A Salute to Library Pages!!!

Our two-week annual booksale is now over and we are offering all the "leftovers" for free. I've uploaded some pictures of the messy remainders. We make only feeble attempts to bring order to the booksale and you can see how bad it gets at the finale.

This morning, as I was bemoaning the clutter, I was reminded of the 2007 bestseller by Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, which explored what would happen to the Earth if humans disappeared. If you're not familiar with that book's premise, it's that man-made structures and systems would quickly degenerate if people weren't there to maintain them and that nature would quickly take over. There was a similarly-themed documentary on The History Channel this year called "Life Without People." Wow, I thought, this same phenomenon happens on a smaller scale in our own library!

Library pages are the often-unsung heroes who reshelve all returned materials and keep our dozens of stacks and bookshelves in near-perfect Dewey Decimal or alphabetical order so we can all find what we're looking for. Our booksale started out looking like this:

but, in just a fortnight, degenerated into this:

Yes it may be true that librarians can obsess about keeping order, but without our constant attention to where items are located, chaos would soon reign. The library would have few satisfied customers if our 100,000+ books looked like those remnants in the booksale! So here's to you Joanne, Sara and Kristen, our library's hard-working and dilgent pages who fight the never-ending battle against misshelving, book-tossing, and general unkemptness!