1. Back at the beginning of my recent cluster of apocalyptic novels, I wanted to re-read Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma. I knew I’d read it the first time from our library, so I went there confidently—and they didn’t have it. It wasn’t just checked out, it was gone. And furthermore, NONE of the libraries in the whole library system had it. They still had OTHER Douglas Coupland books, just not that one. So what I did was, I ordered a used hardcover in good condition and with a dustjacket. I read it, and then I donated it to the library so they’d have a copy.
Our library has a perpetual-book-sale room. They have good deals ($1 for a hardcover Harry Potter, 3/$1 paperback Magic Treehouse, etc.). I had some extra time today, so I went there to browse. Hey, here’s another hardcover copy of Girlfriend in a Coma! Maybe I’ll buy it and keep it for myself. …Hey, here’s my own little “Donation” post-it note inside.
2. I remembered this out of the blue the other day. I used to work in a plant nursery. There were two girls I worked with sometimes; they were best friends and very opinionated, and very proud of the way they expressed those opinions (i.e., loudly, aggressively, stridently, argumentatively, and repeatedly). They used to badger people about wearing deodorant: “You don’t need it! You only think you need it because you’ve gotten your body dependent on it! If you stopped using it, there’d be a brief adjustment period of smelliness, and then after that you’d never need deodorant again!” They really PUSHED it. “Have you stopped using deodorant yet? Come on, just try it! Seriously, I haven’t used it for YEARS, and you’d never know it!”
It’s a sweet little testament to human courtesy (or perhaps just a mark of how awkward such situations are) that no one ever said, “But…I DO know it. The whole room smells like your armpits. I deliberately work as far away from you as possible.” Because oh my DEAR. A person might find grounds to argue that they liked the natural smell of hard-working human armpit; we all have different preferences in such matters. But there was no grounds for arguing that the smell had disappeared after the discontinuation of deodorant.
********
I’ve mentioned before that my dad was a minister when I was growing up. Do these stories seem to you to be crying out for accompanying sermons, or is that a holdover from my formative years? We could write a good one about the donated book: about how sometimes you notice something missing in someone’s life, and so you try to show them what it is—but they’re not ready to receive it. You can’t know why (maybe they’re not ready, maybe they don’t recognize it for what it is, maybe you’re not the right one to show them); all you can do is offer. And maybe someone ELSE will end up taking what you offered, without you ever knowing they received it. Or, we could write one about the deodorant: about how people go around telling themselves/others that they don’t need something in their lives, when everyone who gets near them can clearly tell they do, and all we can do is hope one day they’ll discover that need. (The sermons, they WRITE THEMSELVES!)
OR we could write the opposite, about how sometimes people keep offering you something you genuinely don’t want or need in your life, and it’s because it’s something THEY want/need in THEIR lives. Or we could write about how people might go around proclaiming confidently what they believe to be true and trying to get you to live the same way they do, and how there’s no polite way to inform them that the reason you’re not doing so is that what they’re saying doesn’t seem to be true. (The BEST kind of anecdote is the one you can use to make LOTS of points!)
I liked the stories so much on their own, but now having them become ALLEGORIES makes me like them so much more! Finding a meaningful lesson in the smelly pits of two anti-deodoranters – that’s skill.
OK, so I am feeling oddly sorry (because I am semi-librarian adjacent these days) about how the library handled your donation. Because my heart is sinking a little, imagining you seeing your thoughtful gift rejected. So now I want to find a non-lectury way to say, “Oh! It was so kind of you to donate that book! Let me try to explain how it could have ended up on that shelf, potentially hurting/insulting you! So, yes, well, first, libraries prefer to buy specially-bound copies of books, because it’s hard to see just by looking, but the bindings are different for library books and they hold up better to multiple users/circulation patterns. Plus, it costs money to process a book for circulation and more money to deaccession it when it gets worn out (most of this is just paying a person to do all the work, cataloging and bar-coding and blah blah blah) and libraries may not want to devote the resources for a book without that special binding. And then, also, libraries are so under-staffed that it’s actually cheaper and easier just to put all donations into the library sale room and then use that money to buy needed books from a vendor who does all that cataloging/barcoding work in their warehouse, rather than pay someone their salary/hourly wage to evaluate the donated books and then do the blah-blah-blah on the small number of titles we might want to keep. Even if sometimes, that means you’re selling a book on your acquisitions list. And this is awkward but, even if our library has a person looking at the books for keepers, that person may not realize they’re holding a book that fills in a gap in a popular series, because we’ve deleted the title from our catalog rather than have it sitting there flashing “missing” year after year. But I am so sorry about that! How uncomfortable for all of us!”
I am not sure how that fits into your sermon plan. And I think it got lecture-y after all. Ack. [But _I_ was fascinated by all these little details, when I took my class on collection development. Because there were so many Issues I had not considered before.]
I thought that was fascinating, Jody!
Also, this was one of the most enjoyable blog posts I’ve read. I need Swistle to follow me around making my everyday life into sermons.
I TOTALLY wanted to know this. Thank you for spelling it out. The curiosity, it was getting me.
