My first “real” job, one that wasn’t working for family or friends of the family for a little bit of cash, was as a “library page” for the local county library system. It wasn’t much. Age 13-14. Limited to under 20 hours a week. The minimum wage back when that was $3.85/hr. I was lucky to be able to put in 10-15 hours a week during school and only “maxed out” on hours in the summer when the regular staff took vacations. The pay was so paltry that I could cash my paper check downstairs out of the circulation desk’s cash register and pocket, after taxes, my typical weekly $30-$40, which was still big money to me.
The job was mostly grunt work. Shelving books. Emptying the night book return. Putting magazines in binders. Updating the card catalog– yes, with a manual typewriter and index cards.
Still, I loved it and was in awe of the library. It had been my home away from home after all, as I had often spent much of my free time there as a kid. You could even say I walked on at the tender age of 14 as a trained junior book tender, as I had pitched in before school each day in grades 3-6 at the school library and have the certificates of appreciation to prove it!
The thing is, the libraries of the 1980s are not the libraries of the 2020s.
As today’s readers are more inclined to use the facility for its free internet access or public computer bank, the institutions have slaughtered their increasingly unused book catalogs, emptying the shelves and selling them off for cheap.
Like 50 cents for paperbacks and $1 for hardbacks cheap. Further, as many of the books that end up at these sales are donated by the public who incorrectly think the library will turn around and add them to the collection, there are a lot of old books from private libraries that have seen little use over the years.
And the selection can get pretty niche…in my kind of niche
With no shame in my game, I have been frequenting my local area public libraries for sales and I can report that it is not a waste of time. It feeds my inner tsundoku, you could say.
When they come to take me away to the home, it will be from behind stacks of books.
As Kipling said, “A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition.”