As nominative determinism goes, Forty Minutes Late was a little understated for the title of a book returned to San Francisco library 100 years late.

The book was borrowed in 1917 by one Phoebe Johnson, from the San Francisco Public Library, as US troops sailed across the Atlantic to face the mud and bullets of the first world war trenches.

Luckily for her descendant, Webb Johnson, a potential $3,650 (£2,900) fine has been avoided – thanks to an amnesty for overdue books launched by the library earlier this month.

Johnson’s great-grandmother Phoebe can be forgiven for her failure to return the short-story collection by F Hopkinson Smith, published in 1909: she died a week before it was due back.

Her great-grandson has less excuse for tardiness: he told the library that he had first discovered the book in 1996, but held on to it when he realised it was overdue, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Webb could have escaped fines if he had returned the book two years after his rediscovery of the book – as another amnesty was launched in 1998. Two more amnesties have run since, though the book remained on the Webb family shelves for a further 20 years.

Forty Minutes Late was one of more than 2,000 books handed in by embarrassed borrowers as part of a pardon granted by the local library authority to encourage an estimated 55,000 borrowers to return books that have passed their due date.

San Francisco Libraries estimates that more than 50,000 patrons have yet to return their overdue books. As a result they have had their memberships suspended.

Had she somehow remained alive, Phoebe would now have had her borrowers’ rights restored. The length of Johnson’s loan was epic, but she would still have a way to go to match George Washington: he proved a very bad borrower with The Law of Nations by Emer de Vattel, which the first US president checked out more than 200 years ago and never returned. The book was finally returned to the New York Library in 2010.

According to the Week, there may have been an attempt to cover up Washington’s embarrassment. The leather-bound ledger that recorded the loan went missing some time after it was completed in 1792. It was found in a pile of rubbish in 1934.

Washington’s fine would now have been in excess of $300,000 – though it is likely the library authorities would have offered him an amnesty too.