In a case of disappearing books, some residents of Hudson, Wis., might have the last word.

People are digging into their private collections to replace rare books that went missing from the history room of the Hudson Area Joint Library, said Nancy Hawkinson, a volunteer for the St. Croix County Historical Society. An audit of the collection showed 45 rare and out-of-print documents had disappeared over the years, she said.

Among the six or so replacement books recently donated was "Hudson's Distinguished Men and Women" by Willis Miller, Hawkinson said. And she personally replaced a missing volume of August. B. Easton's "History of the St. Croix Valley," published in 1909. The two-volume set, she said, is worth about $450.

Other missing books include "A Most Beautiful & Handy Place Name: Wisconsin Place Names in the St. Croix Valley," and "It Happened in Hudson." Also gone was a Ladies Home Journal from 1910, a volume of poems, a marriage index from Jackson County and a book about the New Richmond tornado of 1899.

Anyone wanting to use the history room has to sign in but otherwise would be unsupervised, Hawkinson said. The room is locked when not in use, she said. Books and other materials can't be checked out from the history room.

The historical society, which helps organize and maintain the room, discovered the books were missing when cataloguing and organizing materials. "There hadn't been a good audit done," Hawkinson said.

The Historical Society hasn't filed a report with Hudson police because the reason for the missing materials is unclear, Hawkinson said. It's hoped that anyone who might have the books will return them, she said.

"Some of these things, for any reason, could have been missing legitimately," Hawkinson said.