🥇 Library Champion Newsletter #57 | Books influence us 💭
Library Champion,
👋 Welcome to our new subscribers! Glad to have you aboard
We are so excited to announce that we have new, more expanded hours:
Monday - 9:00 AM - 7:00 PM
Tuesday - 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Wednesday - 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Thursday - 9:00 AM - 7:00 PM
Friday - 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Saturday - 9:00 AM - 3:00 PM
Sunday - Closed
Online - 24/7/365 - visit our website.
The Juniata County Library will be closed Thursday, November 11 in observance of Veterans Day.
We will reopen at 9:00 am on Friday, November 12.
According to industry tracker NPD Bookscan, printed book sales have increased 13.2 percent from 2020 to 2021, and 21 percent from 2019 to 2021. “Usually a good year means going up maybe 3 or 4 percent,” says NPD books analyst Kristen McLean. “The growth that we saw last year and this year is pretty unprecedented.”
The pandemic has been what’s driving the growth in book sales. As global lockdowns began in March of 2020, sales of traditionally high-performing categories like self-help books and business books plummeted, while sales of educational books for home-bound kids and first aid books for emergency preppers took off.
In the summer and fall of 2020, during the George Floyd protests and leading up to the fall presidential election, adult books published and purchased on social justice and politics surged. This trend, however, seems to have spilled over into what books and ideas youth should be subjected to.
The rising focus on local school board decisions on pandemic-related subjects seems to have given space for parents to question what books students have access to or will be required to read. The underlining message here is that books matter. They contain ideas that can influence us.
Things seem to get nasty when it focuses on what ideas youth can be subjected to and the need to protect them. Protecting children is central to every culture and community. Children can almost be treated or seen as the property of the parents. But if children are the property of parents, what happens when they leave home and attend a public school or go into the workplace? They will share a space with children from different races, religions, ethnicities, economic backgrounds, sexualities, and any number of identity categories.
Once they enter those places, they become part of society and have social obligations. Schools and society also have obligations in seeing that your children grow up to be the kind of people who can peacefully co-exist with those others, no matter the differences between them.
Public libraries, like public schools, are for the public. They offer services and programs for the betterment of society. America is a pluralistic society (some areas more so than others.) This means that public libraries and public schools will have books, curriculum and ideas that vary.
This takes us to the role of parents. As you would tend to your yard because it is part of a community, you will also need to raise your children so that they can part of a community. Choosing which books they can read is an important role for parents. I appreciate seeing parents check what their kids bring to the desk to check out. They will look at the book cover, thumb through the pages and decide whether or not to borrow it. I have seen some parents allow their kids to borrow a book and then another parent will see that same book and put it back on the shelf. This happens because every family will vary in their values and approaches. We are happy to give families a wide array of books to choose from so that they can present to their children subjects and ideas. Our social obligations begin when we are very young and libraries can help our communities grow and prosper.
What I’m currently reading
The Last Place by Laura Lippman.
Click here or on the image below to follow my reading on Goodreads.
The Dark Hours (Bosch and Ballard book 4) by Michael Connelly (New adult fiction, mystery, detectives, and private investigations)
My favorite fiction author is releasing his second book in 2021. New Year’s Eve 2020 finds Detective Renée Ballard, a survivor of rape and Covid-19, in search of leads on the Midnight Men, a tag team of rapists who assaulted women on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve without leaving any forensic evidence behind. As usual in this stellar series, the path to the last act is paved with false leads, interdepartmental squabbles, and personal betrayals, and the structure sometimes sways in the breeze. But no one who follows Ballard and Bosch to the end will be disappointed.
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🥇The Lions support the library!
The Lion’s Club of Mifflintown are regular supporters of the Juniata County Library and we thank them for their donation of $450!
(from left to right: Andrew Winder of the Mifflintown Lion’s Club and Vince Giordano, director of the Juniata County Library)
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Thank you for being a library champion. You make a difference each day!
–Vince Giordano
Librarian and Director of the Juniata County Library.
P.S.- You don’t need to make an account or jump through any hoops to be a library champion. I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true. You can make this happen in less than a minute. Just click here.