The shelving dilemna

Dear Library Staff:



As you know the upstairs shelving, all our adult fiction and non fiction, has grown tight.  One can hardly fit a new book in up there without twisting a shoulder in the effort. There are a number of reasons for this problem.

1. People just don't check out books like they used to, what with all their really cool, um, portable phones they have instead.

2. We keep chipping away at our available shelving space in order to sneak in makerspace areas, free dental service areas, circus acrobat classes, and lounge areas for all our extremely tired library patrons. And they sure are exhausted!

3. We keep buying new books, and the more we buy the more they make to sell us, which we simply cannot resist!

4. The book market is flooded, it's a buyer's market, and it's no longer worth people's effort to steal anything from our collection anymore.



We have employed multiple solutions to the problem of our disappearing available shelving.

1. Kill lists, where we print off the name of all the books that haven't been checked out in a year and relocate them to a couch factory.

2. Machine book processing, which not only saves staff time, but causes the occasional book to get eaten.

3. Extended check out periods. Did you know that officially starting on January 1, the new check out period for most items will be extended to seven years? Some of these books really do take a while to get through.


Nevertheless our methods to free up shelving, as you can easily see upstairs right now, have not been effective enough. That is why, starting next week, we are raising the stakes. Under the presumption that anything still on our shelves is definitionally unwanted, we will be weeding everything on the shelf at our library. So if there's anything you'd rather not see weeded from our collection I suggest you check it out this week and store it in your own house.

Do please bring it back though by the end of 2027.



Thank you,




The Library Manangement