Even though the building has been closed, work has been continuing in the library. Books have been bought. People have requested books which we have mailed to them. Books have been returned! Books have been moved around.
The library shelves had become fuller and fuller so some serious weeding was called for. I hated to get rid of many of the books, but since no one had checked out that book on existentialism since the 1970s it was obviously past time for it to go. The same went for much of the children's collection. When I started as Plymouth Librarian in September of 2006, most of the books that were being checked out were children's books. By the onset of the pandemic, the number of church families with children had dropped significantly. It had been a few years since any of the children's books had been checked out. I reluctantly discarded many of them, donating them to teachers for their classroom collections or to other libraries. I am retaining a core collection of the more timeless books in case the Church's demographics change.
While the interest in the children's collection was waning, the call for more adult titles was increasing. Where to put them all? The library wasn't going to magically grow so, with the help of Library Committee member, Melony Joyce, we have been moving books and changing the positioning of the shelving. Once the library is open again, you won't have to stand on your tippy-toes or get down on your hands and knees to reach the book you are looking for.
The Library has also implemented the Plymouth Reads program which will continue in the autumn with Austin Channing Brown's I'm Still Here. And, of course, there are the weekly blog articles!
Here are some of the new books that have been added to Plymouth Library's collection this summer:
The NRA : the unauthorized history / Smyth, Frank
Holy envy : finding God in the faith of others / Taylor, Barbara Brown,
You can't be neutral on a moving train : a personal history / Zinn, Howard,
The new cosmic story : inside our awakening universe / Haught, John F.,
Please hold: Poems/ Nelson, Muriel
Threat to democracy : the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s : a warning from history / Gordon, Linda,
Amnesty : a novel / Adiga, Aravind,
Catch and kill : lies, spies, and a conspiracy to protect predators / Farrow, Ronan,
Transcendence : how humans evolved through fire, language, beauty, and time / Vince, Gaia,
The enchanted hour : the miraculous power of reading aloud in the age of distraction / Gurdon, Meghan Cox,
Time : your journey to a slower, richer, more fulfilling way of life / Rowan, Julia,
Feminism in minutes / Weber, Shannon.
The faithful spy : Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the plot to kill Hitler / Hendrix, John,
Life and times of Frederick Douglass / Douglass, Frederick,
Partings : how Judaism and Christianity became two
6 billion others : portraits of humanity from around the world / Arthus-Bertrand, Yann.
The gift of anger : And other lessons from my grandfather Mahatma Gandhi / Gandhi, Arun,
The secret therapy of trees / Mencagli, Marco,
The midnight library / Haig, Matt,
My Unforgotten Seattle/ Chew, Ron
Mystics & miracles : true stories of lives touched by God / Ghezzi, Bert.
The smell of fresh rain : the unexpected pleasures of our most elusive sense / Shaw, Barney,
Crazy brave : a memoir / Harjo, Joy,
Consolations : the solace, nourishment and underlying meaning of everyday words / Whyte, David,
The hill we climb : an inaugural poem for the country / Gorman, Amanda,
Faith and wisdom in science / McLeish, Tom,
A bigger table : building messy, authentic, and hopeful spiritual community / Pavlovitz, John,
Spirituality of the Psalms / Brueggemann, Walter.
25 Sugarland Road : letters of love and war, 1943-1945 / Bentley, Judith McBride
Four hundred souls : a community history of African America, 1619-2019
The guarded gate : bigotry, eugenics, and the law that kept two generations of Jews, Italians, and other European immigrants out of America / Okrent, Daniel,