Dumber than a bag of wet mice

"This is all getting a bit silly now, isn't it?" asks Bronwyn. "I mean, we needed to do a World Book Day display but the rest is getting a bit out of hand."

"Himself's been upstairs telling staff to tidy up the booksale books," says Salome. "'It's the first thing they'll see when they come in,' he says."

"Jesus," I reply. "If that's the first thing we're showing them what does that say about the service?"

"Do you think he'll show them that we've got a choice of milk and that we've got a clock which is really convenient because it tells people when to go up to staff the counter?" asks Frog.

My, how we laughed.

(This is the 2,000th entry in this blog. May the Good Lord save us all!)

Eye opener

Passing by Catty Library I am astonished to see a dirty great banner saying: "Big Booksale Here!!!" It occurs to me to wonder how, if we can manage this feat of advertising, we never did similar for The National Year of Reading.

Then I remember our service priorities.

I can visualise the cartoon for this

Lots of brass for this one. (Tune after HMHB)

I find them cluttering the stairs
And corners where nobody cares.
They fill that office over there.
They're even underneath my chair.

Any space that's going spare.
That meeting room we only share.
And while I stifle all my screams
Frequently they're in my dreams...

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

Coming to the library
What's the first thing that you see?
Orange-boxed in serried rows,
Where they come from no-one knows.

Becalmed, bewildered and bemired,
Ageing bookstock looking tired.
Testament to lending vice.
Pages stained with something nice.

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

(instrumental)

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

In the halls and by the walls
And where the friendly postman calls;

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

Every day, in every bay
And they just won't go away.

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

For miles and miles and miles
They are stacked in messy piles

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

Or else sometimes when we can
They'll be in the library van.

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

Where once there may be ten
There'll be twice as much again.

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

And I turn away and flee,
Thinking: "they'll not follow me."

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

And they go on and on and on...

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

If you multiply a gallon of pitch by a quart of periwinkles, what is the result?

For most of the past year Salome's been the sole Assistant Librarian for this half of the borough: no provision's been made for replacing Bronwyn now she's Book Sale Coordinator (despite her having spent last Spring being made to work a four-month notice period!); Lola's maternity leave wasn't covered; and to make things worse, one of the Counter Supervisors' posts has been vacant for a year. So things have slipped a bit.

It's made even worse because she's also been asked to take a lead on a couple of pieces of work. She's also been asked to work with me on part of the web site project, which is frustrating because I know she'd have useful input but we both know that she's not got time or space to do much about it.

Just to twist the knife a bit, T.Aldous is now in a bate because there is a pile of boxes in a meeting room that's going to be used for a corporate directorate meeting in March. Some of the boxes are the stock that wouldn't fit when Doreen got rid of a pile of shelving in 2007. Some is stock from Noddy and Glass Road that the librarians from Catty and Umpty should have dealt with but sent to Helminthdale last year. And some is the result of Mary's sending a memo to all libraries a couple of weeks ago telling them to send their old books for Catty Library's Big Book Sale to Helminthdale because Catty Library insisted there wasn't room for any of it there.

T.Aldous has told Salome to get her finger out and get them sorted. Salome was marginally more polite than I would have been.

Please remember the grotto!

Catty Library's been re-opened a while now and we're still to be celebrating the New Model Library.

"Have we got any events going on at Catty yet?" asks Frog.

"They're having a book sale," I reply.

"Don't take the piss, it's not nice."

But it was true.

Selling point

Bronwyn's just back from a book-buying expedition. She's been to the local bookshop to deplete his stock of the works of Ederic Ploog.

"I keep forgetting how big that shop really is. I'm just used to popping in to have a look at the new books and the local maps, I don't go into the local studies section in the side room. The only problem with that shop is that he will insist on having his remainder bargain bins prominently on display when you go into the shop. You can't see the Richard and Judy display for the "six for fifty pence" promotions."

"I wonder where he got that business model from?"

