Our Town: The Library

When we visited St. Andrews the spring before we moved here, one of the things I checked out right away was the library. I wanted to know what books were available for Jonah. To be honest, I was really disappointed and that was the number one reason we shipped a pallet from the states. My book loving boy needed mounds of good children's literature to read, love, and help him understand his own story. And, I needed to share stories and illustrations with him from beautiful well crafted books. After Vancouver and Seattle public library sales we had a well stocked children's library and about half of it traversed the sea to join us here.

My initial disappointment with the library meant that we didn't visit it often our first year in St. Andrews (every 3 weeks or so). But after the first year, Jonah began to want to read chapter books and more picture books than we had, so we began visiting the library more regularly (almost weekly) and I've grown to enjoy our visits. I'm more familiar with british authors and recognize there is more available than I first realized. (Though, the collection does have major gaps and there are reasons for this. The biggest problem is that they pay a company to send them children's books, which means the librarians have no control over the quality and diversity of books they receive.)

But in the end, we love books and we truly have come to love our library. We always have our card maxed out and are often calling in books from other libraries in the kingdom of Fife. We've discovered new books and new authors and Jonah loves that the librarians write him emails when books we order in come (That's right, no automated system! They actually write to Jonah; a couple of the librarians know him and write fun little emails!) It is really a good place this little library.