The kinds of donations we receive

One of my colleagues came back from the front desk of the library with a box of donations. They were beautiful, careful stacks of utterly pristine and glossy paperbacks of a Juvenile Fiction series. The complete set was there, all in sequential order.

"Aren't they amazing!" My colleague excitedly exclaimed. "They're in absolutely perfect condition! Maybe we should get them to a children's librarian. They'll want to add them to the collection right away!" This co-worker headed back to the front desk while I looked over the magnificent volumes. I laughed. These were books from more than 20 years ago. Any interest in the series had now been dead for a full decade. Nevertheless I understood:

We see bright, shiny and new books so rarely in our library. It's easy to be bedazzled and lose all perspective.

On receipt

I thought of an analogy for people who donate their books to the library and ask for a receipt. The other day in this space I was getting rather worked up over the donation receipts we give at the library I work at. I found that the pure and generous act of freely donating things for the benefit of the library is turned on its head by the donation receipt, and the gift is made into a transaction.

So picture this:

It is your birthday.

Happy birthday!

A casual friend, or maybe even just a warm acquaintance, comes to you with a little wrapped parcel. "I heard it was your birthday." They say. "And I thought I'd get you a little something."

You are touched. You open it up at their urging. Inside it really is a trifle, but it is so nice that they thought of you. You don't get many gifts any more and you're moved by the simple gesture. "Thank you so much!" You cry out, filled with warmth.

"You're welcome!" They say, moved in their own way by how touched you are. "Now will you just sign here that you received this gift? I'd like a record of this. Also, put down your email address. I think I can get something like a hundred shopper points for every one of these I give as a gift."

You're not so touched anymore, are you?

And so though I understand the reasoning, I am opposed to the tax deductible charitable gift. Yes, as a people we want to encourage charity, even, in a way, to subsidize it. But I say let's just let charity be charity and not a loophole, a scheme, or a prudent management tool.

But what do I know? I hardly donate anything. I mean, other than this blog, my great open gift to the world, for which I expect no remuneration. 

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it today. Please remember to sign my reader's receipt before you head off to check the weather. I need it for tax purposes. Thank you.




I have read this,



Signature: _____________________________________________________
                                 

Date: ___/___/______ 

Valuable donation receipt

The patrons come up to me at the front desk of the library with their little bags of paperback books to donate. Forgettable books in middling condition; street value of 11 cents.

"I would like to donate these books." They say proudly.

I am very appreciative. Eleven cents is eleven cents. They thought of us. They want us to be better, richer, stronger. They want us to prosper, and by extension they want literacy, reading, truth, art, and beauty to prosper. My warm heart goes out to them! "Oh thank you so much!" I cry. "Yes, we will add them to the collection if they are useful to us, which almost certainly they aren't. Or we will try to sell them for a few coins, which, eventually, add up over time. But whatever we do with these we honor your selfless generosity and love of the library."

"Can I get a donation receipt?" They ask. And my heart freezes.

Many of my co-workers regularly offer donation receipts to the people who donate items to us. It may even be the right thing to do. But I doubt that I've freely offered a single donation receipt in the last decade. I feel it cheapens the transaction. Are they donating out of the goodness of their souls or are they running a tax avoidance scheme? Some things are complicated, all shades of gray. But this one is straight up to me; without a receipt it's a gift, with a receipt it's a purchase. 

Without a receipt it is pure largess. It is a gift, an act of kindness.

With their receipt they get something, we get something, and neither of them are worth much.

Donaters

I have been looking through the donations we get at the library since I first started here. They're endlessly fascinating. But mostly they're fascinating in the way I might find rummaging through a junkyard fascinating. Finding something unique or wonderful or valuable is profoundly rare. What we mostly get is useless drek in a range of conditions that runs from "almost destroyed" all the way up to "it looks mint but if you examine it closely you can see there's something not quite perfect about it". That last analysis may seem a bit picky to you and I suppose you're right when it comes to evaluating a hardcover copy of Danielle Steele's Bittersweet, but makes more of a difference when I'm turning over a signed first edition copy of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. I've no doubt done the former many times. I've never done the latter. Perhaps I'm keeping in practice in an optimistic sort of way.

