HOLLY NADLER

508-274-2329

(hollynadler@gmail.com)

How did Robert Preston express it in the Music Man? “Folks, ya got trouble, right here in River City, with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for public library.” Well, his P, as we know, stood for pool, but our libraries, and specifically our own Oak Bluffs Library, are heading for a 16 per cent cut in 2011.

Admittedly 2011 sounds extremely far away. You may have noticed how a 14-month time frame can appear blissfully close when you’re planning, say, a ride on the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul. But if something untenable is planned in the same amount of time, your unconscious tends to shrug: “That’s so far in the future, I’ll probably have been hit by a truck by that time and I’ll be working on my next incarnation on a planet that has fewer wars, more choices of movies at the cineplex, and unlimited resources at the library, above which I’ll live in a 3,000-square foot penthouse.”

But back to Massachusetts libraries and, again, specifically the Xanadu-sized O.B. library; for the time being, these august institutions positively rock. After all, what’s the first thing people give up during a recession? They stop buying books. They don’t, of course, stop reading. Who in the world would want to do that? So they head to their local libraries and check out books and DVDs to their hearts’ content. This is exactly what I did after closing down my bookstore on Circuit avenue. I took my handsome white and black O.B. Library canvas sack, huffed and puffed up the steep incline of School street, and checked out enough books to raise a red welt on the shoulder over which the bag was slung.

I recall sitting in on an Oak Bluffs Library Trustees meeting in the early summer of 2008 when director Danguole Budris pointed out that library circulation had expanded by 11 per cent from the same time the year before. I rubbed my chin and murmured, “Hmm, that figure possibly represents my former bookstore clientele.” Ms. Budris remarked, “And also the clientele left stranded by the Bunch of Grapes fire.” I’ve never mastered the art of raising one eyebrow, so I poked my right eyebrow up with my index finger and said, “They have the Vineyard Haven library to patronize.”

We could discuss other small luxuries dispensed with during a recession, such as hair salon appointments (look around; we’re all considerably less coiffed, am I right?) but the subject, if we haven’t become too muddled here, was libraries, most poignantly the 16 per cent cuts mandated by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners for the distant year of 2011.

Here are a few modest suggestions from your town columnist for enabling that 16 per cent without having to reduce library workers’ hours or slash the purchase of books (omigod, let’s all drink poisoned Kool-Aid before we allow that to happen!), or lock the doors and turn off the lights on additional days:

1. Let’s replace library chairs with meditation cushions. They’re a lot cheaper and we could carry them around, sitting on them for the perusal of lower shelves which generally call for extreme ballet plié positions which most of us can only sustain for a mere two seconds before falling over backwards.

2. Let’s hook sidewalk-style meters up to computers. This sounds ungracious but, let’s face it, we’re all addicted to the Internet these days and, if we grasp the addictive personality by considering people who pay nearly nine bucks for a pack of cigarettes these days, then very few tech fiends (which is to say all of us) are going to quibble about chunking a few quarters in a meter.

3. Let’s put tip-type jars at the check-out counter so that people who feel they’re receiving a heck of a lot of service, goods and pleasure for free, can donate to their library just as they kick in to help waiters and waitresses with their alleged college funds. Think of it this way: You’ve just checked out eight hardback books and six DVDs which, if you purchased them in a store, would cost you a couple of hundred dollars. Isn’t that worth a five buck contribution now and then?

4. How about we publish wish lists for library lovers to buy and contribute their own books? For example, I decided the other day the time had come to re-read Virginia Woolf, whose books I’d been forced to hack my way through in college. I thought that maybe now, far older and a smidge wiser, I might actually enjoy her! Well, I was down in the basement quarters of the West Tisbury Library (mea culpa — I’m a Benedict Arnold when I go anywhere but our own beloved O.B. Library) and I noticed that both To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway were so yellowed and dog-eared that the Felix Unger side of my personality decreed I was too fussy to read them. If I ever have the proverbial two nickels to rub together, I’m buying new Virginia Woolfs for all the libraries on the Island. Starting with O.B., naturally.

So there are a few humbly submitted suggestions. I do encourage everyone to come up with more: 2011 will be here before you know it!

Meanwhile at the Oak Bluffs library on Thursday, Oct. 15 from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., author John Hough Jr. will be discussing and reading from his new bestseller Seen the Glory: A Novel of The Battle of Gettysburg.

Then on Thursday, Oct. 22 in the library meeting room, public health nurse Nicole Barlett will discuss the facts surrounding the seasonal flu and H1N1 (swine) flu in the presentation, The Flu and You: What to Expect from the Upcoming Cold and Flu Season. From 6 to 7 p.m. she will talk about prevention, vaccines, signs and symptoms, and answer your flu-related questions.