QUICK TAKES - April 16, 2009

Washington and Lee University has a missing library book back on its shelves -- nearly 145 years after it was stolen by a Union soldier during the Civil War.

The 1842 book, the first volume of W.F.P. Napier’s four-volume “History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France From the Year 1807 to the Year 1814,” was returned recently by a friend of one of the soldier’s descendants to the Lexington, Va., school’s Leyburn Library.

Mistakenly thinking he was at adjoining Virginia Military Institute, soldier C.S. Gates pilfered the book on June 11, 1864, from the library of what was then Washington College, university officials said this week.