Yesterday we had an entire cart of donated CDs all gathered together. They were in excellent condition. But they were so awful and uninteresting that, to the detriment of this post, I can't recall a single title. Oh, I applied the titles to my brain, but they were so flat and dimensionless that they just dropped right off. Wait! Was there something by the Backstreet Boys? No, no, it was a Backstreet Boys like group. Does that help?

Anyway, looking over all of these CDs, plus poking around in two large sets of shelves full of forgotten nineties self help books, my 20 plus years of donation examinations finally produced a sudden, conclusive analysis:

Everyone with good taste is a hoarder.

Donation prayer

We are getting a lot of donations. The Friends of the Library seem to be gearing up to limit donations and I think the patrons, in their way, smell the blood in the water. So they've been loading up their SUVs with boxes of old books and racing over to generously donate them to us.

The classic rule of thumb for book donations is the more the person donating values them, the more they want receipts, thank yous, and to tell you how wonderful and valuable their books all are, the more utterly valueless their books will be.

Today I met a man at the back garage to collect his 700 or so books. He was downsizing, he said. It was the first of two deliveries, he said. It was a real wrench to get rid of these, he said. Some of these books were valuable antiques, he said. He didn't want to just sell them, but wanted to give them to us so we could get some really good use out of them. 

Uh oh.

It was 12 boxes of books that ultimately will cost the Friends of the Library more in getting rid of them than the small amount they can make from the very few salable ones. I think the man was a Minister. A lot of the books were from the seventies and eighties and had to do with things like "prayerwalking" and revitalizing your ministry.

As we put the last load on my two-wheeler the man sighed heavily and said "I sure wish I could keep all these books." 

And I thought "Oh man, I wish you could too."

Uh oh, who am I?

Yesterday afternoon I was out at the front desk with one of my pleasant co-workers. The horrifically smelly man, who we institutionally refuse to deal with in any way, came, as he does, to the front desk to use our phone to call a cab. This is a sometimes elaborate process because, I suspect, many cab companies and drivers refuse (I think understandably) to allow him into their vehicles. Also we have to burn the phone after he uses it, which is smoky, toxic, and time consuming, but totally worth it.

Anyway, as this gentleman was on the phone, dressed in his better set of grease and urine soaked togs, a woman came up to him and nicely handed him something. I believe it was a bill, though I could not see the denomination. The man thanked her and she left.

After the smelly man was cleared out, and we had dealt with the needs of a line of patrons, and the entire area had been cleaned in a 50-50 solution of carbolic acid, my co-worker turned to comment on events to me.

"Now I feel bad!" My co-worker exclaimed.

"Why?" I asked.

"That woman gave the man money. I feel guilty now, like I should give him something."

"Oh, don't feel guilty. You know what I was doing? I was sitting over here hating that woman for giving him anything at all."

Long time in library

We get a lot of donations here at the library. There are invariably several carts and shelves and boxes of unsorted donated books sitting in our back work room. While the regular shelving carts and public shelves of my library are more likely places to look if one is browsing for a good book to read, these donations tend to be more interesting, comical, apocryphal, historical, and just plain odd to look through. The donations are at their best for searching through materials without really wanting to read them. They tell the strange history of publishing and culture, they tell of book design, forgotten cultural trends, and in their strange smells, inscriptions, and brittle, stained conditions they even tell the stories of their buyers and owners.

But it was a fairly mundane cart full of donated, not very old, Science Fiction and Fantasy books that illuminated for me just how long I have been living in a library.

I have spent decades now in a library. I am deeply acquainted with a vast array of books and audio visual material. But I am familiar with all of it in a library context. So when I saw a cart full of Sci Fi and Fantasy books, many that I have read, something that you will no doubt understand as completely obvious occurred to me in a peculiar surprise. I looked at all these nice books that someone donated, and I thought:

Oh my god, people actually buy new books!

