Book drives are good, in the way that fresh-baked cookies and Norman Rockwell paintings are good. There’s a sense of community spirit that book drives seem to stir in people, and as the freshly elected leader of a new volunteer group in my small desert town, I was looking for an easy project for us to start with.
Good Intentions
I sat at a table with a half dozen or so of my neighbors, and we brainstormed around our vaguely optimistic mission of “making our community better.” Someone suggested that we could organize a book drive for our local library branch, and I latched on to that idea over suggestions of a Valentine’s Day dance or roadside trash clean-ups. Book drives are a low risk, high impact project and basically foolproof! A book drive is always a good idea, I told myself, and I had no reason to doubt it.
To the group, I pitched that a book drive would help our organization build connections in the community and support our severely underfunded library branch. People in attendance largely agreed, although none of them used the library themselves. Undeterred, I listened as volunteers talked about the logistics for a book drive.
One volunteer, Dolly, offered the use of her truck. Brenda offered space in her local business for people to drop off books. I would make a flyer and coordinate with the local library staff. I envisioned that we would collect enough books to fill Dolly’s truck, high-five a librarian, and call it a day.
Five years later, I can honestly say that I had a lot to learn about book drives.
Planning for Success
As our group continued to iron out the details, obstacles began to emerge. Janet, a long-time resident of our town asked, “Who is going to pick up the books? That could be a lot of work, and a lot of commitment for people.”
I nodded my head and agreed, “That’s a good point. I don’t want anyone to commit to more than they’re comfortable with. We’ll have space for people to drop off books at Brenda’s business which should help. I also have time to shuttle books if it’s needed.”
I was struggling to understand Janet’s concern, considering we lived in a small, rural community of 5,000 people. I imagined a best-case scenario with maybe a dozen trips between local drop off points and the library, all of which were within two miles from each other. No big deal.
Drop-off spots for books were thoughtfully chosen, coordinated with local businesses, and clearly displayed on a flyer, which was distributed throughout our small community. The idea was that people would see the flyer, round up their books, and drop them off at a partnering business. I, or another volunteer, would check on these locations once a week or so and transfer books to the library as needed.
You may know about what happened next, but at the time, I did not.
The Books Start Rolling In
I was unprepared for the deluge of phone calls that came in. I heard from people who had come to own — for reasons often unbeknownst to themselves — mountains of books often in varying states of mildew and disrepair. It seemed like everybody had a reason why they couldn’t just take their books to one of the convenient drop off locations on the flyer. It hadn’t occurred to me that if they could drop their books off somewhere, they probably would have by now.
Boxes full of books accumulated at an alarming rate, filling space in my living room, spare room, car, and kitchen. This is great! This is exactly what we intended to do! We’re helping the library! And kids! These are the things I thought to myself as I carved paths through the boxes to navigate my home.
Our library branch quickly ran out of space to hold the books while library staff sorted through them. In my defense, I had communicated with the librarian, Sarah, during the planning phases of the drive, and they were thrilled that we wanted to collect book donations for them. None of us had any idea we would collect thousands of books. Except, perhaps, for Janet.
Sorting the Books
Eventually, I learned how to say no to incoming donations. But not before I had collected books by the car load from garages, storage containers, people’s dead relative’s houses, porches, and I think I’ve blocked out a few book-related memories. I imagined that I was a superhero, rescuing books to give them new life. I was supporting the library, dammit, and that’s like supporting knowledge itself. I wondered why more people don’t get involved in their communities.
Now that our volunteer group had collected the book donations, the next step for the library staff was sorting through the boxes. Some books could be cataloged (very few, it turns out were in good enough shape for this). Other books could be sold by the Friends of the Library sale (everything else, mostly). I learned that sales from these books were an important income stream, allowing the library staff to buy items like arts and craft supplies and prizes for children.
The library staff were very excited about this sudden windfall of donations, but they wondered, is there any way the books could stop coming in for a while? And also, it would be great if I could sort them first. Their branch was overwhelmed with donations, and it was becoming a fire hazard.
The boxes of books languished in my house, with one or two boxes a month going to the library. The volunteer group I was leading had moved on to organizing summer movie nights, and I found myself facing an immovable blockade of boxes in every direction. I maintained a militant optimism about the affair, muttering to myself through gritted teeth, I’m glad to have these books. I’m glad to be helping. I’m glad for this opportunity.
