"Let books be your dining table, and you shall be full of delights.
Let them be your mattress and you shall sleep restful nights."
-- St. Ephrem the Syrian (303-373 AD)
The Friends of the Muehl Public Library in Seymour are holding their annual spring book sale. My job is to count the books and charge the customers. With Easter Sunday approaching, people are coming in to buy books for their children's baskets. What a clever idea for those with low incomes.
Paperback books are twenty five cents, hardcovers fifty cents. There are videos, audios and DVDs for the low price of $1 each. There's a bake sale as well. Colette, who runs an Anime film series for the teenagers, brought Japanese bakery shaped like fish. I don't know what it's called but it's delicious.
In these days of budget cuts, the work of volunteers is absolutely essential. In addition to the book sales, the Friends sell candy bars, hold raffles, and hold a yearly wine tasting event in November. With the money earned, they decorate the library, host movie nights, bring in authors, and help with the children's summer reading program.
I volunteer some hours for the sales and put up posters around town -- though they forgot to ask me this time around and I'm afraid the sale is not being well attended.
Any money earned is helpful when local and state taxes are being cut. There's a poster I saw in Madison that said "Cutting library services during bad economic times is like closing hospitals during a plague." Here at our little library struggling people can learn how to use computers, how to write resumes, how to search the internet for possible jobs. They can open a free e-mail accounts and use them in their queries.
A library is an excellent civic service, well worth our tax money. I'm glad to help out.
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