Hauling Books

A problem in any active library is running out of space. I may have mentioned that when my husband and I took over the management of Grace Village Library, the fiction section was entirely full, no space for even one thin volume. We weeded out hundreds of the old books that were no longer of interest to the residents. It was apparent it had been many years since any weeding had taken place. All of the freed-up space didn’t last long. The donation of over 100 large-print books, much desired by the library users, took up a whole section of shelves. I feel like a hamster in an exercise wheel, constantly spinning, going nowhere. We are happy to get “new” books, but of course in with the new means out with the old. Now the decisions of what to purge are harder because the marginal and the worn-out have already been discarded.

 Today I hauled over 200 books to the public library to donate to its book sale. These were Heartsong books, a line of inspirational reading in the vein of and preceding the Love Inspired line of paperbacks. The library has pull-out drawers where paperbacks are stored. 3 of these drawers contained the Heartsong books.

Except for a few of the books published between 2000 and 2008 or so, they never circulated. This subset of the collection was ripe for culling. The only thing holding me back was the time and energy required. I decided to keep the newest ones in the above range and get rid of the rest. In the end, this was 2 drawers full. It wasn’t simply scooping up all of the old ones. First, I had to separate the newer ones I was keeping from the rest as well as they were alphabetical by author. I needed to mark out the ownership stamp, and for about half of the discards that I had already cataloged on LibraryThing, I had to remove them from the data base. The decision to get rid of these books wasn’t hard, but it did involve a lot of work.

 There was a desperate need for the 2 empty drawers. The large-print Love Inspired books which the library users avidly read, come in at 8 a month. We had run out of space for them, too. We had usurped the shelves above the counter and had 2 rows on the counter. These books are heavily used, even the previous years.

So I shifted the oldest of this set to the 2 empty drawers, and shifted those left on the shelves and the counter top up to the now-empty shelves. This has the added benefit of making the oldest books once again accessible to the readers. The older residents will not stand on the library stool to reach the higher books. By rotating the stock, the inaccessible books are now readily taken out of the drawers. In fact, a lady did so yesterday, pleased to be able to reach and now read some different books. I hope she is the first of many happy users.

I am tired though. I am also behind on processing the new donations. My library book cart is overflowing. I still have a couple dozen books in my guest bedroom from a library sale waiting to be cataloged. I haven’t carted them to the library yet. Because I was pulling Christmas books for the hall display and not trying to put “new” books out, I had a little window of opportunity and I grabbed it. The next few weeks I must try to catch up. I am grateful that God provides books for this library even if it means I am crazy busy at times making space.