Where Do The Books Go?

The Delicate Work Of Library Donations

I’m sitting on the cold, concrete garage floor sorting books into little piles: kids, fiction, non-fiction and garbage. I’ve been at it for an hour. We’re making progress. I’m on the clock. The work is one of my favorite parts of the job of being a librarian.

I’ll tell you why.

People have a hard time discarding books, and rightfully so. Books are special. Different. Intimate.

No one ends up with thousands of books in their home library by accident - that is always a deliberate decision because books are time keepers and memory makers. Books provide connection to ancestors and offer legacies to descendants.

So, when patrons absolutely are left with no options - they are downsizing, a family member has passed away, there was a flood, the children have moved on - that’s when they come to us. We’ll take care of your books. We’ll do it gently and respectfully. Those books - and by association the people behind the books - will not be forgotten.

And so it came to pass that I was sitting on a garage floor on a Sunday afternoon working my way through a patron’s collection. Normally we’d ask the patron to bring the books to us, but this person was a friend of my mother-in-law’s so I went out there myself.

The books were her historian daughter’s, who had passed away. For the longest time, the books hadn’t moved, season after season in the garage, the mother being unable to to deal with the emotional trauma of doing SOMETHING with her daughter’s books. And again, this is normal. Books illustrate personality, they are a shadow of the book owners, a reflection of who they are or were.

I had never met her daughter, but within fifteen minutes I knew she was a history teacher with a focus on the Colonial Period. She was a Star Trek fan. She drove a supply truck. She liked Nancy Drew.

The mom came out several times during my sorting, offering me coffee and conversations, occasionally picking up a book or telling me a story. I was in no hurry. There was sadness, but also relief in her eyes. She was letting go of a part of her daughter and of her life. I understood my assignment. Be empathetic. Assure her that this sacrifice - and make no mistake, it WAS a sacrifice - would be for the better.

These books would either be added to our collection and preserved for direct patron usage, or be sold at our annual book sale. In either case, the benefit to our tiny library and therefore the community, would be enormous.

After a while, I had managed to sort the books and restack them into about seven boxes, a little more than 400 books in all. I carried them out to my car and then joined my mother-in-law and her friend for tea.

We talked about many thing, her daughter, the library. I told her to come to the book sale next July, to see with her own eyes how those books will bring others joy. How those books will find homes. Maybe she even will.

But until then, it’s on the the next box, and the next. Donations rain down on us and we take the time and make the space. So much history, so much character - a world of humanity at our fingertips every day. And us, directing the incoming pilgrims, reassuring them, caring for their artifacts.

This is holy work.