I am just crazy

Today the librarian was weeding ... He had brought in a load of old drug and military books for me to look through. Yesterday I was about to leave and saw that he had pulled books and no one even bothered to mention it to me. I only caught them as they were being loaded into the dumpsters. I brought home 5 books on world mythology, but had to let several go.

When my friend Jean was there we used to put the books out on a couple tables and allow teachers to paw through them and take anything useable. It made me feel bad that I am now so out of the loop that no one bothered to even tell me they were weeding.

Well my dismay must have been apparent because today Kevin brought me in a mess of books. There was only one that I took. A lovely illustrated oversize copy of Don Quixote (abridged) I got talking to the library aid and she did not have any clue about the story of the book and my references "tilting at windmills" "Man of La Mancha" only left her feeling uneducated (that was not my intent. It finally came down to her getting rid of the book because of it's ungainly size.

Well this afternoon Kevin reached the folktales. He must have pulled close to 100 books to be discarded. I saw him over there and sighed. When he brought the books over to take them out of the computer I started going through them. I found 20 that I could not bear to see tossed, but many more that I really felt someone might like. Puck noticed two Dictionaries of Folktales that he commented were used by one of the teachers in her class on mysteries. they had never been checked out, but I knew that the policy was not to stamp books that teachers checked out. I had commented on that recently, but that left many books looking like they were never used.


I tried to explain that I knew the library had to get rid of books, but that especially fiction should be allowed to be looked through before being put in the trach. Heck we just made this freaking grand gesture taking the whole damn school around town picking up trash and then we send 300 books to a landfill. I broke down. I so hate waste, and I so love books. Even now I can hardly keep from crying. I cried all the way home and have been weepy ever since. It is just so hard to not have anyone who feels the same about the books around me anymore. I have no place to put those books I took, but I could not leave Arthur Rackhams fairy tales, and Mike Fink and Paul Bunyan and Uncle Remus and King Arthur and Swedish Fairy Tales and so many more behind. The two big dictionaries went to the teacher thank goodness. If I could I would have tried to adopt them all out. Susi just kept telling me that she didn't have time to watch a pile of books and Kevin kept saying he had a budget to buy new books that would be better.

While I know that those are valid points I don't see the harm in giving staff even one day to paw through discards. I am just sad