“Dear Books and Books,” the letter starts in blue pen on a torn out piece of graph paper with the fringe still on it.
What follows is the most sincere apology for an act of teenage rebellion one could imagine.
A few weeks ago a girl dropped off an envelope in person to the Lincoln Road location of Books and Books. Inside, NalaniAnderko, the store’s manager, found this apology for stealing a copy of Agatha Christie’s book “Third Girl” back in the summer of 2014.
The person apologizes for being an “angsty teenager” when taking the book and for the “horrendous amount of run-on sentences” in the letter. Sixteen dollars were included to cover the cost of the book.
“It surprised me, I didn’t think anybody would give us a letter like that,” said Anderko.
According to the letter, its author ended up moving to Mexico and hasn’t been able to make amends until now, almost two years later.
“It was sort of a very charming letter,” said Mitchell Kaplan, the owner of the bookstore. “[It’s] obviously somebody struggling with… an act that they weren’t very proud of. It gave me hope in the transformative nature of someone's sense of… conscience.”
He says this is the first time anything like this has happened to him. And while Books and Books doesn’t encourage taking books without paying for them, Kaplan feels no ill will towards the person and complimented the book choice.
Kaplan has posted a picture of the letter on Facebook and says it has gone viral.
“I think that people like to see people acknowledge the mistakes that they’ve made and make amends,” says Kaplan. “We’re a very forgiving country and a very forgiving people as long as we make amends and that seems to be what happened here.”
