Requested at the Library

Imperfect Homeschooler wrote a couple of months ago about The Dangerous Book for Boys. A week later, I was visiting a mutual friend, Jane, and that book was lying on the kitchen table. I picked it up and started flipping through it. It looks great!

My daughter Rachel (the former bookstore guru/junkie/employee) tells me that the book was flying off the shelves at Borders. The store could NOT keep it in stock in sufficient quantities to appease the customers.

So today I thought I'd see if I could pick it up at the library. I doubted that it would be checked in, given the vast popularity of the book.

IT'S NOT EVEN IN THE CATALOG!

Here's where it's nice to be persistent and pesty regular patrons and thus know the librarian. I asked about the book, and she was interested. She gave me a request form, so I could ask the library to purchase it. She'd never heard of the book, but thought it sounded pretty interesting. Then curiosity grabbed hold of the staff in the children's section. They decided to look up info on this Dangerous Book. The head librarian was amazed! She said most books will have about 15-20 available for libraries to purchase. This one has 2198 books available. I asked what that meant. Did it mean it wasn't selling very many? She said that it meant just the opposite. She said it's so popular that they have to keep a large stash of these books handy so as to get them out to the libraries. I think that in itself convinced her they needed some copies.

We made the request, so we get to read it before anyone else may check it out. I hope it doesn't arrive the same week as Harry Potter! We're top of the list for that too.

If anybody hasn't heard of this book yet, and would like to get a little taste of what it's about, Barbara linked to a Washington Post article about the author and his ideas that caused him to write this book. It's about boys being manly, and not being girly (quite the unusual notion in the last couple of decades).