Man tried to return overdue book 50 years late — but the library wasn’t buying it

They had already turned the page.

A Chicago man tried to return an overdue book he checked out in his hometown library 50 years ago — but they told him he might as well keep it at this point.

Chuck Hildebrandt, who checked out “Baseball’s Zaniest Stars” in 1974 when he was a 13-year-old school boy in a Detroit suburb, said the library told him to just hang on to it.

“Some people never come back to face the music,” Warren, Michigan, library director Oksana Urban said. “But there was really no music to face because he and the book were erased from our system.”

Hildebrandt, 63, who grew up outside the Motor City, was back in town over the Thanksgiving holiday and decided to try to make things right and return the book all these years later.

He said he took out the baseball book on Dec. 4, 1974, and just spaced out on it.

“When you’re moving with a bunch of books, you’re not examining every book,” he said. “You throw them in a box and go. But five or six years ago, I was going through the bookshelf and there was a Dewey decimal library number on the book. What is this?”

The library scofflaw decided the 50th anniversary of his crime was the ideal time to return it — but it was not to be as there was no longer a space for the book on the shelves.

Hildebrandt is now turning the incident into charity — he’s launched a campaign to raise $4,564 for the nonprofit literacy group Reading is Fundamental.

He got the ball rolling with a $457 contribution, and said the target fundraising figure is what he estimates the overdue fee would have been if the library took back “Baseball’s Zaniest Stars.”

With Post wires