Classic Letters

Every fall our town library holds a book sale. During the summer, folks in town donate their cast-offs by the bag, box and trunk full. Estimates vary, but a decent guess is that over 50,000 books are dropped off. These range from outgrown Junie B. Jones and last year’s popular book group picks (Eat, Pray, Love anyone?) to antique art books and signed first editions. A team of community volunteers sorts the books into logical-ish categories so that shoppers at the sale more easily find what interests them.

For the past four or five years, I have been one of those sorter volunteers, spending perhaps several dozen hours each summer opening the bags, boxes and trunks of books and walking the biographies over to the biography table, the humor books to the humor table, and so on. The donations are anonymous, but you can make a decent guess about the profile of the donor from the contents of a box of books. A box musty Reader’s Digest condensations means a parent is being moved into a nursing home. A box full of cookbooks mean that empty-nesters are moving to a smaller home. Scholastic book fair titles means the youngest child is now in high school. Self-help books imply a divorce.

There are many perks of being a book fair volunteer including the camaraderie with the other sorters and the good karma earned by participating in a gainful community effort (the money earned at the fair is used to make improvements at the library). But to me, the best part of volunteering is that the sorters get first crack at buying the donated books. $1.50 for trade paperbacks, $3.00 for hardcovers. If you’re unpacking a box and find a book that speaks to you, you get the right of first refusal on the purchase.

Last year, a gem I dug up was Letters to the Editor: Two Hundred Years in the Life of an American Town, edited by Gerard Stropnicky (cool name, by the way). Stropnicky plowed through two hundred years of letters to the editors of small town papers, primarily in the Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania area. The hot button issues of the day are illustrated through letters. Local men go to war. There are letters about it. The town plans to fluoridate the water. There are letters about it. There’s a change made to the comic strip Nancy. You get letters.

Through the letters, you are also introduced to many of the archetypes of small town letter writers: the prude, the school booster, the political extremist, the town crank, the moral arbiter, and so on. Here’s a classic moral arbiter letter printed in Letters to the Editor:

Dear Editor:

Just a few lines to advise the readers of this paper that there are two VERY contagious diseases going around. One is the lack of sympathy and the other is viciousness. It seems that the night air and late hours are very good for both diseases.

A Berwick RD 2 Reader, Berwick Enterprise, January 29, 1955

I’m not sure what nighttime has to do with it, but it seems to me that there are still outbreaks of those diseases from time to time. And what is there to do but write about it?