Free for All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Ganstas in the Public Library / Don Borchert Memoir / 223 pp.

Free for All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Ganstas in the Public Library is Don Borchert’s memoir about working in an urban public library. All of the chapters are divided by theme, are self-contained, and range through the emotions. Many of his stories are character-based, taking a type of public library regular and telling their story. Uniting a few of his stories are observations of how the library has affected these people’s lives. From his introduction: “[T]here is the belief that once you begin to open books, you will become a better person. It is Pandora’s box, but in a good way. You are inching toward the promised land, page by page. And it doesn’t matter if you subscribe to this theory or not. The subscription has already been bought and paid for.”

While I did enjoy this book, I did not enjoy it as much as I thought I would. I did find it interesting that it received quite varied Amazon reviews. While I enjoyed the book, I think the writing could have been improved to make the stories more vivid, and I was occasionally rankled by a few blanket statements about libraries or librarians.

A few stories that stood out to me were the story of the man who got upset when his library card number had two sixes next to each other, the man who wanted the circulation people to alphabetize his books for him, and the Mother who tried to scam her way out of hundreds of dollars of fines but was allowed by the library to check out children’s books for her kids.

MOBIUS, Amazon