Catholic and religious books at your public library?

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Beryllos

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With CAF closing, we all might have a little more time for reading in the New Year.

A suggestion: if your city/town has a public library, see if they have books on the Catholic faith and related topics.

You might be surprised, as I was. The library in my New England town has hundreds of books on Christianity, Jesus, Catholicism, the Bible, and other topics of faith.

If access to your library is restricted due to covid, you may still be able to search their catalog online and get library books by curbside pickup or another way.

The online search tool probably also gives you access to the wider selection of books at other libraries in your region.

Wishing all a New Year of increasing faith, hope, and love.
 
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Our library also offers online ebooks/audiobooks via the Hoopla and Libby apps. Hoopla in particular has Catholic/Christian titles available.

There are many free Catholic books on Project Gutenberg and LibriVox
 
Libraries will respond to demand. If you request books and they don’t have them they will be more likely to purchase them because they have received the request. Especially if they have been published fairly recently.
If you get mailers from Ignatius press, Tan publishing, Sophia Press and some of the other Catholic publishing companies, look through the mailers for books that you would l ove to see available in your library for you and your neighbors and their children and grandparents and order away.
Lives of the saints? Quality fiction? The Vatican Cookbook? A movie about Saint Rita?
The library can purchase them all!
You’ll be doing a favor for yourselves and your community.
You might want to specify that you want the Ignatius press Shakespeare or edition of Sigrid Undset’s novel so that you get the great forwards and commentaries to go with the book-otherwise you might wind up with a generic edition.
May God bless you,
jt
 
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Yes, please, I second that suggestion.
Please request books that you are looking for that your library doesn’t have.
They all have some kind of process for this.
You might not be aware that a lot of books go out of print after a year or so, so request them while they’re new.
 
You can add an extension on Amazon so every time you look up a book, the extension searches libraries in your area to see if that book is in their database.
 
My city’s library built a nice new building with lots of spiffy new technology a couple years back. They opted to have a big sale and divest a large portion of their print books. And they also started charging $3.00 per Interlibrary Loan. 😠 So some good, some not so good.

One thing I’ve noticed since the new building opened is that the new titles definitely skew liberal progressive and woke. I wish I had lots of money that I could buy and donate some really well written and intellectually hard hitting books that represent the Catholic and socially conservative viewpoints for a counterbalance.
 
One thing libraries do nowadays (including Catholic school libraries FYI) is track check out patterns and discard less requested materials.
That means that you need to request books and check out books which you would like to see available for yourself and for others.
At school, it means asking the school to purchase or keep certain books and asking your child to check them out and bring them home for family reading time.
Otherwise, your school library will begin to look like a scholastic book sale with lots of captain underoos and misanthrope Nate books and very little quality writing or Catholic sensibility/values.
 
I work at a public library and am in grad school for Library Science. My library buys and weeds (discards collection materials) according to demand. Book requests do get fulfilled in my system. To balance out the tide of far left material (I live in Brooklyn, NY so that’s a given) I plan to start recommending book lists from a contrasting perspective. I want to propose one with Catholic authors to start and see how it goes. We are free to put up any booklist without oversite and see the response. We already have a great collection in our Religion section but I am now curious to see the circulation statistics for each religion.
 
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SisterIncognita said:
My city’s library built a nice new building with lots of spiffy new technology a couple years back. They opted to have a big sale and divest a large portion of their print books. And they also started charging $3.00 per Interlibrary Loan. 😠 So some good, some not so good.

One thing I’ve noticed since the new building opened is that the new titles definitely skew liberal progressive and woke. I wish I had lots of money that I could buy and donate some really well written and intellectually hard hitting books that represent the Catholic and socially conservative viewpoints for a counterbalance.
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At my library system, if you tried to donate a bunch of stuff that the administration doesn’t like, they would just put it in the booksale at my library.
If you request them however, they will get it through their heads that there some of their patrons want to read Christian / Catholic books.
 
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Yes,
My public library will not take donations for purpose other than resale.
It’s best to request books if you want to see them as a presence on library shelves.
 
Our library system where I live is wonderful. Any book I’ve ever requested, they’ve been able to find and get for me to loan. Sometimes it’s taken a week or two, but if it’s still in print, they find a copy!

