Most book lovers get their start in a library. Perhaps for you it was the library at your elementary school or the public library down the street. I avidly remember taking my library card to my local public library and checking out a stack of ten books at a time, the maximum I was allowed.
I would bring home books from beloved series such as Encyclopedia Brown, Little House on the Prairie, Nancy Drew, and The Black Stallion. I’d disappear into my room with my new friends, only emerging for food, school, and church. When those books were finished, I would return them and repeat the process.
Bacon Free Library
Nothing captured my attention like a library. I spent hours browsing the shelves and making my selections. I don’t visit as often as I used to as a child, but even now, my heart patters a little faster whenever I enter a library.
So when I find opportunities to support libraries, I jump at the chance. I’m a friend of our local library and donate books to their annual fundraising sale. My kids have earned service hours through volunteer work there, and when our community wanted to open a library branch in the mall, I eagerly made a donation.
My most recent venture, however, is to join with dozens of romance authors in a fundraiser to support the Bacon Free Library of Natick, MA. This library was established in 1880, which thrills my history-loving soul. Not only that, but the director loves romance and has chosen to reach out to romance writers to help support the library in an annual swag auction.
Some of the biggest names in romance are participating. Authors like Debbie Macomber, Tessa Dare, Sabrina Jeffries, Eloisa James, Julie Garwood, Mary Balogh, Lorraine Heath, and guess who else – ME!!!!
Tricia Goyer and I are the only two Inspirational Romance authors participating, and I would love for our auction items to make a splash, showing that inspirational readers love libraries, too.
I’m auctioning autographed copies of No Other will Do and Heart on the Line from my Ladies of Harper’s Station series along with a heart-shaped teacup and saucer and a box filled with a variety of teas to allow you to relax with a great read.
The auction opens in just a couple days, on Sunday, October 22 and will run through Sunday, October 29. Here’s the link to the library site with more information. And here is the link to my specific page.
The starting bid is only $20, but I’m hoping to bring in more than that to support a library that so generously supports our books. The actual auction will take place on Ebay. Here is the link to the Ebay site. It won’t be active until Sunday, but I wanted you to have it in case you are interested in making a bid.
- What are some of your favorite library memories?
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I remember my mom taking me to children’s programs and going with her to get books to read as a teen.
I think it is a great idea for the library to ask authors for swag to be auctioned off as a fundraiser and so generous of you to participate!
Thanks, Ellie! I remember taking all three of my kids to various library programs when they were small. As they grew, they participated in summer reading programs. My daughter is the only one who truly fell in love with libraries, like her mama. She can never visit one without bringing home a stack of books, even though her hectic college schedule won’t allow her to actually read more than a few pages of any of them. She just can’t resist. (That’s my girl!)
I love this post. I too love libraries and have such great memories of them from my childhood.
The only thing I must comment on: I was SO thankful to note there was no hyphen in the library’s name because bacon-free anything is just sad! 😉
LOL! Too funny, Deb. 😀 Gotta have our bacon – and our books!
I’m also a library lover. My mom was the town librarian so I practically grew up in a library.
What a wonderful childhood, Lynn! And now you are helping to fill those libraries with your wonderful stories. 🙂
I, too, loved visiting my local library and school library when I was young! I still thoroughly enjoy trips to the library with my own kids. It’s the only place I take them where I can say yes, yes, and yes, to their, “Mom, can I get this?” requests. 😉
Ha! So true, Becky.
I remember going to the library at school when I was in first grade was when I started to become a reader it was such an amazing journey to go into a class room filled with adventures galore. I can’t remember the books that I took out during first grade but I do remember my class room book that began the wonderful world of reading. The text book was Dick and Jane . As I got older I began reading Nancy Drew mysteries , Little House on the prairie, and many more stories.In my town we had a main branch of a library this is where I would hang out for hours among the stacks of books .
You and I had a similar path to falling in love with books, Christina. One of my earliest book memories was going to a neighborhood garage sale and finding a Dick and Jane book. I ran home and begged my mom for the nickel (or dime, I can’t remember) needed to buy the book. She gave it to me and blessed me with my first big girl book. I think I was four at the time. Thanks to Sesame Street I could read basic words, so I sat down and started having fun with Dick and Jane. Mom helped with the words I didn’t know, and my love of reading took flight.
