The rubber band date stamp is a wheel of numbers you turn by hand, and it has sat on the counter since the building opened, for the slips in the front of the books that the system replaced but nobody removed. Every morning it is set to a date a few weeks ahead, and books come back through the chute with that date stamped on their slip, in our ink, in a hand nobody has.
I am a senior library assistant and the counter is mine most days.
How the stamp is used, or was.
The date stamp is a wooden handled band stamp with wheels for the day, the month and the year. Before the system went in, every loan was stamped on the slip inside the cover with the date due. The system prints receipts now and the slips are historical, but the stamp is still on the counter because it always has been, and some of the older borrowers like to see it.
I set it to the current due date at the start of a shift out of habit. It is a wheel. It stays where it is put.
Every morning it is set to a date a few weeks ahead.
Not the due date, which is three weeks. Somewhere between three and nine weeks, and a different date each morning, and the wheels have been turned, because the ink pad has the marks of the wheels' teeth in it from the stamp being pressed after they were moved.
Books come back through the returns chute with that date on their slip.
A slip in a book that has not been stamped since 2009, stamped in the night with the date the stamp was set to that morning, in our ink, which is a particular violet that we buy in a bottle.
Not one book. A handful a week, and always a book that went out through the kiosk to a real borrower on a real loan, and the borrower, when I have asked, has no idea what I am talking about.
What has been checked.
The building. Locked, alarmed, and the counter is on a camera that records on motion. The camera sees the counter at night with the stamp on it and nothing moving.
The stamp. I took it home for a week. The next morning the counter had a date on the ink pad, pressed into it, with no stamp in the building.
The ink. It is ours, from the bottle, and I have had a slip looked at by a friend who does documents, and she says the impression is from a band stamp of that pattern and the ink was wet within twelve hours of her seeing it.
The dates. I have kept a list. They are not random, and they are not the same each week. They run ahead of the calendar at a steady pace, and the gap between the real date and the stamped date has been growing by about a day a fortnight for as long as I have been writing them down.
Where the gap is going.
I plotted it, because that is what you do with a list. At the current rate the stamped date is a year ahead of the real one in about four years.
I do not know what that means and I have decided that it does not mean anything, and I have written that sentence in my notebook so that I remember having decided it.
The slips.
The returned books with the stamped slip are ordinary returns, but three of them, over two years, have come back with something else on the slip: a name, in pencil, in the borrower column, in a small careful hand of the kind people were taught in the 1950s.
The same name, three times. It is not a borrower. It is not a member of staff, past or present, and I have looked. It is a name from the town, and I have found it once, on a stone, in the churchyard, with a date on it that is in the range the stamp is now reaching.
What is done about it.
The stamp is on the counter. I set it in the morning to the real due date, and I stamp nothing with it, and in the morning it is forward again.
I have mentioned it to nobody in authority, because there is nobody in authority who would want to hear it and nothing they could do that I have not done, and because the books come back and the borrowers are fine and the library opens at nine.
What I do.
I open the counter and I set the stamp.
The one change is that I set it to the real date now, rather than the due date, because I want to know each morning how far forward it has gone, and because on one morning in March I set it three weeks ahead, as I always had, and it had not moved.
It was on the date I had set. It was the only morning it has ever been where I left it, and I stood at the counter for a while with the stamp in my hand, and I looked at the date, and I put it down, and I moved it back to the real date, and I have not set it forward since, because it was the twelfth of March, and I did not want to find out what it knew about the twelfth of March.