My dark predilection

Among our library regulars is a man who seems to have his share of problems. He carries around a collection of dirty bags filled with what are presumably all his belongings. He parks the bags on one of the comfy chairs in the fiction area for the whole day and sometimes tries to leave them overnight. He is the heaviest user of library hand sanitizer in the upper Midwest. He has had to be asked to put his shoes on a number of times. He's here every day and lingers as long as possible at closing time. 

He has not become endeared to me.

There are people in similar situations to his that I have become endeared to at this library, but no, not him.

This morning I was at the front desk and for whatever reason I received a lot of visits from the 40s to 70s demographic that like to come by for some light library business and much longer ritual chatting. One such gentleman, who I often talk about European travel with, was updating me on his plans. Then he said "You know that man with the bags upstairs?"

"Yes." I replied with faint trepidation.

"I feel so bad for him. I see him here all the time. I figure he's got to be homeless or something. So I put a ten dollar bill into one of his bags."

"Wow." I said, knowing I would never do anything like that in my life "That was incredibly kind of you."

He smiled the smile of the virtuous and went his way. I finished my stint at the front desk and went off to shelve in fiction. I worked my way, shelving, down the stacks and suddenly came upon a chair with all of that man's bags, sitting there, chilling out for the day. Our resident patron was there too, getting ready maybe for a shoeless doze.

I did not think to say "Hi." or "Do you need anything?" or "Can I get you some hand sanitizer?" or "Is everything going okay?"

No, what popped into my mind to say was "I'm sorry, but I dropped a ten dollar bill around here. Did you happen to see one?"

Letter to the McKnight Foundation

Dear McKnight Foundation:



I see your name bandied about town as one who grants... things. You are clearly a granter. I'm not entirely clear on how that all works, but it seems like you are sort of like a Fairy Godmother, or a genie in a bottle. And so I come to you, a supplicant, hat in hands, humbly hoping you will grant me my one wish:

I wish for three more wishes.

I'm just kidding. They say humor breaks the ice, and I would like us to have a warm, friendly relationship. But don't count that as one of my wishes!

You, as a granter, are probably quite used to people coming to you to ask for money. You might even be a bit tired of people always asking for money. So when I write you, all friendly and joking, you probably think "Uh oh. I bet he's going to ask for money."

First of all, I'd like to say our friendship comes first for me. That's the important thing. Second, I'm not asking for any money at this time, and probably not ever. I'm just asking for you to be my "safety" grant organization. You see, I'm 98% sure that I have received a MacArthur Fellowship. These are commonly known as "genius" grants, but the MacArthur people hate when you call it that. Still, it's a really good grant and I'm very excited about it. But because I have yet to receive my first check from them I wanted to have a back up plan. It's super unlikely this "genius grant" thing won't work out, but I was hoping you'd be willing to fill in in case there are any problems. That way I could get started on my genius stuff right away and be sure I'm all set.

You are probably thinking "Hey, I thought we were friends. Why did you pick the MacArthur Foundation over us? Do you like them better? Is it the genius thing?"

No. I like you better. You are my hometown granting organization. And though the genius thing is very flattering, I am only going with The MacArthur Foundation to help save you money so you can give it to other Minnesotans. But if you want to be the go-to grant organization on my grant just say the word. It's $625,000. I accept cash, checks, and money orders. Send it along and I will call up MacArthur today. I will call them and say "I was moved by your generous genius grant offer, but McKnight are my hometown people, they are special, and I am going to go with them!" If I do this I will not look back. Though it would be thoughtful of you, if all this were the case, if you gave my grant a special name, for instance, "McKnight's One Time Super Genius Grant". But that's not absolutely necessary.

But other than that I am just asking, friend to friend, that you be my back up on this grant stuff. I think we'll both come out ahead in the long run that way. I'll know you were there for me, and, in a pinch, you can swoop in and be a hero, only tangentially making those MacArthur people look a bit second rate. Not that there's a competition between granting foundations.

Just let me know which way you want to go, granter or back up granter, and I will get started doing my geniusy stuff.

Thanks so much.

Your friend,



F. Calypso

What do we make of this?