I had to ask...

"How many boxes of book sale were there at Roadkill?" I ask Seth.

"Only forty," he replies.

"You could have fitted them in your car then."

"Yeah, right!"

How long have you been a kamikaze pilot?

Seth's going over to the old Roadkill Library to measure the shelves to see if they'll fit the new staff room at Catty Library. Problem number one being that he doesn't know how much space there is in the staff room at Catty. And T.Aldous and Julia, who have given him the job to do, don't know either. So he's going to Catty Library first.

"While you're going to Catty I'll come with you, there's something I need to check there," says Julia.

"Oh," adds T.Aldous, "while you're going to Roadkill could you bring some booksale back?"

"No," says Seth.

"You don't have to bring it all back."

"No. I'm only going in the car, there's no room for any boxes of book sale."

"If you take the trolley you could do it."

"If I take the trolley I'll have even less space. I'm not doing it."

"Well it needs to come back here. How's it getting here?"

...pause...

"You could ask the van driver to pick it up," suggests Seth.

Never give a sucker an even break

I've bet Thelma £2 that T.Aldous and/or Doreen has the booksale wheeled out into the entrance of Epiphany Library within a month of the place re-opening.

Indulging his compulsion on the tables

I'm going to have to take more chloroform with it at work. I'm ashamed of my reply to T.Aldous:

"It'll be Milkbeck Library's centenary this autumn. We should do something for it."

"We could have a book sale."

The lion was returned to its display cabinet

Catty Library staff are Not Impressed. The plan for the re-furbished Catty Library has finally materialised, six weeks after the original re-opening date.

There is not a lot of shelving. In part because somebody has decided that a strip half the width of the library shall be the walkway from the foyer to the back wall. The counter can't go in the walkway, and neither can the public computers. So everything has to be stuck against the walls.

Except for the bit of wall that has a pile of unboxed pipes for some reason or another and so can't have anything stuck against it. So that's where the counter's going to go. Despite the fact that the proposed sightlines are such that you can only see the walkway. Well, a six-foot length of the walkway, but you get the idea.

Other than the counter there are only two detailed specifics of function/service on the plan...

The two booksale points in the foyer.

Slack-jawed in amazement

T.Aldous has splendid news:

"We should have a booksale for this bank holiday weekend."

There's a big brown thing in the coalshed

I'm upstairs in the community room. I need a box to kick and we've a shortage of them downstairs.

Up here there's boxes full of leather chairs and books from Catty and Epiphany. There are playaways that never will and piles upon piles of 'inconvenient' stock. There's a metal cupboard and a few old tables. And stacking chairs. And more thingie than you could poke a stick at. I turn to Seth.

"Aren't we due a booksale in here?"

"Don't even go there."

Sale!!!!

There's a press release on the council web site:

Massive big book sale on at Helminthdale Library

When did we become Allied Carpets?

Entrepreneurship

I'm doing "What do other libraries do?" which is usually really irritating but today is a useful diversion from things even more irritating. Somebody (not me) suggested outsourcing our booksale, dumping unwanted stock onto somebody else and taking a percentage of the proceeds. I ask a colleague how their arrangement's faring.

"Oh, wonderful. Actually, it's an excellent way of making sure you're not clogged up with boxloads of old stock but it's not much of a moneyspinner to date. We signed a contract with this company last year. After a few months I rang them up to make sure that the stock we were sending them was appropriate and that things were going fine. They asked me if I wanted to know how our account stood at that stage. I wasn't expecting much by then, we'd only just started remember, but out of curiosity I said yes please.

"'You're doing really well,' they said, 'your account's two pounds in credit.'"

I wonder how much librarian you can get for your £2.

Incentivisation

A colleague writes:

"I've been seconded to a stock management post in our library authority. It sounds like your "Booksale Coordinator" is a bit like my post! I'm not dragged off to the enquiry desk all the time, though -- we're housed in an industrial estate about two miles from the library. That's the good news. The bad news is that the funding for my post got cut before Christmas. So it's now being funded from the book sale!!!"

