Pittsylvania County Library Blog

Vivian Robertson is passionate about history.  For that, she credits her dad, who took her [actually, “dragged” is the term she uses] to the historical sites in our region from Appomattox to Mt. Vernon, from Gettysburg to Monticello.  From that beginning she discovered how fascinating it is to find out about history that has a face—whether that face is hers, those of her family members, or of people who live in our region.

That desire to know about what has happened in the past led her to be involved in two books about Pittsylvania County history; the official titles are Pittsylvania County, Virginia, Heritage 1767-2004, and Pittsylvania County, Virginia, Heritage 1767-2006, Volume 2.  We at the library just call them “the heritage books” and we view them as nothing less than local treasure.

Vivian would tell you quite quickly that a committee produced these books, and that’s true—in the first volume a photo shows twenty-two people who guided the process, and Roger and Anna Dodson served as the committee chairpersons.   Vivian said that most people who worked on the first book came back for the second.   It’s clear that these folks have made for the rest of us something of which they can justifiably be proud.  It’s a true labor of love.

When the books were done, the committee had some funding left and, as good stewards of the county’s history, they realized that there was a particular interest in some of the artifacts that represent Gretna’s past.  They approached us at the library about placing a display case that would showcase these types of items in our branch in Gretna.  The result is a beautiful cabinet, hand crafted by Fowler’s Pride Woodworking of Blairs, which contains bits of the history of the Gretna area.  The cabinet is lighted and locked, glass-fronted and secure, something that will last for many years and bring happiness to people in the same way the heritage books do.

Looking for memorabilia of retailers who live in your memory, if not on the streets of Gretna?  Peer into the display case, and there you will see photos of them, and the little items they gave away to their customers.  How about the railroad?  There’s a telegraph key from the Gretna train station.  Remember the old telephones that had a trumpet-looking handset?  Or the old flatirons that were heated on the stove?  If you want to show your children or grandchildren what those looked like, a trip to the Gretna library should be on your itinerary.

When Vivian talks about these items, though, the depth of her interest in them shines through.  She knows these objects—if she is too young to have seen them used, then nevertheless, she has a knowledge of them received through study and through conversations with other county residents.

What Vivian Robertson has done for Pittsylvania County, and particularly for Gretna, is simple, and yet profound.  She’s found a way to preserve and display the heritage written about in books so that all of us, young and old alike, can look, learn, and remember.  In her recent This Book is Overdue!, Marilyn Johnson says, “We are all living history, and it’s hard to say now what will be important in the future.  One thing’s certain, though:  if we throw it away, it’s gone.”  If it’s up to Vivian Johnson, that’s not going to happen.

Everyone talks about “beach reads,” summer books, and summer reading.  What is usually meant is books of a less serious nature, books over which you can gracefully slump in your beach chair, a little wiffling snore emitting from your slack jaw from time to time.  Paperback books with greasy sunscreen stains, not heavy tomes meant to improve your mind.

For some reason this summer, I have been reading nonfiction, but with a twist—I’ve excavated a seam of nonfiction books that read like fiction.    Even though we may put nonfiction into that “mind improving” category, these particular books make the grade as “beach reads.”

What are the main characteristics of books like this?  I would say that they have one or both of these two things:  strong characters and a compelling plot.  All the other elements of literature—setting, theme, point of view—are less important, I think, than these two when nonfiction crosses over to the “reads like fiction” camp.

So on to the books.  The first one I read is titled Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art, by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo.  It’s the story of a true con artist, John Drewe, who teamed up with a struggling painter, John Myatt, and together fooled many professionals in museums and the art world into believing the art Myatt produced had been created by some of the greatest artists of modernity.   Drewe is no ordinary swindler.  He manages to create “provenance” [the term in this case has to do with the history of ownership of an object] for these forgeries, and takes creation of fake documentation to a whole new level.  He even inserts these provenance documents into historical archives at the great Tate Museum in London, believing that security at an archive is more concerned with the removal of documents than they are with the insertion of phony ones into the cultural record.  He had ingratiated himself with curators at the Tate by giving the museum two paintings by Bissiere, which led to his ability to get past their security:

The grand moment in the reception finally arrived. Two white-gloved Tate conservators entered the room with a pair of paintings, each about five feet tall. There was a moment of respectful silence. Myatt was stunned.

“Ahh, the Bissières, how lovely,”someone in the room whispered.

