WILD Cambridge students dodge library food ban by hiding chocolate in a book

Look at these mad bastards


Cambridge students have got round a food ban in the library – by stashing chocolate inside a book.

In a haunting echo of Stephen King’s The Shawshank Redemption, staff at the Newnham College Library found the snack hidden inside a text.

Clever students had cut out the inner pages of the book to allow room for sweets which were found during a routine stock check last week.

What if I actually wanted to know something about Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees? Inconsiderate

The Crunchie and Dairy Milk bars were concealed inside a copy of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.

Scrawled inside the pages is a message encouraging the lucky finder to enjoy the contents – and then replace them with a new snack.

Pretty basic handwriting

The note reads: “Dear student, congratulations on finding this book. Take your prize and return with one for the next person.”

The discovery comes after a draconian ban on food and drink in the library.

I’d be legging out the library that fast if I had to share space with the tossers who did this

Jo Tynan, from Newnham College, said: “We do regular stock checks at the library and a student stock taker came across this book last week.

“It didn’t have any issue numbers on it so she opened it and the inside had been completely hollowed out.

“We don’t know how long the book was there for but we don’t think it was very long.

“A lot of our students got firsts this year so who knows whether they were helped with their studies by these chocolates.

“We didn’t think anything like this had ever happened before but when we wrote about it on Facebook we had quite a few responses from alumna.

Not a dining room

“One person said she found a pack of minstrels in a book and another student found a love letter.

“We didn’t think there was form for it but we are not always privy to what the students do.”

Oh look, the lavender’s in season

The college does not allow food or drink in the library but occasionally leaves sweets out during the exam period when the library closes at 1.45am.

No one has come forward to claim responsibility for the idea and library staff say the book must have been brought into the building by a student.

Newnham College Library contains around 90,000 volumes and is one of the largest at Cambridge University.

The Oxford Companion to English Literature was written by Newnham alumni Margaret Drabble.