Library pioneer

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, September 17th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Lending Libraries, part two!

Last week we heard from families in Tennessee about their journey into the lending library movement.

Today, our coverage continues in Alabama. WORLD’s Myrna Brown introduces us to two more lending library families and the homeschool pioneer many believe started it all.

KAREN LAUGHLIN: We had consistent librarians. They were super friendly. They knew the kids' names. They were excited to serve homeschoolers. We would check out 50 books at a time.

MYRNA BROWN: When Karen Laughlin, her husband, and two children relocated to their 30-acre-home four years ago, their biggest challenge was the local public library.

LAUGHLIN: Though I found here, when I started using the public library, they seemed to be inconvenienced by me taking out that many books.

Eventually the books became an issue.

LAUGHLIN: Well, I mean, they mostly fit into two categories. One was political activism type things in baby board books. And then just the LGBTQ movement.

Laughlin says she took her complaints and ideas to the library’s director.

LAUGHLIN: And it was just no, no, no. So, the only other step at that point was school board or starting my own.

BROWN: What did you know about starting your own library?

LAUGHLIN: Nothing. I thought it was a revolutionary idea. Little did I know it’s been going on for years and years.

At least 30!

Michelle Howard is a librarian, curriculum writer and columnist. She’s also considered a pioneer in the private lending library movement. In the mid-1990’s Howard was a book-loving, homeschool mom of two boys.

MICHELLE HOWARD: At the time the American Library Association did not want a non-fiction book sitting on the shelf for more than two years and you were pushing it to have a fiction book on the shelf for five years. That stunned me because I thought of libraries as being archival of the best that was ever written.

Books written during the Golden Age of youth literature.

HOWARD: Which is basically like the late 1930s through the mid 1960s to the early 1970s.

Howard says she and a friend started stumbling upon these books at yard sales. From there Howard discovered an even deeper literary treasure trove.

HOWARD: That led me to the basement of whole huge library institutions where they had tens and tens of thousands of discarded books that they couldn’t sell at the time because this was before the internet.

She started buying the books in bulk. What happened next, she says, just came naturally. She started lending them out to other families.

HOWARD: And just at that time, friends of ours with a very large home were going to make a major two year travel around the United States and so they let us set up the library in their home. We had to add floor jacks below the floors to carry the weight and that library as you know is almost 30 years old now.

Howard lives in Florida now and runs a 42-thousand living books lending library. She predicts the lending library movement will only get bigger.

HOWARD: I believe that there are maybe 80 or so that are operating around the country. There’s one in Australia, one that I know of in England. But there are probably two to four hundred that are in development.

SOUND: [HAMMERING]

Or in Karen Laughlin’s case, re-development. It's been almost a year since she opened her tiny, three-thousand-book lending library in their new house. Now, they’re making renovations on the space.

LAUGHLIN: This gym will become a library and we’ll double our space.

PAYTON’S SON: Why is the cat in the hat orange? Why is his bowtie orange? Match his hat.

Fellow homeschool mom, Elsa Payton can’t wait to get her hands on more books that will occupy bigger shelves. Payton and her two sons were Laughlin’s first patrons.

ELSA PAYTON: I was like, I’m so excited. It wasn’t open yet at that time and I waited maybe a year.

Payton is part of a homeschool co-op and teaches history there. She’ll use each of the twenty books she’s checking out today in her lectures.

BROWN: How many in the co-op?

ELSA PAYTON: All together? Probably about fifty kids. We go all the way from preschool up to 13 and 14 year olds.

SOUND: [LAUGHLIN TAKING PICTURES OF BOOKS]

Laughlin pulls out her phone and starts taking pictures of the books going home with Payton.

LAUGHLIN: Right now we don’t have a scanning system and so I take pictures of everything and then when everyone leaves, I go ahead and enter them into my database by hand.

Laughlin calls it a labor of lending library love.

LAUGHLIN: When you’re a public library and you have tons of employees and funds and everything. That’s one thing. But when you’re alone and you’re homeschooling or working and you know making dinner and all these things, you’re never ready. But it doesn’t matter because you have some kind of resource that someone else can use.

AUDIO: I think your mama’s ready to go…

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Myrna Brown in Grand Bay, Alabama

AUDIO: We’re going home… yeah.. You’re ready….

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