A Reprise

This should sound familiar because it is, as it should be.
When I first wrote it, I called it:

41.5243° North, 72.0736° West

The Friends of Otis Library hold their Fall Book Sale this weekend as part of National Friends of Library Week. Despite my basement now having almost as many books as the Otis Library has in theirs (as my loving and lovely spouse has repeatedly pointed out), I’ll be on the hunt for (even) more books because we help the library when we support the book sale. 

As a kid, I grew up reading Tom Swift. His adventures were my dessert, so to speak as a reward for 'real reading' that we did in my parents' house after we came home from school and had finished our homework.

Our father was a teacher and our house was filled with newspapers, magazines but most especially books. I got my own library card for my seventh birthday. The sense of power it gave me was remarkable and something I can still very vividly recall. 

That first library card was my passport to anywhere and everywhere in the world anytime I wanted to go. My parents even got me a wallet to put it in even though I was a decade away from having anything else to keep it company.

No longer did I have to plead with my Mom when she was checking out books from the library or try (and usually fail) to negotiate with my dad along the lines of 'for every Sir Walter Scoot and Ivanhoe and Mark Twain and "Connecticut Yankee," I can also have a Chip Hilton or a Hardy Boys book.'

I know it sounds like "back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth" to anyone who's come of age in our current Converged and Connected World of non-stop noise and news but there really was a time when downloading a book to read meant using a step stool in the library to reach a book on a high shelf.

If you have a library card from the Otis Library, you don't need me to tell you about all the places you can go in terms of materials to check out and enjoy, be it music on compact discs feature-length movies, and of course every manner of book imaginable.

Rows of treasure stacked (nearly) to the ceiling

But this weekend, actually, starting Friday, you don't even have to have a library card because it's the Friends of Otis Library Semi-Annual Book Sale, held in the basement of the library, open to everyone.

It's a great fundraiser for the library and it gets bigger and better every time it's held.  As I said, it starts on Friday morning with an early bird hour from 9 until 10, which will cost $10 to get a first look at all the treasures.

Officially the sale runs from 10 until 3 on Friday, from 9 until 2 on Saturday, and on Sunday from noon until 3 as your last chance to get huge bargains, and, I'd hope, enough reading material to get you to the spring sale. See you there?

-bill kenny