Getting Friendly with the Library
About a year after kicking off the book drive, I realized that I was going to have to do something about the situation in my house. By that point, I had become friendly with the local library staff, and had learned that their local Friends of the Library volunteer group was nonexistent. This is what was taking so long for the library to process the donated books; there was no local apparatus to actually accept these donations, sort them, shelve them (on their special “for sale” shelf), collect, and then spend the money. The library staff had been doing this (they weren’t supposed to, so please don’t tell anyone) and depositing the money into the Friends’ bank account.
That meant, in order to process these donations more quickly, the library needed a functioning Friends of the Library. Sarah explained this to me, and even as I listened and nodded my head, I was in total denial about what I was signing myself up for.
The truth is that I never wanted to volunteer at the library. Even if I did, I was still the president of a volunteer group that was going through its own share of dysfunction at the time. Sure, I definitely support the Friends of the Library, but in a hypothetical way rather than an in-person kind of way. Realistically, I didn’t have the time or capacity for any additional commitments. I did not want to be in charge of the Friends of the Library.
That’s what happened, though. I showed up to what Sarah said was an informal meeting of interested volunteers. She was very proud to have assembled these people. The minimum needed for the Friends to operate, she said, and I was honestly impressed. I had been asking my local contacts to find volunteers for the Friends, but had not been able to rustle up any interest, so she had that on me.
The other two meeting attendees were very nice people. One, James, was retired and he wanted to talk about the age of the Earth in Biblical terms. He was voted as the treasurer. The other, Mary, was also retired, and she was more interested in her love life than the meeting agenda. I didn’t blame her, honestly.
The Only Way Out is Through
I was feeling as though I’d swallowed a fly. A book drive had turned into a hoarder-style situation in my house, which resulting in me leading the local Friends of the Library. I was desperate at this point, more than a year since starting this effort, to do whatever it took to get the books out of my life.
I thought that would be a Friends of the Library book sale. Other library branches had sales, so we could, too. We would have tables set up at the library for a week, bags for people to fill, and we would sell a whole lot of books. It would be great.
Mary was very supportive of this idea, although we’d have to plan around her dates. James spent some of the Friends’ donation money on a magazine subscription that I think he meant for the library but had mailed to his house instead, and then mysteriously disappeared before it could be sorted out. I slogged ahead, dogged but determined.
We had the books. We picked a date. I even got paper bags for the book sale donated from the local grocery store manager who was notorious for his stinginess. It felt like a good sign. Mary was going to bring table cloths. What more did we need?
Liability insurance. That’s the answer to that question, and it’s something that we didn’t have. Each Friends of the Library group is associated with one library branch and is an individually incorporated nonprofit organization. This meant that our local group had to hold its own insurance. As I pulled myself through this process, I quickly learned that our local library branch was part of the county system, but our branch’s Friends group was not part of any larger entity. The volunteers stood alone.
Tapping Out
I never learned how a group purchases liability insurance when it doesn’t have money in its bank account to afford insurance. I had spent the last month chasing down the Friend’s check book from a previous volunteer who was going through a tough divorce, who had handed it off to another former volunteer, who I also knew, but whose wife wasn’t doing well. I found the check book, the absence of which had become a major hurdle in moving the Friends forward, and I delivered it to the library with the last of my effort and energy. I was done.
The book drive was one of the first projects the volunteer group did, and the books outlasted my time with the group. Even after I had stepped aside from the Friends and the community volunteer group, which was a hard and painful process, I had to deal with books. The remaining twenty or so boxes had managed to make their way into my neighbor’s garage, and while he didn’t care, I needed to be done with them.
What was supposed to be an easy exercise in civic engagement and “being the change” turned into a lesson about local government, community, and myself that I hadn’t set out to learn. As the drive wore on, I found myself feeling increasingly angry; I was angry at all the people who called and wanted me to pick up their books, I was angry at myself for letting the situation escalate, I was angry at the library for being too small and poorly funded. I felt betrayed. I thought I knew something about the world, and if a book drive isn’t what it seems, then what is there left to trust?
Wrapping up the book drive was as painful as anything I’ve done. The vulnerability I showed with the kind library staff was thankfully received with grace and care. They moved internal mountains to find space to store the remaining books. Sarah proudly told me how the branch’s Friends organization was being merged with a branch fifteen miles away, so now they could have a sale!
