by Beth Cronk, Litchfield head librarian
We’ve been playing musical chairs with some of the book
collections at the Litchfield library lately. Shelf space is always tight, so
we look for creative ways to make room for everything, especially the most
popular things. I’ll give you an
explanation of where to look for the collections that have been moved, in hopes
that fewer people will be lost while looking for their favorite books.
The library’s large print book collection is well-used, and
it hasn’t been in the most user-friendly spot for the past few years: on low
shelves behind the computers. You’ll
find the large print books now on full-height shelves along the back wall of
the library, behind the regular adult fiction.
We even managed to keep them up off of the bottom shelf, for less
bending to reach books.
You’ll find the adult paperback collection now on the short
shelves where the large print books had been.
This places them in a more visible spot, instead of hiding in the back
corner of the library.
In the coming weeks, we’ll move the reference books to the
tall shelf behind the paperbacks. We
don’t have many reference books anymore, but sometimes people need to consult things
like a book of quotations, a concordance, or a dictionary. We keep a small
selection of these books in the library without making them available for check
out.
The oversized books will move along with reference; these
are unusually tall books that don’t fit on regular library shelves. Moving both of those will give the adult
nonfiction section just a bit more room.
All of this rearranging has happened along with removing
books that haven’t been checked out in a few years, the difficult but necessary
thing that must happen in order for the library to add newly published
books. The public will have an
opportunity to buy some of these, among all of the books offered at the Friends
of the Library book sale on Saturday, November 16.
So if you go looking for the large print books or the paperbacks,
what kinds of things might you find? The
Litchfield library gets two westerns, two mysteries, and two books that can be
described as “gentle reads” in large print automatically every month. We’ve found that our large print readers
especially like those kinds of books.
We also get some of the most in-demand titles in large print
as they are needed. For example, the
library has “Searching for Syvlie Lee” by Jean Kwok, a Chinese-American family
drama about a woman who goes missing in the Netherlands and her sister who goes
looking for her, discovering family secrets in the process.
One of our most recent large print westerns is “Hang Them
Slowly” by William W. Johnstone with J. A. Johnstone. William Johnstone died in 2004, but his niece
is continuing his popular series. This
new addition to the Range Detectives series finds two undercover detectives
posing as cowboys getting caught up in a Montana range war.
As far as paperbacks, one of the newest additions is “The
Wallflower Wager” by Tessa Dare. The
latest in Dare’s “Girl Meets Duke” regency romance series features an
aristocratic spinster who rescues every lost or wounded animal she finds. Her “wealthy and ruthless” new neighbor
insists she get rid of the menagerie, so she enlists him to find homes for the
creatures.
You can find little paperback or big large-print editions of
many books at the library. If Litchfield
Library doesn’t have the format you want, ask staff to find out for you whether
the publisher has printed that kind of edition and if we can order it from
another library. As always, there’s no
charge to request books from other libraries throughout Minnesota.
