Manuel SierraReference Librarian Art Bagley doesn’t like to get stressed out over late fees.
“You know, students just have to pay them back or we’ll put a hold on their account. It’s no big deal,” Bagley said.
But when Jed Prinlapp, a veteran of the Spanish-American War as well as both World Wars, walked into the library to return a book he checked out in 1902, Bagley was speechless.
“It was as if I’d seen a ghost,” said Bagley. “Nobody has checked out a book in over a thirty years! Our E-Search was so advanced that it sent itself back in time to assist students in 1970.”
After some speculation, Bagley confirmed with his staff that the outstanding book, Lectures from Terry Parssinen, a 2,400 page tome of classroom speeches from the history professor’s first year at UT in 1898, was in fact the last book ever checked out from the UT library.
Prinlapp explained his delay in returning the book.
“I just finished it,” the skeletal scholar confessed. “It was quite a read; it took me a hundred years of solitude in the Honors Lounge to get through it! Fortunately no one ever bothered me in there.”
Prinlapp was discovered by Dr. Richard Piper during his search for a new way to flood UT’s e-mail servers.
“I saw this guy and thought, wow, his hands are so bony, so he could press the ‘send’ button way more than I ever could,” Piper confided.
At the time he was found, Prinlapp was still fighting World War II, and attempted to bayonet Piper, screaming “I GOTCHA NOW, JERRY!” after the Honors professor unsealed the Honors Lounge.
“It was a little unsettling, but ironically, my own copy of Lectures from Terry Parssinen saved me,” Piper said. “Then again, I had Volume Two, which comes in at around 5,300 pages. That absorbed most of the bayonet.”
Piper mentioned the irony in the situation, since he’d been looking for the “lost” volume one for years.
“After my retirement, I was planning to seal myself within the Honors Chamber