You may already know that I work in an academic library. It can be a little bit dangerous as I will often read about a book and then discover that we own it. So, up to third floor, scan the shelves, find the book and voilá it ends up on my stack of books to read. We are constantly getting in new books. So many new books, as a matter of fact, that we are running out of room on the shelves to house them. This means one thing--the collection must be vigorously weeded. Now, I do understand why this needs to happen and it can be a very good thing as sometimes books do become dated. Surely we don't want to send students up to the shelves to browse books on topics where trends have changed significantly in the last few decades, so as to render them without much merit.
However, fiction is different (in my very humble opinion, that is). Authors and styles of writing come into and go out of vogue constantly. We have lots of books that are out of print, and who knows, maybe they deserve to be. Or maybe not, which is why publishers like Persephone Books pop up to bring these worthy books back into print so a new generation of readers can discover and appreciate them. The problem is, no one knows they're there. They sit quietly and unobtrusively on the shelves, all but forgotten. And it makes me shudder to think that some really worthwhile novel might be pulled from the collection and discarded because no one has checked it out for years and years.
So this is going to sound a little crazy, but I have this idea that I might be able to rescue a few of them by checking them out and putting them back into circulation. I'm not entirely sure what criteria will be used later this year to weed the fiction collection, but if a book has been circulated recently it will likely have a better chance of surviving the cut. Is this silly? If we weed a book, another library will likely still own it and I can always borrow it via interlibrary loan or find an inexpensive used copy online. How will I know about it, though. Now, I can, and do browse our stacks. I pull an interesting volume off the shelf and flip through it, wondering what story it has to tell. Is it an interesting one? Something I will be taken with and might happily lose myself in for hours and hours? I'm already reading E.M. Delafield's Gay Life and finding it surprisingly absorbing.
Now I have added to my stack Mary Borden's Three Pilgrims and a Tinker. There is actually a story behind this 'weeding of the library collection' story. I can't recall what I was looking for on Amazon--some book about World War I, I suspect. I spotted Mary Borden's The Forbidden Zone: A Nurse's Impression of the First World War and immediately decided it was something that I needed to look at, and did my library own it. Unfortunately no, but we do have two of her novels, so why don't I try one of them in the interim? Mary Borden was a wealthy American who had been living in England when WWI broke out. She set up a field hospital in France that she funded with her own money and The Forbidden Zone is about her first hand experiences in France. Perfect supplementary reading since I am on a WWI kick at the moment.
I haven't a clue what Three Pilgrims and a Tinker is about. A little surfing on the web has not aided me one bit, but I did come across this post by Dovegreyreader Scribbles where it is mentioned. Perhaps she has read it since writing her post? If she hasn't, maybe Agatha Christie did. DGR was touring Agatha's house and spotted the book on her bedroom bookshelves! It was published in 1924. So how's that for a story about this book? Doesn't it scream to be read now? It begins:
"The house stood in the middle of the village, and the village was on a hill in the middle of England. It appeared to be a very ordinary house, four good sandstone walls and a slate roof that did not leak, but let us be fair to it, it was a hunting-box and the stabling was first class. Everyone said so. Everyone in the country knew the house because of its stables. When you said--'Windside,' Woodthorpe, they said, 'Oh! yes, jolly good stabling,' congratulating you. The important thing is to do your horses well, your family doesn't matter."