“Someone has been hiding empty A.1. steak sauce bottles throughout the Avon Lake Public Library and no one knows why.

Dan Cotton, the library’s page supervisor, said 28 of the 10-ounce bottles have turned up since he found the first one Jan. 11 hidden among the library’s newspapers.

No one has been spotted hiding the bottles, but it’s become almost a game among library staff to locate the bottles, which are typically left lying on their sides behind books on the shelf.

“It became something everyone wanted to find,” Cotton said.

The library’s security guard and pages, who shelve the books, have found most of the dark glass containers among the magazines, the fiction section, the children’s section and elsewhere. Although the bottles appear at random, the most popular location seems to be in the nonfiction section, Cotton said.

“We mapped the first 12 to see if we could find a pattern, but we couldn’t find a discernible pattern,” Cotton said.

Jill Ralston, the library’s public relations and marketing coordinator, said there doesn’t appear to be any malicious intent from whoever the culprit is. The labels have been removed and the bottles have been thoroughly cleaned.”

(read the rest of this library mystery article here!)