To the Editor:

The Board of Trustees, staff, and volunteers of the C.H. Booth Library sincerely thank the Friends of the Library for coordinating and hosting last Sunday’s Book Donation Day. As they do throughout year in small batches, on Sunday, October 17, the Friends accepted thousands of new, used, and antique books, puzzles, DVDs, CDs, LPs, video games, and board games, and the drive was a huge success.

If you’ve never seen it, the process that scores of Friends put each of these materials through is thorough and efficient. After it is accepted, each and every individual item is evaluated on a number of criteria and sorted into categories for later sale. The amount of work completed by many individuals is impressive and the sheer amount of materials that the Friends go through is massive.

Special thanks go out to the Friends’ Board of Directors for ingenuity during a time of pandemic and for unwavering support of the library: Toni Earnshaw, Ellen Speirs, Lynda Doyle, Jane Gatenby, Marge Gingolaski, Nancy Dvorin, Anne Rothstein, and especially Denise Kaiser.

The library literally could not do what it does for Newtown without the Friends. Yes, the library is majority funded by the municipality (a bargain at $48.50 in taxes per capita in 2020), but funds that the Friends raise and donate through book sales support the library’s materials collections, programs for children, youth, and adults, databases like Ancestry.com, streaming media services like hoopla and Kanopy, and special projects that enhance the patron experience. The Friends and the library support a literate, educated, vibrant, and healthy community.

Thank you to all who donated, and applause to the Friends! If you know one, thank them and if you don’t and have a couple of hours a month to volunteer, call 203-270-4537 or visit https://newtownnc.galaxydigital.com for more information.

Douglas Lord

Library Director

Cyrenius H. Booth Library