Myatt cringed as the group praised the paintings and Drewe’s taste and generosity. The two works were carried around the room, and long before they reached Myatt, he recognized the faint but acrid smell of the varnish he had sprayed on them when he’d finished them a few weeks earlier.

When Drewe is finally caught, it’s the ordinary people of the art world who help to bring him down—historians and archivists convinced that something is fishy, and who refuse to ignore their instincts.

The second book I want to mention is The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.  The story of Walls’s childhood, one in which she was neglected, if not abused, by parents who were intelligent and able, but who chose lives of dysfunction and drift.  Walls’s tone is matter-of-fact as she relates their moves across country and the ways she and her siblings finally escaped to a different life.  She is clear-eyed, she is unsentimental, but the fact that she still loves her parents comes through every episode of her account.  A fantastic storyteller, Walls is now the gossip columnist for MSNBC.com.    No kidding.

If you like the idea of nonfiction that reads like fiction, then here’s a great resource for you—and of course, it’s written by librarians:  http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/booklists/nonfictionreads.html.

Don’t forget your sunscreen!

There are whole industries or market segments dedicated to getting organized.   Some months it seems that every magazine has an article about how to get your life in hand and keep your stuff from controlling you.  Each catalog that arrives seems to have a section devoted to “organizational tools”—whether that is a fancy electronic calendar or sets of file folders in colors, or wicker baskets with file inserts, or big plastic tubs.  We build bigger and better houses to put all our stuff in, and then we rent storage units for the overflow—units that we may never look in again once we rent them.

Earlier this summer I had the task of starting to close a family home.  In this particular instance, the residents had lived there since 1953.  One of the couple’s granddaughters said, “Grandma was a hoarder, but she was an organized hoarder.”  This was the truth—there were checks in that house from the sixties, but they were all in order by year.  Did they buy a radio in 1974?  I can tell you what it cost them because they still had the sales receipt in a file clearly marked with the date.

I had, of course, some idea of what I was facing, which might explain my fairly recent fascination with Antiques Roadshow on PBS.  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/ That show has been on for years—it’s in its fourteenth season—and I never once watched it; since January, however, I have hardly missed an episode.  I love to see people discover that ugly vase given to them by Aunt Maude is actually worth $15,000.  You can imagine the lovely narrative that’s been running in my head about all the stuff in this family home of ours.  The problem is that getting from the ugly vase to the $15,000 takes a bit of work and research, not to mention rubber gloves, Endust, and perspiration.

One day when I walked through the stacks at our Chatham library, I saw Sell, Keep, or Toss:  How to Downsize a Home, Settle an Estate, and Appraise Personal Property, by Harry L. Rinker.  I just happened to glance down and spot it.  We librarians call this “browsing serendipity.”  Just like some stray cat that I didn’t really want, but whose face I couldn’t forget, I finally went back, picked it up, and took it home.

I think I am a little in love with Harry Rinker.

You don’t want someone who is wishy-washy when they are telling you what to do with fifty years of accumulated detritus.  Rinker has a method that seems helpful, a plan to follow to get your house from an organizational nightmare to what he calls “broom clean” and ready for sale.    He makes you believe you can do it.  He even tells you how long it’s going to take.  No, really!

He also shows you that you need to be realistic about what your things are worth, but that very few things need to go to the junk pile.   That advice alone led me to look online for some things and discover that baby boomers reliving their youth think that it would be cool to have a 1950s era yo-yo.  That thing would have been in a trash can instead of on eBay, where it sold rather quickly, thank you.

So, my reading advice this week has nothing to do with great literature and everything to do with what some call bibliotherapy, using a book to help a person solve a problem.   Harry Rinker is helping me solve mine, and whatever problem you may have, I can pretty much guarantee you that there’s a book to help.  We’d be happy to help you find it here at the library.

My husband and I are book collectors. Actually, some might call him a book hoarder [à la that TV show]. When we were in our twenties, we moved to Virginia, and the kind gentlemen who helped us carry our boxes into our apartment said my husband had more books than any other man then living in the Commonwealth.

If you think about this, it’s a little crazy. I mean, I’m a librarian. One of the great perks of this profession is that I am surrounded by books all day, every day, and I can pretty much get my hands on any book I want. So why, you might ask, would I ever buy a book when I can get them for free.

Good question.

It’s a disease. It’s a sickness, but it’s clear to our friends that we are not looking for a cure.

That’s why we were both happy to discover the joys of LibraryThing. You can see it at www.librarything.com.  LibraryThing is in fact many things—a catalog, a review source, a social network, a community of book lovers. You can keep track of your reading in LibraryThing, and read what others have said about a book. You can keep a list of books you’d like to read. You can read reviews others have written, or write your own.