We have a lot of volunteers at my library. Some are boisterous and interactive, but a surprisingly large number of them are very quiet, diligent, persistent. With all these people, coming in for two or six or ten hours a week, an important part of the library's work gets done. There is little fanfare, little drama, and a good deal of steady work. Pretty much every day I come to work there are two or four or six of them emptying carts, putting things in order, collecting items from one of our various printed lists.

So, yesterday, we had a thank you brunch for them. It was very nice. There were attractive sandwiches and pastries- a nice spread, as my people say. The Director came in and talked to the volunteers and told them how vital and important and virtuous and wonderful they all are. I only caught a bit of the end of this soiree, but it looked like it all went very nicely.

And then today I came to work; no volunteers anywhere. I searched around. I thought maybe they'd come in later. No. I've been here now for 5 hours. I still haven't seen a one. I'd usually have seen about eight by now. Zero, nada, nothing. Certain things are starting to back up. There are absolutely no volunteers to be found.

There is a story I have told you about people who donate books to us, and it goes something like this:

The person who donates mid nineties computer programming books, or yellowed, smelly generic best sellers of the 1980's, that is, books that are mainly useless to us, asks much of us. They want their cars emptied of these books, they want their boxes and bags back, they hunger for our gracious appreciation, and they definitely, absolutely want a receipt for tax purposes ("So, shall I put down a value of, say, minus four dollars and eleven cents?"). But get people who bring in books we might use, or at least be able to sell for actual money, and it's all humble graciousness ("You sure you don't want a receipt for these beautiful first edition Dickens?" "Oh, please! It's you who give so much to me!").

This makes me think that perhaps we have crossed a line with our volunteers. Perhaps it was all too much for them. In fact, I think it was. All they ask is that we just not speak of what they give. They simply like to come empty bins for the library. Could we just leave it at that?

I guess not.

Ah well, what's done is done. Eventually, I am sure, they will recover from the burdens of our appreciation. It will fade far enough into the past, and they will return to their gracious virtue.

Motive

A slightly cynical person can easily see that there is an ulterior motive for everything, a secret self-serving reason for all our actions. I can very easily be that slightly cynical person, and yet I can also be quite the innocent, thinking that people are random and mercurial and sweet and full of heart. Sometimes a single event can flip me from one mode to the other. "Why is that young man taking that old ladies bag? Hey! HEY! what's... ah, he's helping her. I see. Wow, gosh, he sure is nice. And what lovely manners and facial tattoos." Or the other way "Wow, that sure is nice and thoughtful of my co-worker to take care of that before I replace her there! Oh, no, NO! She's just dumping it there. Ahhhhhh! She's just dumping it there to make it look like it wasn't her fault!"

But like many things there's a mostly complicated middle ground in play. Yesterday I was in the backroom with one of my colleagues. Someone from the front desk came back and asked if one of us could meet a patron at the back loading dock to help them in with multiple bags and boxes of donations. It was a volunteer situation with the caveat that one of us really had to do it. It's an infrequent sort of task, and though I'm not keen on it, I figured I was going to have to take care of it. To my surprise though my co-worker volunteered. I was particularly surprised because this was not one of my most giving, respected co-workers. Still, he has his qualities (though I generally find myself in the minority of those who will speak to them), and I was delighted to enjoy my release from this responsibility. I returned to the tasks at which I was engaged.

About ten or fifteen minutes later I had cause to wonder where my co-worker had gone, I think he was soon to replace me on the machine. I looked out the window. Whatever patron there was dropping off books was gone. My co-worker was smoking a cigarette and walking across the parking lot, apparently to his car. All the light bulbs in my head filled with electricity, and I could see. But here's the thing. It didn't matter. Sure, my co-worker likes helping with donations on the loading dock because it means a long cigarette break and the opportunity to hang out in the parking lot he so loves. But if someone needed help repairing the towel dispenser over by my espresso machine I could easily have had a similar response. All I know is that I didn't have to unload the patron's books and so am grateful for my colleague's efforts. There need be no cynical criticism, there need be nothing more than that simple truth.

The fact that he was five minutes late to relieve me on the machine is another, unrelated issue entirely. That's just how he rolls.