For years my brothers and I loved the commercials for Crown Books bookstores where that whiney guy would say at the beginning, “books cost too much.” Well library books can apparently cost too much, too.

Emily Canellos-Simms always prided herself in never having an overdue library book. That’s why the Kewanee native now living in Peoria was astonished when her daughter-in-law called from Texas to tell her that one of the old books she had sent her for a decorating project was overdue from the Kewanee Public Library — 47 years past due, to be exact… Emily’s son, Carl Soderstrom… insisted his mother return the book — mainly because he had been reminded by her to do so many times. Soderstrom went one step further. He calculated the number of days since the book was due — 17,257, including leap years — and instructed his mother to write out a check for the amount due — $345.14, and pay up.

Personally, I’ve never understood library book people. Someone once said if a book is good enough to read, it’s good enough to own. That’s always rung true with me. And folks who take out books from libraries are very defensive on this point – they strike me as similar to people who get really defensive about the importance of public schools.

But the writer Joseph Epstein recently got rid of a whole bunch of his books (and wrote a damn fine essay about it). And I think NR’s David Frum did, too. From what I’ve heard, Slate founder Michael Kinsley doesn’t read any books at all. I’m sure he prefers, a la that famous line in the movie Metropolitan, “good literary criticism.”

After moving recently, with books far and away making up the bulk of the move (“books weigh too much”), I’ve begun to rethink the need for books. I love them and can’t stop acquiring them, but how many copies of Hall and Rabushka’s “The Flat Tax” do I really need on my shelf? Maybe libraries aren’t so bad after all. Cornerniks are a literary lot, so I figured I’d ask — Libraries: thumbs up or thumbs down? Is it better to own, or to borrow?