I have a suggestion for the city budget crunchers -and pertaining
to the library system- Why not start to charge a small fee for checking out
a book? An amount like 50 cents. Also, they could sell stuff in the
library, greeting cards, papers or discard books, even t-shirts.
In the art gallery business some years ago there was the Rifle
Sport gallery (so named because it was located upstairs from a place on
lower Hennepin (old block E) where you shoot rifles for sport). It is
difficult to impossible to get a gallery to pay it's way as lots of
galleries, a few people come and look and nobody buys a thing.
So this Rifle Sport Gallery went to selling under-a-dollar priced
items, hand printed greeting cards, t-shirts, I don't know what all, but
through that business they got more shoppers and art buyers and they
survived for a time.
Kind of in line with the planned new library where some eating
places plus some retail is plannned to help with revenue.
I used to go to the Central Library downtown -usually on some
mission to get some particular info- and it was disgusting the outer hall
way was used by the bums to stay warm -or cool- and usually you could smell
the urine -the bums were usually drunks too. I wouldn't criticize the bums
so much as the library and city for having been so defunct about the
function of their facilities.
I never heard of any law saying the libraries can't sell and promote
stuff, like the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, -periodically they have some
particular art, like 65 landscapes from a particular artist or a 'group' of
art of whatever kind and they give out notices about it, often it is
borrowed art so it has to go back eventually,
--Why couldn't the libraries promote subject matter, tell something
interesting about it, like medievel history, Francis Hackett biography of
Henry the 8th, or such like that, early history of China, -or maybe the
ancients, like Egyptian, Greek and Roman history, maybe they could
promote -for a time- all books on Atlantis or of 'the gods from outerspace',
stuff that would intrigue and attract patrons. Then they could sell stuff
on the subject matter as well as to have books to check out on it.
Why are those people paid huge salaries to just sit there in these
tombs of books -not promote anything or take in money to help pay the bills.
I know public libraries in America got started with Andrew Carnegie funding
them, but that shouldn't mean that forever they just do nothing but dust
books and draw pay.
James Jacobsen // Whittier
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