A kid snuck his own book into a public library and now there's a waitlist to read it

Perhaps as perturbed as we are about Wordle succumbing to capitalist machinations, the universe has provided us with a new, equally pure and nice distraction to take its place: As reported yesterday in the Washington Post, an 8-year-old in Idaho recently pulled a reverse-heist for his handwritten book, sneaking it into his local public library and planting it within the children’s section shelves.

After confessing the caper to his mother, the two returned to the branch a few days later to see what became of it, only to find The Adventures of Dillon Helbig’s Crismis already gone.

As it turned out, Helbig’s 81-page handwritten and illustrated epic about “putting an exploding star on his Christmas tree and being catapulted back to the first Thanksgiving and the North Pole” was already a hit with the librarians (to be fair, that sounds like a badass plot for a children’s book). One of the staff had even already read it to their own 6-year-old son, who reviewed it as “one of the funniest books he’d ever known.”

Taking things to previously unknown realms of cuteness, the library went ahead and catalogued Helbig’s opus within the branch’s graphic novel section. Following a local news outlet’s coverage of the situation, patrons have since flocked to read the “Crismis” saga… only to be put on a massive waitlist that technically could last for years—as of this past Saturday, Helbig’s book had 55 people waiting to get their hands on it.

Granted, it probably won’t take each of those patrons two weeks to make it through The Adventures of Dillon Helbig’s Crismis, but we all have that one book we swear we’ll read upon this particular library checkout. We’re looking at you, battered copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay…

[via Digg]

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