I went home and cried. I felt like such a failure. The thousands of books we had collected were finally at their destination, freed from the shackles of their boxes, crates, dust, and darkness. They were going to be read! Or, at least, sold and moved to different basements. The circle of life. It was very hard to feel relief at the end.
It Wasn’t Over Yet
Strangely, I had the chance to follow up with the book drive several years later when I was hired as a library aide at that same local library branch. Part of my training included a day spent in the county’s library headquarters, and I was utterly mortified when a staff member showed a huge section of floor with suspiciously familiar boxes of boxes. She explained that most county library branches no longer accepted donations as they had been backed up in that department for years. I tried very hard to not meet the eyes of the two workers who stood over tables, unboxing and flipping through pages of old books.
The library staff member explained that most book donations were basically useless, with most of them going to the dumpster. She shared some horror stories with our trainee group about books full of bugs or mold to underscore her point, and we moved on with the tour.
It was odd to hear the library administration speak so disparagingly about book donations. I can see the frustration with going through piles of battered and bruised books, but for our cash-strapped library branches, those books represent a much needed source of income when they’re sold on the Friends of the Library shelves. I understand that it takes time and resources to sort through the donations, but surely there’s got to be some benefit?
What I thought had been my own personal failure with the book drive was actually a series of failures, many of them outside of myself.
Seeing the Systems
Mojave is largely defined by scarcity. For many of my neighbors, there’s not enough food, water, housing, or safety. Our schools lack basic supplies, and in our library branches, many of the shelves are empty. Living in a desert doesn’t help to ease the ever present sense of not enough.
The people who opened their homes and bookshelves to me were not under the impression they were donating garbage to the library. They held onto these books in their homes and basements because they thought they were important; they saw their old books as a resource, and the book drive was a way for them to give back to their community, even if they were going to be in a food bank line themselves later that day.
The people giving me their books would often go through them with me; brushing the dust off the covers as they told me the story of how that book came to be theirs. When they turned those books over to me, they really believed they were helping in a meaningful way. I did, too.
The hands that received these books did not cradle them with such care. Often, donations were held by fingertips at arm’s length while staff at the county’s library headquarters scoffed at the poor condition. I do see their point; mildewy home repair books from the 1980’s really aren’t that useful to a library that is trying to maintain a current and relevant collection.
But still, the disconnect troubles me. The library is a unique institution, one that is fundamental to our basic ideas about community and democracy. A community depends on the services and resources that flow outward from its library, and the library depends on the people that flow into it. How can this flow happen when the same books are seen from one side as an important resource that should be shared, and from the other, a pile of trash that needs to go to the dumpster?
Putting those books in the dumpster makes sense, if the end goal is to improve profit margins and reduce waste. Donations are expensive to process, and empty shelves cost less to maintain than shelves full of old, dusty books. Is that the best way to run a library, though?
People here didn’t have nice, new books to donate or much money to contribute. They didn’t have the time or interest to sit in meetings for the Friends of the Library and talk about liability insurance. They just wanted to give what they had to enrich a community space.
The problem isn’t in the community’s moth-eaten offerings, or even the library staff’s understandable resistance. The problem is how we fit communities and institutions to each other, and why. If the most important thing is profitability, we’ll make certain choices (like throwing away donations and having empty library shelves), but if the most important thing is connecting people with resources and a shared community space, then maybe things would look a little differently. I wonder how much more we could have done if the library had the structure, systems, and resources to meet the community where we were at, boxes of old books and all?
More Books, Fewer Drives
With the book drive, our volunteer group tried to do the right thing. What we did however, was take resources that were already existing throughout the community and give them to an institution that effectively throttled the mobility and reach of those resources.
Book drives have a much different meaning for me these days. If I had the chance to do it again, I might skip the library entirely and instead partner with a wider array of community members to seed the area with books. We could place books in laundromats, barber shops and salons, and every waiting room in the area. Anyone who wanted one could have a free little library exchange box in their yard. Instead of funneling books from lots of places into just one place, why not redistribute them to even more locations?
With a half dozen volunteers, our group inspired a community to move an avalanche of books to support our library. It was an extraordinary effort that almost broke our library system and did break a few things inside myself. Even still, I can’t help but to be awed by people and what we can accomplish. I wonder what will happen when we realize that we have this power, right now, to be the solutions to even our most pressing problems. We are our most tremendous resource, and when we realize that, I don’t think anything will be able to stop us.
Joyce Nash Writes 