(Please note we are throwing away old books that no one is checking out or books that are too damaged to circulate) Edit: fixed typo
Do they sell them? My local library holds a book sale every so often (6 or 12 months, not sure). Books are usually $1 for a novel up to $3-4 for a textbook sized book. It’s always packed. Some people bring carts and fill them up with dozens of books.
The city I work in prohibits the selling or giving away of city property so we aren’t allowed to sell them (and truly most of the time they are so old and crusty and yucky that no one would pay any amount of money for them), but if the quality of books is super high we sneakily donate them to More Than Words. That being said we do hold book sales stocked by donations from patrons and the proceeds go into our programming budget.
Oh, OP, what’s the most amusing damage you’ve ever seen?
My absolute favorite damaged return was a book covered in weird hardened-goopy pink material, named something like “wax casting for beginners”. Probably one of the only times I laughed at a damaged book.
Hahaha that is hilarious!!
Probably the time I had a book come back with the pages taped back together in a completely random order. Created a wild ride of a story lol
That would make me legitimately sad
Used to feel that way, but realized that printed and bound words don’t necessaily have value. Some books simply suck.
Got excited seeing the cull cart at my library. Free books! My god they were garbage, no idea how someone agreed to print them.
Also, non fiction can get dated. Growing up in the 70s, I had a wonderful kid’s book about science. One article was about asbestos and how it’s a useful and wonderful material. Yeah.
Also, Pluto was the 9th planet, debunked dinosaur theories, stuff like that. Love to have it back, but I wouldn’t let my kids read it. :)
Reading anything cool?
I love libraries and the people that work at them ♥️📙
My first gf was a librarian and 30-years later she’s the head librarian of a large, private university. One of only two people I’ve known that I’m certain are geniuses.
EDIT: Looked her up, not the head librarian, but one of the top. Also, that woman has had a wild academic career. Seems she partly transitioned to medicine and has many scientific papers under her belt. LOL, I feel like such a loser.
How long does a book have to go without being checked out to be purged?
Depends on the library and the type of book. Typical time frames are 10 years, 7 years, 5 years, or 2 years. For example I work in an busy urban library in the children’s room and we were running out of space in our fiction novel section so we did a 5 year then a 2 year when the first one didn’t make enough space. Our biography section grows less quickly so we do 7 year weeds.
The library i worked for for a while also had an archive system. If there were fewer than X books in the system for the whole country (not counting most novels) it would never get removed. It was wild spotting books that predated my grandparents just sitting on the public shelf, defended only by a “no checkout” sticker.
That’s got to be tough. Hope this means you can eventually order more that people have been requesting.
It does! We gotta clear space on the shelves sometimes for new books :)
God, libraries are cool
Doing difficult, noble work OP. Thank you for keeping local community resources running.