While Mother read me books when I was a small child, once I was old enough to go to the library to select books, I began reading on my own. Mother took me to the public library usually weekly to check out books. Since my father used our one automobile for business, Mother and I would ride the city bus downtown to the public library to acquire our books. Of course, I don’t remember the books I read as a small child, I do remember reading classics like Heidi and Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates and the Nancy Drew books. As a teenager I worked in the school library as an aide and loved being surrounded by all the books. Even though I read non-fiction when I want to learn about a particular topic, I LOVE reading fiction!
What wonderful memories, Suzanne! I love that you were an aide in your school library. What a great experience.
I have wonderful memories of my parents taking me to the library after school. Each section designated for various age groups. In elementary school, I was fascinated with the librarian. Interesting lady named Mrs. Walker. Also, very excited when I was promoted to visit the older children section of the library at school. Special memories.
Oh, yes! The thrill of moving up from the children’s section to the juvenile section. I remember it well. Such pride and excitement!
As a preschooler, I remember my Mom taking me to the library that was housed on the second floor of a building. The shelves were low, directly under a huge picture window. I still remember looking at all of the bright colored books, gracing the shelves. I don’t remember which books we checked out that day, but it was the start of a love affair with books and reading that has bloomed and blossomed to this day.
There is nothing quite as thrilling as a room full of books. I can just look at pictures and get excited. Thanks for that lovely description, Jocelyn!
As a child, my dad would read to me almost every night. I made some lifetime friends in those books. Both he and my mom were avid readers, and my brother and I both are to this day. My daughter is, but none of my grandchildren do much reading, which breaks my heart. My preacher stated not long ago that “he who does not read is no better off than he who can not read.” So true. Although I have always loved libraries, my favorite memory is from the year I graduated from high school. My boyfriend asked if he could come over to visit, but I told him I had to go to the library. He asked if he could come by and take me there. I already had curlers in my hair, (this was in 1964), but he came, took me to the library where I picked up some research books, and when he brought me home, we stood outside for a few minutes before I went in to finish my homework, and he asked me to marry him! We didn’t get married for another year and a half, but that night was so special.
A library proposal??? With curlers in your hair??? Oh, that is fabulous. Great story. And great guy to understand the true beauty of the moment.
Yes, he was and still is. We celebrated our 52nd anniversary last week. He doesn’t like to read much, but has bought me 3 kindles for my constantly growing selection of ebooks.
Yep. He’s a keeper. 🙂
I grew up on a farm in Georgia and the bookmobile came by our house during the summer months and I can still remember the smell of the books and the excitement when they stopped in front of our house on the dirt road. My mother would fuss at me when my nose was in a book instead of helping with vegetables or chores. I read historical books and biographies, such as the story of Juliette Low, founder of the Girl Scouts. Wonderful memories.
How wonderful to have a mobile library come down your road. My mother used to fuss at me, too, Gloria. Mostly when it was time to visit with relatives. Put down my book down to talk to real people? Are you crazy?
My father took me to the library for the first time when I was five or six. The library was in the basement of a beautiful old stone house in a neighborhood park. I loved looking at all the books, and like you, I checked out the most I was allowed and started reading in the car on the way home. These were picture books with not very much print on each page, so I was able to finish them quickly and felt so proud of myself. We were a reading family, and my father was always happy to take us back to get more books.
From that beginning, libraries were always important to me. I continued the tradition by taking our children to the library, and they are both avid readers today. School libraries are also such special places to me, and when I was teaching, I loved taking my class to the library and helping students select books. Now that I am retired, I volunteer at my granddaughter’s school library during their book fairs. My daughter lives in California ( on the opposite coast from where she grew up) and is well-known to her local library staff in Long Beach. She and my eight year old grandson go regularly, and he especially loves reading to the BARK (Beach Animals Reading to Kids) dogs one Saturday a month.
Thanks for supporting this library. It sounds like a wonderful place.
I love that you give back by volunteering for book fairs and continue to encourage reading in your grandchildren, Betty. What a gift you are passing down to the next generations.
