Pay it Forward - Library Style

We love donations! We covet them! We do happy dances when great things are gifted to us! We all gather round and ooh and ahh like a baby shower! We whisk them off to be added to our library collection for others to use ASAP!

However, these times are so exciting partially due to their infrequency. Similar to Christmas or birthdays, we don’t get to celebrate them as often as we’d like. We know you love to give us things, so here’s a quick guide to helping us to do more happy dances!

Things we do like – Bright, shiny, new things (hey, we’re all ladies here at FPL). Books that have been very gently used and have been published within the last 5 years are snatched up like great shoes on sale!

Things we don’t like – the messy or the ancient. If they have an odor about them, we usually don’t add them because it’s hard to make a book smell different without airing out every single page of the book. This is very time consuming and doesn’t always work (i.e. pet odors, mildew smell), so we have to really need the book in order to add it. Dirt on the cover can usually be dealt with, dirt on pages is worse, and food is virtually impossible, so those don’t end up in our collection.

The ancient – this encompasses things that are just very old, and mold. Mold on books can look like mildew, but it can also look like little brown or black spots on the top of the pages. This mold can be passed to the next book on the shelf, so we have to be very careful of books that have any sort of mold. These, we just won’t add, period. Some old books can be cool, most probably aren’t, and right now, we don’t have the staff or the volunteers to search records and the internet to see if all the old books we get are valuable, so most of those get passed over, too.

We know you love to give, and we like to get, so we can turn around and give to someone else, therefore, think of donations to the library as a classic pay-it-forward, and don’t give anything you wouldn’t want to get.