A day in the life of a first-round Cybils panelist
As soon as your category chair begins approving nominations, you’re on the library website, putting titles on hold like crazy. You’ll have barely two months to read dozens, maybe even hundreds (depending on your category), of books. The sooner they come rolling in from branches all across the county, the better.
I gave my branch librarians a heads-up to let them know I’d be reserving a tremendous lot of novels. Promised to stop in often to pick up new arrivals, so as not to overfill the hold shelves. “No worries,” they told me. “We’ll move ’em to the bottom shelf if we need to.” There’s an empty slice of shelf there, under the Last Name T-Z reserves.
I stopped by today expecting to find the P shelf squeezed full of my holds. Nope, although as usual P—, LYD (last name redacted) had a small handful of appealing titles awaiting her. I’m assuming she’s a she—Lydia? Lyddie? No idea, but for eight years I’ve been glimpsing her reserve books next to ours (PETERSON, SCO) on the shelf, and when it comes to books we are clearly such kindred spirits that I’ve been tempted to leave her a note in one of them. Except that might seem a little creepy. Whereas blogging about it totally isn’t weird at all. Ahem. MOVING ON.
Okay, so I’m expecting a bunch of books but they aren’t on the P shelf, and they aren’t on the spillover bottom shelf either. I run my (okay, Scott’s; I lose things) library card under the scanner next to the shelves, and it says I have 16 titles ready for pickup. I’m just about to track down a librarian when I spot the cardboard box on the floor.
Aha. Now we’re talking.
I just love my librarians. 🙂
P.S. Nominations close tomorrow. Here’s the link!
Cybils, library, thing is you just KNOW Lyd P has read All-in-the-Kind Family and would totally get the note-in-the-library-book thing
Sheila Ruth says:
Love it! Your own private hold BOX!
On October 14, 2014 at 3:10 pm
Gail Gauthier says:
The first year nominated books used to arrive at my door from the publisher. Bags of them. Just a couple years later, I was doing ILL, too. Fortunately, I was a second round judge and didn’t have as many books to deal with as you do.
On October 14, 2014 at 6:20 pm
Penny says:
Nice 🙂 Enjoy the reading!
On October 15, 2014 at 5:35 am
tanita says:
Hahahaha! The Benicia Public Library gave me my own two crates last year – it’s so funny to me that they just shrug and say, “No problem, you’ll just have your own box!”
And, there’s every possibility that P, Lyd is eyeballing your books, too.
On October 15, 2014 at 7:46 am
Fanny Harville says:
The idea of leaving a note for your kindred book-reserving spirit reminds me of the little incident in More All-Of-A-Kind-Family where the boy at the library that Ella has a crush on leaves a note introducing himself and inviting her skating in a book that Ella and Henny have mis-shelved so that no one else will check it out before they have a chance to the following week…
On October 15, 2014 at 11:53 am
Melissa Wiley says:
Fanny–we’re thinking along the same lines–check out how I tagged the post! 🙂
On October 15, 2014 at 12:07 pm