Today's a sad day. My church has decided it no longer needs a church library. The good news is that I've managed to get a couple of carloads of free books. The bad news is at least one whole dumpster's worth of books got thrown out, and I didn't even get to look at any of those.
It's another sad reminder that not that many people are reading anymore. And it's a crying shame.Not just for the entertainment that -at it's worst- is better than most of the stuff on TV; but also for the fact that a lot of people in the church today have questions about what they believe, or why, and the answers have been molding away in the church library (well, more mildew than mold, but...)
Most of the people in the church didn't even know we had a church library either. I've been thinking for a while about doing reviews on this blog. On the one hand, everybody reviews books. On the other, I obviously need more ideas for content, and perhaps someone reads my blog (I know, I'm crazy...) that doesn't read any of the others. So, in the near-future, look for mini-reviews for books I love, and links to some of those other sites when they review a book I love too.
Oh man, as a book hoarder myself, that made me so very sad. For one thing, church libraries often have valuable first editions of rare books that would be worth a nice chunk of cash, had they bothered to sell them. It's too bad the church didn't tell people they had a library so it got used more often.
ReplyDeleteBut just ... wow. What kinds of books did they throw out?
All kinds of stuff. I rescued almost the whole Cherry Ames series, a ton of biographies, lots of novels from around the late 1800's and 1900's, a G.A. Henty book (if anyone has boys and has trouble getting them to like history, look these up! They're historical fiction written in the 1800's).
ReplyDeleteI also rescued an encyclopedia (1956 World Book. Some say it's out of date, but for historical events, they don't change, and it's valuable to have a different view than the currently held one on said events. Also, I'm going to homeschool and want to make sure my kids can research the old fashioned way too), tons of theology books, a handful of Hardy Boys and Tom Swift Jr books.
They had a Family Illustrated Bible Encyclopedia too, but sadly I didn't get to it in time. :(
Wow, that is a sacrilege. I simply can't understand people who simply throw things away to "clean." I'm sure such people have a lot of good personality elements that I don't have (like, maybe just a little of organization...), but to me, throwing away anything old but still useful is a shame. I was sad to see a school throw away long-obsolete desktop PCs; throwing away old books is even much worse.
ReplyDelete