Books are woven through all parts of my life. I was a latch key child long before there was a term for it. I spent hours reading. As a kid I read every Louis L’Amour western and every Walter Farley black stallion book I could get my hands on.
Our public library was an old three story Victorian mansion in the center of town that was donated to the town years earlier. It was dark with lots of small rooms and too many stairs. There was no security at a library back then, so I would go into the back rooms where the old books were kept and sit on the floor in the corner looking through them.
From that library I read Congo by Michael Crichton; Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes; Savage Sam by Fred Gipson; and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.
I remember reading a great book with twin sisters, one of whom went on a space journey where she was frozen in time so she would survive the journey. When she finally got back to earth, her sister was fifty years old than she was. I don’t remember the name of the book or I would read it again.
During the summer of 1981 I was recuperating from some unexpected surgery. My neighbor started taking me to her Friends of the Library group. People donated books to the library all year long to be sold at an annual sale. This annual sale also gives the library a place to put books they have weeded out of their system. I had a lot of fun sorting the books and stayed for three years, until I moved to Texas. Each state I move to, the first place I go is the library to sign up as a volunteer. I am now in my 27th year volunteering.
I volunteer a couple of hours a week sorting the Hobbies and How To section books. As a rule, the maintenance staff keeps a constant four pallets of donated books to sort through year round. There are sorters who go through those books and sort them into categories. They roll their carts of sorted books down the isles where there are tall bookshelves defined by individual categories. Each person assigned to sort a category sorts the books into sub-headings. Those books are boxed and stored until the annual sale.
At the same time, some of the sorted books are sent upstairs to a used book store located inside the library. Books that are deemed to have a potential larger value are stored separately to be sold on an Internet store front. I enjoy my volunteer time though out the year. It is quiet. We are in the basement, so my cell phone won’t work. You can visit with people or just lose yourself in books. The person who sorts audio ‘stuff’ has a record player and he plays music on vinyl throughout the morning. There is a dining room in the library if you need coffee or a muffin. And, of course, there is the library upstairs. The photo below is the where the main sort takes place.
