Free printable SSAT practice test for Grade 11

Every Saturday from June to September, Teo's grandfather set up a folding table at the end of the market row, between a man who sharpened knives and a woman whose goat cheese drew a line by eight o'clock. The table held thirty jars of honey arranged by color, from a pale gold that was almost white to a brown so dark it looked like coffee held up to a window.

Teo was fifteen, and he had agreed to help for one reason: his grandfather paid in cash. He had not counted on how visible the end of the row would be. Anyone walking from the parking lot to the bakery passed within six feet of him, and by the second week he had developed a habit of studying his phone whenever a group of teenagers drifted by.

His grandfather noticed, of course. He noticed everything about bees, and Teo suspected he had long ago stopped distinguishing between bees and grandsons. But he said nothing. He only talked, in his slow and steady way, to whoever stopped. He explained that the pale honey came from clover in early summer and the dark from buckwheat in August. He let children hold a jar up to the light. He told one woman that honey almost never spoils, and when she looked doubtful, he did not argue; he simply handed her a spoon.

Teo heard all of it whether he wanted to or not.

In late July, Dani Ortiz from his chemistry class stopped at the table with her older sister. Teo felt his face grow warm. He considered pretending to be a stranger who happened to be standing there.

"Why are they all different colors?" Dani's sister asked, pointing. "Is the dark one burnt or something?"

Teo's grandfather was bent over the cash box, counting change. He did not look up.

Teo heard himself answer. "It depends on the flowers," he said. "The bees go wherever things are blooming. Clover in June is light. Buckwheat later is dark, and it tastes almost like molasses." He paused, then picked up a spoon. "You can try it. People either love it or think it tastes like a barn."

The sister tried it and made a face, and Dani laughed and tried it and bought a jar. When they had gone, Teo realized he had not once reached for his phone.

His grandfather closed the cash box. "Barn," he said thoughtfully, as if testing the word. "That is not how I would describe it."

"It's how she would," Teo said.

The old man considered this, then nodded once, the way he nodded when a hive turned out to be healthier than he had feared. The next Saturday, without being asked, Teo arrived early and arranged the jars himself, from lightest to darkest.

For generations, the overdue fine has been as much a part of the public library as the card catalog once was. A book comes back late, and the borrower pays a few cents for each day of delay. The practice seems harmless, even fair: a small penalty to encourage people to share. Yet a growing number of libraries have abandoned fines altogether, and I believe the rest should follow.

Begin with what a public library is for. It exists to give everyone, regardless of income, access to books, information and a quiet place to learn. Fines work directly against that purpose. For a family with money to spare, a few dollars owed is a minor irritation. For a family without it, the same amount can mean a blocked card, and a blocked card can mean a child who stops borrowing at the very age when reading habits form. Librarians in many cities have noticed that accounts blocked for unpaid fines tend to be concentrated in the neighborhoods that most need the library. A policy that pushes away the people a library was built to serve is not harmless, however small each fine may be.

Consider, too, what fines actually accomplish. Their defenders claim that the threat of a penalty is what brings books back. But libraries that have eliminated fines have generally reported that most materials are still returned. Some found that former patrons, who had stayed away for years out of embarrassment over an old debt, came back once the debt was forgiven. The money collected, meanwhile, usually makes up only a small share of a library's budget, and some of it is consumed by the staff time spent tracking and collecting it.

The strongest objection deserves a fair hearing. Without some consequence, critics say, a minority of borrowers will simply keep what they take, and the shelves will slowly empty at the expense of everyone else. This concern is reasonable, but it argues for a different tool, not for fines. A library can still require a borrower to pay for an item that is truly lost, and it can pause borrowing until a long-overdue item comes back. These measures protect the collection without charging people for being a few days late, which is the offense fines most often punish. Reminders by text message and email, now cheap and nearly universal, do more to prompt returns than a charge most people never notice until it has grown.

A library fine is a small thing, and that is precisely the problem: its benefits are small, while its costs fall on the patrons least able to bear them. Libraries pride themselves on being open to all. Ending late fines is one simple way to make that promise true.