IT gives a whole new meaning to the words "travelling guide".
A missing travel book about Italy has clocked up 10,000 miles on its journey home to Swansea — via Australia.
A copy of the Rough Guide to Sicily was presumed lost after it was borrowed from Oystermouth Library in January.
But now it has been returned after being discovered abandoned in a hotel on the Mediterranean island.
It was found by a kind-hearted woman from Melbourne in Catania, a city on Sicily's east coast. And once she had returned home, she decided to post it back to Swansea, with a note attached.
She said: "One of your naughty borrowers left this book behind. Since I've been feeling guilty about lifting the two cookery books from the school library in 1972, I decided to return it, making up half of the karma perhaps?"
The libraries in Swansea are run by the council and more than 11,700 issues and renewals of travel books have been made so far in 2013. Steve Hardman, Swansea Council's library service manager, said: "Books borrowed from our libraries across the city tend to end up in all corners of the world, especially at this time of year when many people have either been overseas or are planning trips.
"The vast majority of our books are returned but some inevitably get misplaced or forgotten about – that's human nature and it's very rarely intentional.
"But it's even rarer that a misplaced book is returned from the other side of the world by someone who didn't even borrow it in the first place! In fact, I can't remember something like this ever happening before.
"The Rough Guides are just some of the many travel books we've got in our libraries — and borrowing books from your local library can save you lots of money too because it's a free service."
