By the Book

By the Book is a delightful short story by Michael J. Farrell. I'm not going to review it - go read it yourself. It's in a collection called Life in the Universe from Stinging Fly Press.

The story dovetails nicely with the questions I've been asking professionally:

• What should we be weeding from a collection? 
• Why do patrons select the books they do? Why do researchers? 
• When is there enough? When is there too much?

My great grandmother liked reading Sienkiewicz. My father decided to reread some of the things she had read to him as a child. They were gone - weeded from the public library's collection because no one still reads Sienkeiwicz - Polish novels no longer are interesting. And no one's heard of them. And if they have, they can't find them because Polish spellings are so different from the way an English speaker would transliterate them. Should I at least try to find a copy and give it whirl for nostalgia's sake?

Finding and using seem to be tightly connected. Advertising, word of mouth, display, wandering the stacks. I read Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age, because I saw it on a prominent display at the public library. I read Britain's war machine : weapons, resources, and experts in the Second World War because I found it in the stacks while looking for something else. Should we take old uncirculated books and display them prominently, rather than send them to storage or off to the discard pile?