The man renovating his house in the seaside town of Kiama, south of Sydney, had no reason to expect a time capsule inside a disused fireplace. Yet there it was: a wooden tea crate bricked meticulously into the sealed chimney, and inside the crate, a book.

The volume was Antiquities of Athens, published in 1858, its pages mottled with moisture from the years it had spent beneath the hearth. Stamped inside the cover, alongside a list of stern Victorian rules, was the mark of the Kiama Library and the number 506 – one of roughly a thousand books that had formed its original collection when the institution opened in 1872.

“We’ve never had anything that old come back to us,” said library manager Michelle Hudson. In an age of estate clearances that occasionally disgorge a title 30 or 40 years delinquent, a return delayed by an estimated century and a half is an anomaly of an altogether different order. Had the borrower been traced, the fine, computed from the three-pence-per-week penalty printed on the front endpaper and adjusted for inflation, would now stand at around 28,000 Australian dollars.

But the ledger that once recorded every transaction – who took out which volume on what date – has been lost. “Unfortunately, we have a missing link. There’s nothing in the book that tells us who the last borrower was,” Hudson said. The regulations of the 1870s were exacting: a book could not be borrowed until the previous one was returned and all fines settled, a stricture that may explain why the book never came back. In those days, a household could borrow up to three titles only if at least six of its members were “known to be able to read”; anyone arriving at the library in a “state of intoxication” was turned away.

The book, bearing quiet witness to the domestic life that once surrounded it, will now enter the library’s local history collection. Hudson has ruled out any further lending. “We’re not going to allow it to go back out again. We don’t want to wait another 150 years for this book to be returned.” For the foreseeable future, Antiquities of Athens will remain visible but immobile – a solitary artefact from a lost circulation, no longer in silent hiding but on quiet display.