But the part that excited my husband most was the ability to catalog all of our books.

I found that rather amusing.

You have to understand that in the library world, catalogers are a breed unto themselves. They love detail, they love rules, and they love to keep everything orderly. Not one of these characteristics describes my husband. So imagine my surprise when I gave him a ten dollar bar code scanner and he was deliriously happy.

So happy that I didn’t see much of him for the next month. Why? He was spending all his time with that CueCat, scanning his entire book collection into LibraryThing.

Cutest barcode scanner ever

Here at the library, we happen to think that our catalog is pretty cool, too, and I hope you feel the same way. It’s got book jacket covers and lots of pertinent information. Sometime in the next few months we will add more enhancements.  But for those of you who have your own stacks of books at home–or your very own hoard [you know who you are]– take a look at LibraryThing.   Do you fit that cataloger profile?  You can get the joy of being a librarian, just by putting order into the chaos of those books you own.  [Or, as Karen Schneider once pointed out, if your house burns down, you’ll know which books you used to own--your list will be on LibraryThing].

Here’s another thought.  If you keep track of what you read in your LibraryThing account, you will always have the answer to the age-old question of voracious readers—“Hey, have I already read this?”

That alone might make it worth the effort.

Sometimes it’s hard to get the word out about good things. I think that one of those overlooked good things is our Health Information and Advocacy @ Your Library initiative. This grew from a grant the Tobacco Commission gave to Massey Cancer Center at VCU to provide health information through libraries in tobacco-growing regions of our state. Campbell County Public Library and our library system were the first two recipients of funding—guinea pigs, some might say.

A direct outgrowth of the grant funding is a web portal you can access through our website. What’s a web portal? It’s a way in to see some specially selected resources, in this case, health resources that have been chosen by experts at Massey.

My colleague at Campbell County likes to say, “Friends don’t let friends Google health information.” That is what we are trying to prevent. As librarians, we know that there are many health information sites on the web, but significant numbers of sites are trying to sell you something, often something that will not help with the condition you have. Others provide alternative information with no medical basis at all. The web is not monitored; there is no Internet monarch determining what is posted there. So it’s important to beware, especially when it comes to information about a health condition.

We’ve taken this portal out for a test drive from time to time here on our staff. Library staff, like everyone else, can have health issues. I was gratified to hear from one of our staffers that they used the site and found lots of pertinent information that was immediately helpful to them.

The portal will have a more polished look soon, but I’d encourage you to take a look now. Get familiar with it, and the next time you have a health question, take a look there first. You can trust what you find.

Last week I mentioned climbing the stairs of the old public library in Ohio so that I could go to story time. When the summers came, I haunted that same library for summer reading club activities. For me, it was all about the joy of reading—well, that, and maybe getting out of doing household chores. I loved it, but I am sure I had no idea how important summer reading was.

Children intent on the story at the Mt. Hermon branch

Now, of course, library summer reading has been studied, as most programs are these days, for proof of effectiveness and measurement of outcomes. But no librarian is surprised to read what a difference it makes in the lives of children.

Dads love summer reading programs, too.

In her definitive and classic study, Summer Learning and the Effects of Schooling (Academic Press, 1978), Barbara Heyns followed sixth and seventh graders in the Atlanta public schools through two school years and the intervening summer. Among the findings of her research:

• The number of books read during the summer is consistently related to academic gains.
• Children in every income group who read six or more books over the summer gained more in reading achievement than children who did not.
• The use of the public library during the summer is more predictive of vocabulary gains than attending summer school.

Miss Candace reads a real "fish story."

The major factors determining whether a child read over that summer were:

1. Whether the child used the public library;
2. The child’s sex (girls read more than boys but also watched more TV);
3. Socioeconomic status; and
4. The distance from home to a library.

More than any other public institution, including the schools, the public library contributed to the intellectual growth of children during the summer.
If you need to be convinced of the importance of the public library in the lives of children, I invite you to come by and see us during any summer reading program. In the meantime, the pictures here, all taken in our libraries this summer, serve to show that reading is not only fundamental to school success—it’s also just plain good old-fashioned fun!

Crafts reinforce learning

Hi, and thanks for stopping by! We will be posting here about all things Pittsylvania County Library. Summer has started and we hope to see everyone out for all of our great summer reading programs. Keep checking this blog – or better yet, subscribe to the RSS – to get the scoop straight from the library director!