Bully! Teddy Roosevelt Biography Finds Its Way Back To Amagansett Library

John Moss, a retired East Hampton Town police officer, who now lives in Mattituck, didn’t know where the copy of “Great Heart: The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt” by Daniel Henderson came from.

All he knew was that it was overdue from the Amagansett Library. Way overdue.

So last Friday, Mr. Moss who had been carrying the book in his truck for the past two weeks, planning to swing by the library the first chance he got on his occasional forays to the South Fork, finally got around to returning it.

The due date was April 5, 1949, nearly 72 years ago.

Back then, when Jean Talmadge was the librarian, the fine for an overdue book would have been a penny a day, according to the library’s director, Lauren Nichols.

“It is a first edition from 1919 and has the original library bookplate, as well as the circulation policy on the back cover,” she said via email. “I’ve only seen one or two items at the library with these features, but none with both.”

Besides informing library patrons that books can be kept for two weeks and renewed after that time and that borrowers will be charged if books are returned damaged, the policy includes a line that rings true today: “Any books exposed to contagious diseases will not be accepted at the library.”

Assuming that policy was the one in place in 1919 when the library acquired the book, the library would have been concerned about the flu pandemic of 1918 that killed a conservative estimate of at least 20 million people over the two years it ran rampant around the world.

Happy to get the book back, the library neither admonished Mr. Moss for returning the book during the current coronavirus pandemic nor required him to pay a fine that would have amounted to about $262, give or take a quarter, assuming the penny-a-day fine remained in place. Like most other libraries, Amagansett no longer levies fines for books that are returned late.

An avid reader, Mr. Moss said he has a “boatload of books” at his home and found the Roosevelt biography in a big plastic crate of books he had in storage. He said he didn’t remember if he had taken the book when he cleaned out his parents’ house after his mother died in 2013, or if it was one of the hundreds of volumes he picked up at yard sales over the years.

“I can’t see my mother reading this book,” he said. “I can see my father reading it, although he wasn’t really into politics.”

Mr. Moss admitted that while he looked the book over, he never got around to reading it himself.

That’s too bad because Amazon describes it as “a thorough biography of the famous president,” and one, incidentally, that was reissued as recently as 2015 in paperback, which you can get for as little as $5.99.

Ms. Nichols said the library was happy to have the book back on its shelves. “There is something magical about a library book finding its way home after such a long time,” she said.