Recently Returned Books

Gabbert, Elisa,” Recently Returned Books (Letters of Recommendation), New York Times Magazine, Sept. 9, 2018, pp 20-21.

My favorite spot in my local library — the central branch in Denver — is not the nook for new releases; not the holds room, where one or two titles are usually waiting for me; not the little used-book shop, full of cheap classics for sale; and not the fiction stacks on the second floor, though I visit all those areas frequently.  It’s a shelf near the Borrower Services desk bearing a laminated sign that reads RECENTLY RETURNED
…

The “recently returned” shelf is perhaps the subtlest most indirect way of advising readers, nudging them towards what others in the community are reading — an index of local interests, a a record of your neighbor’s whims.

COMMENT

     The most charming thing about this essay is how the author experiences the returned book shelf as a community connection. She imagines other people reading the books and wonders if they might be personal friends. I wonder if the librarians ever thought of it that way? The shelf is probably just there so that librarians can locate books in transit and so that shelvers can sort them onto carts.  

     As far as selecting what to read, the author lists her favorite ways to find books, none of which are keyword searching in an online catalog which is how librarians think people find books.

      I used to work with a library administrator who fancied  himself a prescient futurist. He loved to talk about how book circulation is going down and how "useless" books should be weeded so that shelf space could be put to “better” use. The circulation statistics he cited were deeply flawed, but never mind. He was utterly convinced that digital reading was The Future and that libraries should therefore purchase everything on clunky ebook platforms (the kind that will become instantly obsolete if technology ever really does replace print). 

    This administrator seemed to believe that book circulation arises from internal information needs of individual readers. He could never quite grasp that librarians (and booksellers) can persuade people to check out more books simply by putting more books in front of them. Likewise, librarians can suppress circulation by hiding books in onsite storage and remote repositories where nobody will ever stumble across them.