Five Great Christmas Gifts for Librarians

1. Avoid feeding the librarian bleu cheese, or the book equivalent. There’s something about blue- green mold on food or books that makes us lose our appetites. It’s a funny thing about books getting wet, even when you blow them dry with a hair dryer, we still know they were wet once. Librarians may not be omniscient, but we know a few things. Dried books still mold, the glue dissolves, the pages fall out. So as a Christmas gift to all librarians please, don’t go surfing, water skiing, or bathe with your library books. We can’t keep a book that’s been water damaged. It has to be replaced. Even though we have a science club, we try not to have mold-growing experiments going on the shelves. So, please, if a book gets wet, tell us. Yes, we will ask you to pay for it, but isn’t that better than causing the librarians to curse and have mini-strokes when they find moldy books on the shelves?

2. Promise to not use your library books as trivets. Here’s another funny thing, mylar covers (the little plastic covers we put on books) melt. The big melted hole in the mylar cover is usually a dead give away that you’ve been setting hot pans on your library books. Replacing the covers isn’t impossible, but usually they are glued on, which means we may tear the book when we replace it. So please, buy yourself a trivet or pot holder for Christmas. We’ll consider it a personal gift to the librarians.

3. Don’t use library DVDs or CDs as dinner plates, Frisbees, or other disk shaped items. We don’t mind the occasional fingerprint or even small scratch. Usually we can clean those off, or resurface the disk. But DVDs that are returned with spaghetti sauce on them, or mud, or paint, really get us wondering. Although spaghetti sauce and mud will wash off (we just create some really great stories about how it got there), the paint doesn’t. That means the DVD has to be replaced. So feel free to put the CDs and DVDs in the player, but as a Christmas present to librarians everywhere, please don’t use them as Frisbees, dinner plates, or shovels.

4. Buy yourself a book mark for Christmas instead of turning down the corners of the page to mark your place. There’s no doubt about it. Librarians are a persnickety lot. We like everything perfect. We like a place for everything and everything in its place. We like books to last and stay looking clean and new. Every time the corner of a page gets turned down, it makes a crease and weakens the page. Eventually the corner will tear off and the book, although still readable is less than pristine. Even though it’s an easy way to mark your page and it doesn’t seem to be doing much harm, it drives librarians nuts! We have loads of bookmarks that we will give you for free. You can get a bookmark with our hours, or one with a story courtesy of the Homer Writers’ group. We have bookmarks about OverDrive, the downloadable audio system, and book marks with animals on them. We have bookmarks from the summer reading program and lost and found bookmarks that were left in books. So get a bookmark for Christmas and don’t turn down the corners of the pages!

5. Take a vow to never crack the spine of another book. Books just aren’t made like they used to be. The pages aren’t sewn in. There’s no reinforcement other than glue. If you’re the first one to read it, it’s not going to lay flat, so you can eat dinner and read with no hands. Forcing the spine open so that the book lays flat cracks the glue, makes the pages fall out, and means the book will need to be replaced soon. Lately we have books falling apart after only five or six readings. But if it’s a copy of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, there are a lot more than six people who want to read it. So treat the book and its spine with respect. It needs to last a long, long time. We will all love you for it. And it will be one of the nicest gifts you can give all librarians, everywhere.