This is the Lawncrest branch of the Philadelphia Free Library.
This was my childhood happy place. We went every other week, up until junior high school, when we moved to an area with a less interesting library. Tragic, but I was also old enough to be able to buy books and my school had a good library, so I survived.
Kids had the same borrowing rules as adults: twelve books at a time. Twelve was never enough, so I nagged my mom until she let me have six of her borrows. Once I got older, I made it easy for the librarian and borrowed a dozen books from the kids' library and six from the adults.
Mom didn't care what I read, so long as I was reading, and the older I get, the more I appreciate that. I read some horribly inappropriate things - some of which have stayed with me to this day - but overall, it was a good thing.
But, I digress. Libraries are good things. And they're one of the last places on earth where we can go and not be expected to spend money. It's rare, that is. Unless you want to make copies, they don't want your money.
Do you frequent your local library? Have you ever asked your library to order a book you wanted to read? Did you know that all of my books - ebooks and paperbacks - are available for your library to order?
You can just ask your local librarian to order anything you want to read. Just give them the title and my name and they can look it up and order from their catalog. Often with ebooks, libraries don't even have to buy them, they can just make them available through library services like Hoopla or Libby and as the author, I will make a percentage every time the book is checked out. Win/win, right?
So that's it - that's how you can support authors you like without having to spend personal cash, which, we all know, is getting tighter and tighter these days. You might spend your book budget on gas for the car, so why not drive it to the library?
2 comments:
Sigh. I seldom make it to the local library; the need to return the books stresses me out, lol. But libraries were magical when I was a kid. I killed the whole summer reading chart in about two weeks...and the only reason it took two weeks was because of the six-book limit for kids.
We had two libraries in small towns near us; one was an actual Carnegie library; the other was a rather randomly laid out old building. Both have been replaced.
But if someone could bottle the smell of the old libraries...I'd put it in my house, lol.
I would love old library scent! What intrigues me now is that you can borrow ebooks and audio books without having to go in, and when they're due, they just disappear from your device. Much easier.
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