Altamont Library Notes for Wednesday, March 3, 2021

Last Monday, I opened our outside dropbox and pulled out all of the library materials that were returned over the weekend, and found something that I wasn’t expecting: vinyl record albums. Like LPs.

What’s more, they were stamped as having come from the Altamont Free Library. Now, we don’t currently loan albums. The last time I remember seeing LPs in a library, it was the mid-1990s and I was devastated that my local library had gotten rid of their vinyl collection just as I was discovering LPs.

Now, vinyl is enjoying a resurgence in popularity, as it seems to do every decade or so, but these were not new LPs. We don’t have borrower records from decades ago, so we can’t know when was the last time they were checked out, but it looks like at least one of them was added to the library collection in 1967.

In the past, when things like this have come back, which happens from time to time, I would go on social media and make a joke about needing a scientific calculator to total up the overdue fines, but I’m going to resist the temptation this time.

See, for a lot of people, and especially a lot of young people, having a late library book or movie causes a lot of anxiety and fear. Some people worry that keeping a book out too long means that they’ve done something wrong. You haven’t.

Some people worry that they’ll have to pay some outrageous overdue fines if they bring something back late. You won’t. Our overdue fines are capped at $5 per item, and it takes almost two months to get that high.

Even better, our children’s and young-adult books don’t have any overdue fines at all! As long as they come back, you won’t have to pay anything at all. If the item is lost, you will have to pay for it to be replaced before you’re able to check out again but, if you have trouble with that, let us know and we can work something out.

Finally, some people — our younger friends especially — might worry that the librarians will be angry with them if they have overdues. We really, really won’t.

Here’s a story about me: I remember being about 11 years old and finding out that my favorite author at the time, John Bellairs, had died. Fearing for some reason that his books would be removed from the library now that he was dead, I checked one of my favorites out from the library and kept it

I knew I had done something wrong, and I was scared that the children’s librarian at my Huntington Public Library would be mad at me, so I stopped checking books out for a long time. Like, years.

I never stopped going to the library, because it still was my favorite place in the world, but I did stop going to the children’s section on the second floor, preferring to hang out in the adult section where I felt that I wouldn’t be judged.

This was, perhaps, a double-edged sort of a thing, since I was exposed to books that I wouldn’t have come across otherwise, but I also lost access to what had been my favorite books, and to the little spaces that felt like they belonged to me — a heater under a window in the stacks that I would clamber onto and sit and read for what seemed like hours.

Worst of all, I carried a feeling of shame every time I entered that wonderful building.

If I had just returned that book, or told the librarian about what the book meant to me, if I could have found the words to describe my sadness at the death of a person I’d never met, or been able to tell an adult that I was just struggling to mentally process the idea of mortality on something like a mature level, I could have let go of my burden and regained that little bit of home away from home.

But I didn’t, and I’m still sad about it to this day.

Because of all of that, one of the projects of my career as a librarian is to decouple feelings of anxiety and shame from people’s experience of their library. To be perfectly honest, I could care less about your overdue fines. Nobody should ever feel like they’re an outlaw in their library. Kids especially.

The most important thing for us is to make sure that everyone in our community gets a chance to enjoy the books and movies that we purchase. The sooner they come back, the sooner somebody else can enjoy them. That’s why we have (some) overdue fines. They’re not meant to punish people, they’re meant to serve as a gentle reminder that someone else might be waiting for that item.

Ultimately, there’s enough to worry about in the world without the library causing people any more anxiety. So, to the folks who returned those vinyl LPs, THANK YOU!

If you’ve got something that you’ve held onto for too long, don’t worry. Just bring it back, or give us a call and we can work it out. And to the Schubert String Quartet in C Major, Opus 163 as performed by the Budapest Quartet featuring Benar Heifetz on cello, welcome home!