
“Maybe it was sick of the library. Maybe it just wanted to explore other parts of campus,” hypothesized philosophy major Belle Bell ’15, who is known around campus for using the words “home” and “library” interchangeably.
Other theories are not as wistful. “Oh, I know why! It was just sick of the communal good it was doing by being in a shared space,” explained LTS employee Lily Lil ’15, who proudly refused to disclose the name of the co-op to which she belonged.
“It knows it should be shared,” said Gin. “But it doesn’t care. What does it matter to the book if students can’t read the section about the Problem of the Commons?”
At press time, the book was found smoking a cigarette on Severance Green.
