Library Charity

"Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to be free."  This is not the slogan of the Point Roberts Library's magazine exchange.  One might think that putting signs on the cart indicating that it is a 'magazine exchange' and 'free magazines' would make it clear that this is not a place to leave your airline brochures for travel to Turkey.  Doubtless some people are going to Turkey this year, but it seems very unlikely to me that they would ever think to go to the Library's magazine exchange cart to find information about such a trip.  You go to the magazine exchange cart to find a copy of Wired, or The National Geographic, O, Smithsonian, Harper's, etc.

I went by the library today to do my weekly (when I'm here) tidying-up.  And what did I find today?  Well, maybe it's the Christmas season and people have lost their wits; or maybe it was the very cold weather last week that caused no blood to flow to their brains.  What I found were a lot of old newspapers and a spontaneous outpouring of catalogs, particularly from LL Bean and Land's End.  Maybe a dozen of one of them.  Some person (the LL Bean contributor, I think) had carefully cut out the back-page mailing label in exactly the same way on all those catalogs, making it clear that these weren't accidentally dropped off at the library.  The other set of catalogs apparently came in packages because they had no printed labels requiring removal.  Just a little reminder, folks: we all get those catalogs.  We don't need to pass them around.  What the contributors of catalogs might need to do is contact the web site that permits you to request that companies stop sending you catalogs. 

There are some people, I guess, who think that leaving something in a recycle zone automatically gives value to objects that have no value.  Do these people also give their worn out underwear to clothing drives?  Keep your catalogs to yourself, I ask.  Politely, if possible; like the Grinch, if not.  No more difficult for you to cart them to the dump than it is for me.