Notebook: (2) Borrower and a Lender Be

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

May 2020, librarians and booksellers from Lewes Public Library and Browseabout Books in Delaware deliver books out of the back of their cars to homebound kids, following the school bus bringing free lunch. (Librarian and bookseller show up wearing the same book-themed shoes!) See #KeepCapeReading

Read Part One of this post here!
Fortunately, the combative rhetoric around library e-book lending and pricing does not seem to filter down at all to the layer of the bookseller and librarian, where collaboration can be ample and affectionate, even moreso since the crisis of 2020. As booksellers more and more advocate for their profession as a public good in addition to a (perhaps fatally flawed) retail mechanism, they rely on many of the same cases as libraries do for their value to civic life: both are out in communities doing the work of literacy and informedness, they provide the sort of “social infrastructure” that writers like Eric Klinenberg (Palaces of the People) and James and Deborah Fallows (Our Town) have found to be restorative to social cohesion and civic well-being, as well as stewarding reading itself. And many libraries and booksellers have in fact found wonderful individual partnerships.