The library donation story reminds me of a short-lived sitcom called “The Torkelsons,” where the mother explained to somebody that her family was not well-off, but never considered themselves impoverished or felt they lacked for anything important. She told how they were so glad one holiday to help out by donating certain food items so that the area needy could have a nice holiday meal. Then she opened the door that holiday to find a basket with all the things they had donated. Perspectives can be so very different….
Also, I’ve considered myself agnostic for many years. When I recently visited a psychic, one of the first things she said to me was that I’d feel better if I brought God closer to me and let Him into my life again. Not really what I was looking for, but, um, thanks…?
Please never stop blogging. This is delightful.
Heh. I love this post. You know, I move in a bit of a hippie-yogi circle (I’m not hippie myself, but I have a lot of friends through yoga who are a little on the fringe) and in any such circle there is always someone who doesn’t “believe” in deodorant. Now. I’m a natural deodorant girl myself, but still I WEAR DEODORANT. It is terribly unpleasant to be sweatily practicing yoga beside someone who does not wear deodorant of any kind. WHEW. Also – ALSO – I had a professor in university who smelled so badly that he would routinely stink up large lecture halls. I mean, the kind that held 500 people. There was no escape. I’m sure he had some kind of condition – or maybe he never bathed – I don’t know. All I know is that he would walk into the room and slowly that stinky onion-y smell would make its way to you no matter where you were. I was in a very small room with him once for a very small 12 person lecture, and I almost fainted. No joke. And I always wondered, how does he not know? Or does he not care? He was married, and this fact was astounding to me. I mean, he managed to become legally committed to a woman. I couldn’t figure it out, except maybe she had no sense of smell? Or maybe she liked his manly natural scent? It’s a mystery. A DIVINE MYSTERY PERHAPS.
I love this post so much I read it this morning, then came back and read it again this afternoon just to savor it.
In the first story, I felt sorry not just for you for the rejected donation, but for the book itself because it was rejected. I may have a problem.
I would love it if I heard a sermon based on anti-deodorant proselytizers. Maybe I’ll suggest it to our rector!
I love everything about this post. I’m a pastor’s granddaughter and a librarian’s sister…and my husband insists that he doesn’t smell after working out because “it’s a clean sweat.” OH RILLLLLLY.
I’m thinking what they meant by the “If you stopped using it, there’d be a brief adjustment period of smelliness, and then after that you’d never need deodorant again!” statement was that THEY stopped smelling themselves. But the rest of us can still smell just fine.
Your poor book donation. Of course, after Jody’s explanation, I thought back to the boxes and boxes and boxes of books that I once donated to my library…I have a feeling they may have also ended up in the library’s book sale.
BUT!!! I am a librarian who now works for the public library’s friends’ group and I can say this: Our book sales bring in nearly $40K a year and 90% of that money goes back to the library for things like e-books and summer reading prizes, and this year we are buying this fancy printer/scanner/copier thing the library wanted. So even though as Jody said, your donated book may cost $20+ dollars to add to the collection (a figure I might say was from 1997–so I’m sure it is higher now) your book in the book sale could actually help augment the library’s collection or services, but in a way you might not expect.
You are a natural at the sermon writing! I found myself nodding along.
This post fascinates me. My library does some very curious things. They only keep the last book or two in a series readily available. You have to request earlier books in the series from wherever they live. Why would they do this to anyone?! And, there our eight or ten libraries in our county system and they kind of have “secret specialties.” They all seem to have small base collections, but one seems to be the keeper of history books and historical fiction. One has more computer books, the For Dummies books and the like. I’m guessing one most host the early books in a series. One has a large children’s section, etc. I have to request almost everything, drives me nuts.
I learned never to donate a book I want in circulation to a library, because it will just end up in their book sale for $1.50. What I have learned, if I love a book, I need to check it out a couple times a year. As long as a book shows in circulation, they won’t chuck it. So I go in every few months and take out every single D.E. Stevenson book they have on the shelf. I have read them all, but I want them to stay on the shelf!!
Another librarian here, and Jodie’s comment is absolutely spot on. We love donated books, but they mostly do go on our sale shelves. In my suburban metro area system, each branch has a person who goes through the donations and looks at adding them. Most often, we use them to replace worn copies of popular books. For that reason, many of the popular kids series books get added, but adult books mainly end up out for sale. In fact, we can’t even add a book if we don’t already have it in our system–which may be what happened with Swistle’s book. If that title’s record was deleted (because the system didn’t have any more copies) they likely couldn’t add it into the collection.
But! Just because we don’t put all of the donated books on our library shelves doesn’t mean we don’t want them. The sales really do bring in $$ that we use for many necessary things. So you’re still supporting and helping the library, just not in the exact way you wanted to.
Unless you’re donating your full set of encyclopedias from 1982–we really don’t want those.
This is off topic, but I just wanted to let you know that whenever I get caught up with the pile of blogs in my reader, I always look forward to catching up with your posts. Your writing is so pleasant to read, and I love settling in for a stack of recent Swistle posts. Thanks for the enjoyable reading.