Three weeks ago, I put in for an interlibrary loan to get some photocopies of a book review from an old issue of The Listener.

Our Interlibrary Loan department states that getting photocopies may take a week to ten days. Usually, requesting a book or copies from another library takes less time, especially if it's from another in-state library. But ILL makes no promises. We must still rely on the unpredictable services of the U.S. Mail.

Anyway, two weeks after I submitted my request, I started to worry. "How long do I have to wait before I get to complain?" I asked. It's a free service, so complaining about how long it takes is really ungrateful. But ILL re-sent my request to another library.

Duke University's Perkins Library came through, finally. They even emergency-faxed the pages, which made up for some of the lost time. But somewhere along the line my request got manhandled or mistranslated: they missed the journal issue's table of contents, and they copied the title page from the first issue in the volume, not the title page from the issue my article was in. Oh, well. Beggars, choosers, and all that. Still, even I know how to tell the difference, and I know what TOC stands for. And what ever happened to my original request? Was it sent, and is malingering and maloitering under some Post Office conveyor? Did it ever get sent at all? Maybe, eventually, it will turn up, torn, opened and resealed, criss-crossed with tireprints, stamps cancelled and re-cancelled in foreign lands.

Macht nichts. I had to dig up the full citation to fill out the ILL form. So, there you have it. The long, perilously dull, but true, story of the return of a very favorable review.