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Idaho Librarian |
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One Librarian’s Trash… About gifts. Most librarians welcome and appreciate them. Especially gifts of cash. Gifts of books are more likely to produce ambivalent feelings. Not that librarians lack gratitude; after all, isn’t it the thought that counts, even when the gift is a multi-volume set of life-altering advice from the Church of Scientology or the uplifting spiritual musings of Sri Baghavan Aurobindo? No doubt the zealous givers of these books are honestly persuaded that the citizenry would be much better off if it would only read them. Then there are the proffered slender volumes of self-published poetry, usually from earnest folk in late middle age whose poems have been praised by neighbors and relatives once too often. One thinks “No one reads good poetry anymore, why should I put this on my shelves?” And then, perhaps, one does so anyway. But it’s not always easy to smile graciously at the donor who bears a cardboard box of Bantam paperbacks that appear to have been recovered from the library of the Titanic and are now shrouded in mildew. To librarians, books may be precious things sui generis, but, let’s be candid; we also find many of them to be pretty worthless. In fact, I sometimes think that the general public reveres books more than we do. Is it because, from their viewpoint, books don’t seem to wear out, or get used up, like ordinary products? What possesses someone to think that an accounting textbook published in 1953 is still worth anything? What could it be but the fact that its pages and binding are still intact and its text legible, though perhaps heavily underlined and with helpful marginalia such as “memorize for test!”? Then again, donors may have some warrant for their apparent convictions about the worth of old books. The Internal Revenue Service, after all, seems willing to accept a rather generous appraisal of old books’ value, at least when those books are donated to a library. Not that the IRS actually knows what is donated, nor what a fair valuation might be, except in cases where a donor claims a gift to be worth $5,000 or more. In my library we suffer from a devoted donor who keeps giving us technical magazines that, because of his job, he receives for free. He’s been told that we don’t want them and that we won’t add them to the collection, yet boxes of them arrive regularly. We have no idea what deductions he receives for these “gifts.” We’d rather not know. I’m not saying that it’s easy to throw away a gift book. There’s that intimidating old bookseller’s wheeze that every book, given time, will find its reader. To which I can only respond: Be honest, aren’t there plenty of books that don’t deserve a reader? Ah, but there’s no accounting for taste, and one man’s trash is another man’s…….. and besides, who are you to judge? Well, I’m a librarian, that’s who, and not only am I professionally trained to euthanize books that have outlived their usefulness, I can handle the guilt. Leonard Hitchcock
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