Of all the things our taxes pay for, the returns on the library system is the best bang for the buck ever! Our library is also greatly appreciated by the citizens, too. Their fundraisers seem to always garner more than asked and when discussions began about closing one of the old branches, people put up such an uproar that they quickly dropped the idea!
 
When I have worked in public schools and had errands into the library, I always changed books with “iffy” content on display to books with better quality and content. Since we had no librarian, we all had to to our part of keeping the library “tidy”.

My local public library was a “safe place” to borrow “Catholic books” when I knew I had to make my way over from a protestant congregation to the Catholic Church. I found a surprising amount of both classical (St Augustine and buddies) to “alive” authors like father Wilfrid Stinissen OCD and others from my diocese. I could notice a depth in the Catholic/Orthodox authors compared to contemporary Lutheran.

The local libraries are closed due to Covid but I have several piles of books stacked on the floor… The diocese and our Catholic publishers are working hard to translate books and documents into Swedish as well as encourage those with knowledge in areas where there are no suitable books (or none at all) in Swedish to write them.
 
Maybe some day, we’ll see a new edition with
Translated by HeDa
on the cover!
 
As a library professional, I will share some insight into why donated books usually go to book sales. We end up with huge tubs of donated books every week. We accept anything donated as a goodwill gesture to the community that takes pride in their charity. We don’t want to tell someone their donation isn’t worth anything so we just accept with a smile. It also keeps that staff employed tbh. Someone has to process these donations, so I’m happy to give youth and entry-level workers a job. Most of the materials are out of date, things that we already have in abundance, bad condition, or we know from demand will not circulate well. The rare items we do take and put into the collection may be any valuable things that could go into a special collection. We have had estates donate specific collections that have historical value to the community. But even still, just because something is old does not mean it is appraised at a high worth. Even what is put out at book sales is not representative of the volume we receive in donations. The vast majority of books are up for grabs for staff to take, and the remainder is usually sold off to resellers who buy by weight. This is where a lot of those people selling used books as street vendors or thrift shops source books.
 
jeannetherese said:
Libraries will respond to demand. If you request books and they don’t have them they will be more likely to purchase them because they have received the request
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It depends who is in charge of fulfilling requests. I have had faithful Catholic book requests denied and when questioned they are quick to point out they have "Catholic’ books but then you look on the shelves and it’s the usual ‘catholic’ books by liberal dissenters and anti Catholics.
 
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This. I know about the donations in general, and our library has a little bookstore in the new main library which is nice, plus quarterly sales (none of these going on during Covid).

But what I’d like to see is more faithful Catholic books and not so much woke stuff. I might get gutsy and put in a request now and then post pandemic. Nothing to lose by trying.
 
I would just like to note: Be careful of what “Catholic” books you find in the public libraries.

Some books (like ones published by Ignatius Press) are quite good. But it’s also not uncommon for public libraries to have:
  • heretical Catholic books, written by heretical Catholics.
  • anti-Catholic books written by anti-Catholics
  • books about the Catholic Church written by non-Catholics who get somethings wrong
  • etc.
So I highly suggest to always research to see if the author is a good Catholic writer and/or if the publisher is a faithful Catholic publisher.

Merry Christmas and God Bless
 
So right you are - and I even used to work in a Catholic bookstore that was part of a chain. Some of the books we got were not what I would’ve chosen to carry if I were in charge! What sometimes happened was that the buyers took recommendations or promos from publishers or distributors and there wasn’t someone in charge of making sure the book selections were really orthodox. That didn’t seem to be a huge priority. I even mentioned that I wished I could offer my assistance in that regard to the book buyer, but there wasn’t a practical way to make it happen and again, probably not a big priority to them or it would’ve already been in place.
 
Beryllos said:
A suggestion: if your city/town has a public library, see if they have books on the Catholic faith and related topics.
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Parishes often also have a “library” which books that parishioners can barrow.
 
runningdude said:
Parishes often also have a “library” which books that parishioners can barrow.
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One of our churches had that and I really miss that parish library once we moved.

Don’t Catholic books still carry an imprimatur.?
 
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