Back in early November, while library worker June Hicks was busy organizing the stacks in the aquaculture section of the Ralph Pickard Bell library, she happened on something unusual: an enormous can of beans.

“It’s not unusual for students to leave stuff around,” says Hicks. “But this is kind of unusual, a big can of beans.”

Hicks says she was doing routine work in the agriculture and aquaculture section over the course of a few days, and one day happened upon the giant can, “on the bottom shelf, just as cozy as it can be.”

“I was just working away,” says Hicks, “when I got down off my stepstool one time, there were these beans staring at me, just like that. And I thought, what is this?”

Hicks didn’t just happen upon any old can of beans. This was a 2.84 litre (100 ounce) monster can of beans. “I don’t know who’d want to carry it around because it’s so heavy,” says Hicks.

Not surprisingly, none of Hicks co-workers were able to guess what she found before she revealed the hefty can on her library cart. “We’re still laughing about it, because it’s so unusual to find it in here,” says Hicks.

Hicks’ coworkers also had a surprise for her, as the colossal can got catalogued in the library system complete with a sticker normally reserved for book spines.

Mount Allison’s dean of libraries and archives, Rachel Rubin, says the beans sparked a debate among staff, as they discussed how to catalog the donation. “We had an aboutness problem,” says Rubin. “What is a can of beans about?”

“To catalog something you have to know what it’s about,” says Rubin. “So we were trying to figure out if it’s a legume, is it about legumes? Is it about the process of cooking? Is it about canning? I think we went with canning, but we had to have a pretty serious philosophical discussion about what a can of beans is truly about.”

Teaching and research librarian Laura Landon says the strange discovery inspired some wordplay among staffers as well. “We’ve been talking about Rachel as ‘the bean of libraries’,” says Landon. And the literary puns have been flowing, with ‘to bean or not to bean’ and ‘For Whom the Bean Tolls.’

According to student reactions to the library beans story on social media, the mammoth can could have come from the supply at the Jennings meal hall, or possibly from a wholesale grocery shop in Moncton or Amherst.

“No one has claimed responsibility for the beans,” says Rubin. “I’m waiting for the rightful owner of the beans to come forward to collect their can. Now that we’ve catalogued it, it might just get shelved so they should come and collect it before it ends up in processed foods.”

CHMA couldn’t resist dropping by the Ralph Pickard Bell Library back in November to hear the story of the giant can of beans: