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February 24 Newsletter

February 24 Newsletter

HPL Newsletter Feb 24

February 01, 2024

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What’s new at the library?

Cooking with Caleigh

Upcoming Programs

Calendar of Events

Art Exhibit

Photography by Lee Ingraham

If you haven’t been in to see Lee Ingraham’s composite photography yet, there’s still time. His photography will be on display until mid March.

Romance Reads for February

Mad About You by Mhairi McFarlane
The Wake-Up Call by Beth O’Leary
The Good Part by Sophie Cousens
Cleat Cute by Meryl Wilsner
The Gentleman’s Gambit by Evie Dunmore
Witch of Wild Things by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland
Accidentally Engaged by Farah Heron
Hana Khan Carries On by Uzma Jalaluddin

Recommend a Book

Read a really good book recently that you think other people should read as well? Let us know and we’ll share it in a future newsletter!

Request a Recommendation

Want a personalized recommendation? Fill out the form to let us know what kind of book you’re looking for!

Suggest an Item for purchase

Want to read, watch, or listen to something the library doesn’t own? Let us know and we will consider purchasing it for our collection.

New Books

From the Director

As Director of a small village public library, I never know what the day will bring. Often, it’s sitting at a desk entering numbers into a spreadsheet. Other times it’s writing a column for the monthly newsletter. And every once in a while, you have to get into a police car and give a statement.

About a month ago, I received a phone call from Brookfield Town Supervisor Loren Corbin. He told me that the Little Free Library (LFL) that we installed and maintain in that town was knocked over. Mind you, the LFL was in a parking lot adjacent to a busy intersection in Brookfield, so my first thought was that it was an accident. When I arrived to pick it up, the word ‘accident’ was upgraded to ‘incident.’

Supervisor Corbin said that they were able to obtain security footage from a few nights ago wherein a truck hit the LFL from one side, drove around, and hit it again from the other side. The video was recorded at approximately 3 a.m. on Saturday, December 23.

I can’t begin to speculate the reasons why someone would take such offense at a free community resource, especially in a town that has no library of its own. Brookfield has been very kind to us in supporting our budget, and in addition to traditional library services for their residents, we have tried our best to offer the programs and services to the best of our ability. We offer free delivery to their patrons, have worked with them for Summer Reading Programming in the past, and installed this LFL.

It isn’t every day that I have to deal with vandalism. In fact, the last time we dealt with anything similar to this was when someone came to our building and affixed “White Lives Matter” stickers to select nonfiction titles in June 2022. With that offense and this one, we filed a police report and spoke publicly about the incident. It’s difficult to know what to do in situations like these, and even more difficult to sum up those complex thoughts into a newsletter column. This is probably my tenth attempt writing about it, but talking about it is pretty much all we can do at this point in time.

This isn’t the end of the Brookfield Little Free Library. It’s important that we continue our outreach efforts, and we plan to re-install our unit back in its location. In order to do this, we wanted to ensure that the effort to remove the LFL is taken seriously, so filing a police report was a necessary step in the process. Thank you to the Madison County Sheriff's Department and the Town of Brookfield for being so helpful. We know this was an isolated incident and that for years the Little Free Library was a positive presence in your community. We can’t wait to get it back where it belongs and help out our service area as best we can.

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