One of my older sisters took me to the Carnegie Library in our small Georgia town and signed me up for a reading hour on Saturdays. I got a library card and I so looked forward to those Saturdays. I remember the slightly musty smell of old books and the art deco style building that had a vestibule entryway. I would go there after school to study (and flirt with the boys) and I found so many great books there, including Christy by Katherine Marshall. Later I had some poetry displayed there because I won the contest. Much later, as a fundraising event, I held a book signing there. That library encouraged me to follow my dreams.
That’s beautiful, Lenora. I loved Christy. My first Christian fiction book, and I adored it! And how fun that you flirted with boys at the library. 🙂 I guess that still happens on college campuses today, but most university libraries have few actual books anymore. At least on the main floor where students gather. It’s all computers and coffee shops.
My story reminds me of yours! I loved our local library and would check out as many Nancy Drew or Boxcar Children books as I was allowed. (Someone else was reading the Boxcar Children books at a similar pace as I was, so it was always a guess if the next few books in the series would be on the shelves.) As an adult, my appreciation continued for Children’s literature (I was an elementary school teacher) and I was introduced to wonderful books from Lamplighter Ministries. I am blessed to be married to a man who shares my affinity for reading, bookstores, and libraries – as we both serve in our Church library. My dream space would be to build a library similar to the one in Beauty and the Beast. 🙂 I have more recently been discovering Inspirational fiction, especially thanks to this blog.
I often dream of a personal library with built-in shelves, a rolling ladder, a window seat, and a comfy reclining wingback chair. 🙂 How wonderful that you and your hubby both work with the Church library! That’s great to share something so special. My husband is a reader, but doesn’t quite have the same level of passion for books as I do. He’s more of a computer nerd, but I don’t hold that against him. 😉
Karen, I LOVE your dream of a”personal library with built-in shelves, a rolling ladder, a window seat, and a comfy reclining wingback chair.” And I love the couple of pictures on this post! When our children were younger, we let them check out as many books as their own age. So our 13 year old would get 13 books, but our 5 year old only got 5. The librarian had great fun calling our oldest “Mr. Jedidiah Esquire” ! She even took his picture of him holding his stack of books, and made sure the picture made it to their newsletter. The library I went to when I was younger, had a resident cat. The librarian even wrote a book about it. It’s called: Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World.
What a charming picture you paint, Becky! I love Dewey the cat. Perfect name and no doubt a charming addition to the stacks. And Mr. Jedidiah Esquire – how adorable. I can just picture him with his giant pile of books and eager grin. Love it!
What a great idea to support this library?
Growing up, I used the church, public, and the school library.
I volunteer in the church library and have for almost 40 years.
So many books and not enough time to read them all.
My favorite memory was just the two bags and a backpack I used to carry out of the library each visit and the librarians who knew me by name. I lived at the library from the age of twelve until I went off to college. I’d check out the limit of 50 books and every couple of days return some to get more. Books were my safe haven and my friends. I read through whole sections of the non-fiction section including mythology and folk lore, historical, biblical studies. I think the Lord used them to shape me into the author I am today.
I lived in the library whenever I was old enough to check out my first book with my own book card. After that I volunteered all the time for any library and that would let me. I worked all summer every summer through middle school and high school at the middle school library putting it back together scrubbing cleaning finding books anything that the library and would need me for. I love the smell of the library. I love the work of the library and I love being with librarians. I seriously considered being a librarian, but God took me another direction very close to a librarian. I’ve been a teacher now for 26 years. I bid on the eBay auction. I’ve been as high as I could, but I hope I don’t win because that means that someone bit higher than me and your auction will raise more money! I love your books Karen and I hope this auction is very successful. Thanks a lot for bringing back so many nostalgic memories to me. Mary Massey
I notice I had many spelling errors in this. Please forgive me I’m exhausted and I’m on my way to bed and I’ve been talking in my phone LOL
My mom used to leave me at the Air Force base library to browse while she got groceries at the commissary. (I can’t imagine doing that now!) I thought it was the most fun ever to choose books and then sit down to read until she returned. Later, my mother was an elementary school librarian (and her name IS Marian – yes, Marian the Librarian). I loved going to her school and helping out in her library. I was in college so I was able to help with inventory and straightening. It was a wonder just touching all the books!