It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region, and investigate, report.

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From WBEZ.

Hi, I'm engagement producer Stephen Arroyo.

Curious Citizen Bradford Casberg recently picked up a copy of Catherine Ann Porter's short story collection, Pale Horse, Pale Writer,

from his beloved local Chicago Public Library, Solzer Regional in Lincoln Square.

And you could really tell that it was printed in the 60s, the binding, the yellowed pages, made it look old, everything about it.

And my first thought when I grabbed it was,

am I allowed to take this out of the library?

The worn binding, the brittle pages, they made Bradford curious.

What is the oldest book in circulation within the Chicago Public Library system?

So he put the question to the Ask a Librarian form on the CPL website and got a pretty

quick response.

Hi, Bradford. I think the oldest book in circulation is called Life of James Crichton of Clooney.

You can see it here in our catalog. It's from 1819. They added, I think that's a great curious city question.

If you ask them, maybe they'll find something even older.

Challenge accepted, ask a librarian.

The Life of James Kreiton of Clooney is an obscure title published in 1819 in Scotland. It's basically a biography of a Scottish polymath who perished under strange circumstances at age 21.

I had to see if this book is, in fact, the oldest in circulation, so I headed to Harold Washington Library,

and on the sixth floor, next to a memoir by Charlie Chaplin's son,

was a hardcover book that I had no doubt was over 200 years old.

I took it to the counter and was mildly shocked when they scanned the barcode

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