“In a corner of the Maurice M. Pine Free Public Library, in Fair Lawn, New Jersey…the gray carpeting is flecked with sequins.”
So begins an article titled “Saying Yes to the Dress—At the Library,” published in the May 20 edition of the New Yorker. (Not a New Yorker subscriber? Me, either. I read it for free at the library!)
The program began about a decade ago when librarian Adele Puccio found a wedding dress from a local “freecycling” website. Today, prospective brides can choose from around 50 different wedding dresses – each one donated or rescued from local thrift stores. There’s a lot of turnover—Puccio has matched about 60 brides with dresses just this year.
When you think about a library, you probably think: places that lend books—with emphasis in the last word of that phrase. But we think the real value of libraries lies in the lend part, not the books part. Don’t get me wrong here. Anyone associated with a library will tell you that we love books! And books continue to be a large part of our mission.
Libraries started as places to lend books because once upon a time, books were really expensive. Literacy exploded—particularly here in the United States, where free public education was the norm in most states by the 1850s. Printing books remained expensive. Libraries stepped in to meet the public’s demand for reading material.
It made a lot of sense. A book was an expensive thing that you’d only use one time.
Kind of like a wedding dress.
These days, libraries loan out a lot of different types of things. Over in Hinton, for example, the local grocery store was having a hard time keeping shopping carts. The carts kept showing up all over town, abandoned on sidewalks or pushed over hills. It got so bad that the local police were threatening to enforce criminal measures.
Austin Persinger, director of the Summers County Library, saw things differently.
He recognized that many of the county’s poorer residents lacked reliable transportation. The town of Hinton—which contains the only grocery store for miles—sits in a valley, while many of the residents live in the surrounding hills, often walking in from as many as six miles away. These residents were taking shopping carts because it was their only way of transporting groceries up the hills to their homes.
So the library purchased several lightweight utility wagons. Residents can check them out, use them to take groceries home, and return them the next time they visit town. They were all checked out within the first month. Shopping cart theft is down.
Here in Pocahontas County, we provide access to lots of outdoor equipment. Want to go looking for treasure? (Or, maybe you dropped your wedding ring somewhere at last Saturday’s barbecue.) Drop by either the McClintic or Greenbank branch and you can check out a metal detector.
Or maybe you want to watch the stars from one of the three(!) officially recognized Dark Sky Parks in Pocahontas County? You can pick up a stargazing backpack from any of our five library branches. Each backpack contains everything you need to start learning about viewing outer space.
And, as befits a county where internet access is tricky—owing both to the quiet zone needed to protect the important work at the Green Bank Observatory and to the difficulty of stringing wires across a large and rugged landscape—we provide free WiFi (except at the Green Bank branch) and plenty of physical copies of movies and music.
Of course, you can still check out books, too!
Our mission is to lend things that help improve the lives of the people of Pocahontas County. We do a lot of lending. But we’re always eager to do more. If you have ideas for things you think would be nice to lend out, drop me a line with your suggestion. I’m joe@pocahontaslibrary.org
Or, better still, stop by any of our five branches and talk with your local librarian. You may discover that we already have what you’re looking for!
