A rare volume of The Antiquities of Athens, published in 1858, has finally made its way back to Kiama Library in the seaside town of Kiama, New South Wales. The book spent roughly 150 years hidden inside a sealed fireplace, where—under the library’s original lending rules—it would have racked up nearly $20,000 in overdue fines.
Local resident Ross Simmons, 77, uncovered the book while renovating a family cottage on Manning Street. He found it tucked inside an old tea chest that had been bricked into the fireplace. Simmons returned the volume to the library last week. He believes his great-great-grandfather, John Simmons—an English immigrant and former Kiama alderman who lived in the cottage in the late 1800s—was the one who originally borrowed it shortly after the library opened.
The book is 168 years old and belongs to the influential series measured and illustrated by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, which carefully documented classical Greek architecture. Kiama Library acquired its copy when the institution opened in 1872, then operating from the old Kiama School of Arts. Staff marked this particular volume as number 506 in an original collection of fewer than one thousand books. Lending journals from the 1870s no longer exist, so the identity of the final borrower remains unknown. Library manager Michelle Hudson suspects the book left the shelves within the first few years after opening and somehow ended up stored in the tea chest before the fireplace was later sealed. The long concealment protected the volume from further handling, though it still sustained some water damage over the decades.
According to the rules printed inside the front cover, a reader could borrow the book for one month and faced a fine of three pence for every additional week. Calculated across roughly 150 years and adjusted for inflation, that rate produces a theoretical overdue charge of about $28,000 Australian dollars—or nearly $20,000 U.S. The library no longer imposes fines and has no way to identify or bill anyone. Remarkably, the volume remains in good overall condition and still contains its full set of seventy black-and-white plate illustrations, some of which fold out. Hudson confirmed the library will keep it permanently in the local history collection rather than allow it to circulate again.
This recovery shows how ordinary home renovations can reconnect communities with forgotten pieces of their own past. Sealing the fireplace decades ago turned a simple overdue book into a quiet time capsule that survived intact enough for modern readers to appreciate both its scholarly content and the unusual path it took. Interested readers can examine digitized versions of the original work through the Internet Archive edition of The Antiquities of Athens, while additional verified details appear in the Associated Press account of the return and the library’s announcement on Facebook.
