The Secret Lives of Book Club Sets

What becomes of old book club sets? The ones that haven’t been checked out in a while. You know the ones: they appeared on popular lists several years ago, prompting a flurry of patron requests. They had BIG STREAMING ADAPTATIONS, it says so right there on the covers, but the adaptations turned out pretty badly and the sets of 8, or 10, or even 15 now sit attracting only dust. Librarians need to figure out what to do with these books, which still retain obvious value.

Libraries need to be economical with space and for some a set of 10 hardbacks, for example, can take up quite a large footprint. Of course, there is a process for dealing with such things in every library – it’s called weeding. Weeded books may be offered as book donations, for sale, or end up being chucked.

If you’ve read this far, perhaps you are interested enough to consider a philosophical question. What is a weed? If you ask a botanist, they might say something like, “a weed is a label humans apply to plants we deem undesirable.” But there is no scientific classification for weeds like there is for ferns, for example. Usually, space is part of the issue with garden weeds, too. The botanist might remind us that a dandelion is a friend to a bee. The bee does not take the whole plant for itself, it sups what it needs and leaves the dandelion intact for the next patron.

The point of this *brilliant* metaphor

The Colorado Book Club Resource is a circulating collection, but also a sort of repository that gives new life to unused book sets. Thankfully, we have the space in the State Library – think of an open prairie dotted with easily discoverable wildflowers of all kinds! That doesn’t mean the collection is filled with bad, irrelevant titles, or that we take every set we’re offered. It is curated for book clubs, which today come in all shapes and sizes. You have your mystery book clubs, your romance book clubs, your local interest book clubs, your popular fiction book clubs, your horror book clubs, your post-apocalyptic book clubs, your nonfiction book clubs, your silent book clubs… Plenty of book clubs get their suggestions from the entertainment world or social media, and some even read books published before 2020! The collection answers to all these needs and more, representing a boon to Colorado’s library workers and community reading groups.

As our recent Fast Facts illustrated, lending is at an all time high and long may it continue. Library book donations account for at least half the collection (which just passed the 1,300 sets mark). Thank you if you have donated books to the collection in the past. Please reach out if you have unwanted book club sets needing to find their new forever homes. To do so, first check we don’t already have the title by searching the catalog. Then, send us an email with the title(s), author, number of copies, and condition.

Bonus: Make our book club sets discoverable in your local catalog!

At the risk of overextending the metaphor, if a book club set is a wildflower (and it definitely is, as we’ve established), how do “the bees” know where to find them? The answer is simple: flowers with their distinctive colors are discoverable to browsing bees! They find them because they are visible. We were recently approached by a library hoping to include our book club sets in their local catalog. Their plan is to direct the users who click on one of those items to the responsible staff member handling book club sets at their location. If you would like to do the same, you can now download all the MARC records from the Book Club Resource landing page (see the Handy Links section). The records will be periodically updated thanks to cataloging whiz, Amy Hitchner, who runs the popular Friday Grab Bag.