787.87 SUT (+audio)

Earlier this fall, Mary Beth (MB) and I left our city for a nearby village to spend some leisure time browsing, working and reading in their beautiful village library.

True story: Evanston, Illinois, where we live, is a city. Wilmette, to our north, is a village. I don't know why this is, but I'm sure there was a time when the distinction mattered a lot more than it does now.

At the library, we worked for a while, then did some relaxing stack wandering and book browsing. Shout out to Austin Kleon, whose Steal Like an Artist reminded me what a refreshing and affordable outing this can be. Eventually, we found ourselves in the crafts and hobbies section.

“Hey,” MB asked, “I wonder if they have your cigar box guitars book here.” We looked at where we thought it ought to be, but it wasn't there, so we headed to the card catalog. Well, we headed to the “card catalog”—the shiny computer terminal that replaced the many cubic yards and metric tons of oak cabinets, drawers and notecards that used to tell you where to look for books in the library.

My book, Cigar Box Guitars, wasn’t listed in their collection.

MB, ever resourceful and so often game for real life adventures, wanted to know if perhaps a nearby library had a copy of my book. We did a broader search and found that another nearby village, Morton Grove, owned a copy, and the status of that book was listed as AVAILABLE.

It was getting close to library closing time, but just as I was mentally filing this under [Adventure: Future], MB smiled that smile of hers and said, “Let’s go!”

Saying yes to MB's ideas has proven to be such a life enricher for me that quite often, even when I’m tired, I allow myself to be infected by her enthusiasm. I’m always glad I did.

We hurried off to my car and beat it to the Morton Grove Public Library.

Arriving just ten minutes before closing, we approached the front desk.

Me: “Can you tell me how to find a copy of a book called Cigar Box Guitars by David Sutton?”

MB: “He’s David Sutton.”

Librarian: “Oh, my!”

Not a minute later the slender young man handed us a 4"x 4" Post-It® note onto which he’d printed several numerals, a decimal point and the letters SUT.

“Crafts and hobbies,” he said, pointing to his right.

We thanked him and walked as fast as we could (running is frowned upon in public libraries) to the crafts and hobbies section where, two inches to the left of The First Fifty Songs You Should Play on the Banjo, stood my book, slender and majestic, with an official looking Dewey decimal sticker on its spine!

In the dozen or so years since Cigar Box Guitars was published, it had NEVER ONCE occurred to me to wonder if copies might be lurking in the collections of nearby libraries. Now I’m wondering what other libraries might have it, and if it might even be found in libraries very far from where it was written.

Are you a library goer? If you are, and if you have a minute the next time you’re in your local library, would you wander over to the crafts and hobbies section and take a look for me?

If you don’t see it, could you perhaps ask them to purchase one?

If you do see it, would you send me a picture and tell me what city, village, town or hamlet you found it in?

I’d love that, thanks.