Life at the Library discussion

I needed to vent somewhere about some likely stolen books at my public library. I have to start by admitting that I have, in my much younger and stupider days, stolen a small number of library books; the last was 25 years ago.

My library was good enough to add some Joe Abercrombie books to their collection at my request. He is now on their "we will add all new books by these authors" list but there were a couple of slighlty older ones that were absent. They purchased Best Served Cold and The Heroes and I immediately borrowed the former; kept it out for 12 weeks and 3 days (I had a pretty deep to-read pile and no one else had requested it yet), returned it for a day and re-borrowed it for a couple more days to finish it. I went to get the next book (The Heroes) which was supposed to be on the shelf, but it was not to be found. I put a hold on it so that library staff would look for it, and a couple of days later it was marked in the catalog as "missing". I did the same for Joe's next couple of books (Red Country, Sharp Ends) and now both are also "missing". I put a hold on the earlier book that I had already read (Best Served Cold) because it was also absent from the shelf when it was supposed to be available, a couple of days later it has not shown up yet and I am sure it will also convert to "missing". If it was just the other two books, that could be an honest mistake; I have seen "missing" books before that then reappeared, most likely they just got missed by the automated check-out scanner and the borrower returned them. But given the disappearance of two books, followed by the later disappearance of the book that I returned, convinces me that some punk decided to take them for keeps.

Grr, Arrgh.

On some better notes about library behavior, I love this little blog, now defunct:

I work at a public library

And this twitter thread, among others by librarians

Interesting.

I’ve always wanted to work at a library, but this just makes me want to work there more! Haha.