A rare volume titled The Antiquities of Athens published in 1858 has returned to Kiama Library in the seaside town of Kiama New South Wales Australia after remaining hidden for roughly 150 years inside a sealed fireplace where it would have generated nearly 20000 dollars in overdue fines under the original lending rules.
Local resident Ross Simmons who is 77 years old discovered the book during recent home renovations at a family cottage on Manning Street. He found it tucked inside an old tea chest that had been bricked into the sealed 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 person who originally borrowed it from the library shortly after it opened.
The book itself dates to 1858 making it 168 years old. It forms part of the influential series measured and illustrated by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett that documented classical Greek architecture. Kiama Library acquired a copy when the institution opened in 1872 and operated from the old Kiama School of Arts. Staff marked this particular volume as number 506 in the original collection of fewer than one thousand books. Exact records of the final borrower no longer exist because the lending journals from the 1870s have been lost. 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 sealed during later construction or renovation work at the house. The precise reason it was bricked away remains unknown though the long concealment protected it from further handling while still allowing some water damage over the decades.
Under the rules printed inside the front of the book a reader could borrow it 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 28000 Australian dollars or nearly 20000 United States dollars. The library no longer imposes fines and cannot identify or bill any individual in any case. The volume remains in remarkably good overall condition despite the water damage 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 illustrates how ordinary home renovations can unexpectedly reconnect communities with forgotten pieces of their own past. The decision to seal the fireplace decades ago turned a simple overdue volume into a time capsule that survived intact enough for modern readers to appreciate both its scholarly content and the quirky 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 announcement on Facebook.