I offered to send her T.Aldous for back-up support. This was politely declined.

Sherbet dabs

It's starting to look a bit dicey for our meeting the national stock additions and stock expenditure performance targets and our stock health target's looking iffy because we've enough money to buy hardbacks and so don't buy "enough" paperbacks for the Nabobs' liking.

Despite this, we'll be meeting the stock replenishment targets because we've so many libraries closed with their stock boxed up in storage that there's a significant dent in the "available stock" figure within the calculation.

Ideally the dent would have been unnecessary because there'd been a programme of stock-editing throughout the year. As it is, the Group Librarians are desperately trying to catch up with decades' worth of anti-stock-editing and can't whip the tatty, broken-down and stagnant stock off the shelves fast enough. One of the reasons being that T.Aldous has instructed that stock that's been edited has to be transferred to other libraries and not put into booksale. (eh?) The reason for that being that boxes of booksale books have been skittering around the borough for the past umpteen years and have collected enough Air Miles to travel first class to Wollameroo. Rather than chalk up more mileage, T.Aldous has decided to stem the flow of "new" old books, to improve our chances of hitting the booksale income targets. (you may need a cold flannel on your neck at this stage) One of the other reasons why the stock-editing can't progress is that most places are full of boxes of stock to be transferred to other libraries from libraries that have moved into smaller premises or, in the case of Helminthdale Lending, slung out a pile of children's library shelving without buying anything to replace it. Dutch Bend is so full of transfers to closed libraries that the stock to be transferred from the branch libraries in the Dutch Bend and Catty townships has all been sent to Helminthdale to deal with, together with the stock from the Helminthdale, Milkbeck and Spadespit townships which are stock-edited from there anyway. When stock-editing's being done, of course.

So we're doing very well, really.

The auditorium is completely full of Orson Wells

T.Aldous has told Seth that the boxes of booksale books in the meeting room need to be redistributed to no more than three boxes' height for health and safety reasons.

"Is that three little boxes or three big boxes?"

"It doesn't matter. Three boxes high."

"What about all those boxes that are stacked six-high in the fire exit?"

"Just get on with the meeting room."

Counter intuitive

I can't get my head round this one...

• Catty Library has to be cleared of furniture and fittings by Friday.
• The booksale at Catty Library has been extended to Saturday.

Say goodnight to the folks, Gracie.

I've been trying to avoid saying anything about boxes...

Salome and Bronwyn are supervising the packings-up, movings-round and songs around the campfire as Helminthdale Library staff shift stock, shelves and chattels around the bits of the floor that the carpeters aren't working on. They're also covering at the branch libraries in their half of the borough because the staff who would have been covering have either retired or been promoted to branch manager posts elsewhere in the borough.

T.Aldous has told them that, as a matter of priority, they need to do some stock-editing of twenty boxes of stock from Noddy and Glass Road, which happen to belong to the other half of the borough but the three Assistant Librarians on that side don't have time to do the job. T.Aldous is insistent that this stock must be transferred to other libraries for to make space on the admin. floor and on no account must they be withdrawn as we've currently got more booksales on the go than we have libraries open to the public.

Salome opens one box and suggests that perhaps we would be better putting it into a damp cellar and harvesting the mushrooms.

After a summer of new stock famine a van's just brought sixty-nine boxes for the Acq. team to deal with. With the complication that they can't get anyone to tell them what to do with the new stock for Catty, which will be closed for months, or Helminthdale which is closed for a few weeks. So that stock's joining the story packs, audiobooks, foreign books, Books For Sharing, treasure chests, bookmarks, extremely large boxes, Larry Grayson, Jimmy Clitheroe, broken microfiches and a horse blanket.

At least the contents of Catty Library will be going into storage so we won't be having to squeeze that into this place, thank God!