By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The theme for the Wood County District Public Library’s summer reading program is “A Universe of Stories.”
On Thursday, July 18, the library’s foundation will host Novel Night with the goal of expanding that universe of stories for all the library’s users, from tots to elders.
Novel Night is the new iteration of the library’s annual Schedel Garden fundraiser. That event was held mid-summer for 10 years at the Elmore landmark.
The venue, however, has gotten a bit too cozy, said Library Director Michael Penrod. “We outgrew the venue. … People were shoulder-to-shoulder,” he said of last year’s event. It felt a bit “claustrophobic.”
So the fundraiser is coming home.
On Thursday the doors of the downtown Bowling Green library will open at 5 p.m., with activities getting underway at 5:30 and continuing through 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $100, $75 of which is tax deductible. Only 125 will be sold. About 100 were already spoken for a week away from the event.
“It will be fun to take this beloved event that we knew how things fit at Schedel and seeing what the event looks like as it unfolds in this new space.”
The library will be transformed. The information area under the staircase will become a bar. Computer terminals in the atrium will be cleared away so gift baskets and a gift card tree for the silent auction can be displayed.
Book cases and seating will be moved, and a buffet table with hot and cold hors d’oeuvres will be set up in the Children’s Place, right in front of the castle. (The library will be closed Thursday so the event can be set up.)
Guest will be able to wander throughout the library hobnobbing and noshing. Michele Raine, the assistant director and adult services librarian, and Maria Simon, the children’s services librarian, will be on hand to answer questions about services offered.
Those services range from book discussion groups, night sky watching, cooking demonstrations, and concerts.
The core of the library’s work remains loaning out books in all their forms — audio, ebook, picture, large print, hard cover and paperback. Circulation continues to climb. In 2018, patrons checked out 744,000 items, an increase of 8 percent from 2017.
Penrod is insistent that the library’s patrons deserve above average library. While the national average is for libraries to spend 11.5 percent of their budgets on new materials, Penrod budgets 14 percent, $338,000, of monies generated by taxes for materials.
The library works best, he said, as a public-private partnership. That’s where the foundation’s fundraiser fits in. All the proceeds go toward buying new materials. “This really allows our collection to remain robust and fresh.”
While books are a constant, their format is not. “What’s changed is a big chunk is virtual,” Penrod said.
And ebooks are more expensive by far than their physical counterparts. A book that can be purchased for $19 in hard cover, may cost as much as $100 as an ebook. And then after that ebook has been used for a certain number of times, 20 say, it disappears and the library must purchase it again from the publisher.
Penrod wants a patron to be able to download an ebook version of the newest best seller as quickly as they can from a commercial source.
If the waiting list grows, the library will purchase a couple more copies. “It’s the private fundraising that allows us to remain competitive.”
Last year, when 100 tickets were sold (a few people having to be turned away), the event brought in $140,000.
The event is made possible, he said, by the work of the foundation and support of the community.
“The foundation is really going all out to have a wonderful event,” Penrod said.
That includes soliciting a range of auction items (https://www.wcdpl.org/Auction-items) from a dozen cookies to a week in a vacation home in Mexico. There’s Labino glass and special art-related and restaurant excursions. Attendees can bid on a dinner for six with BGSU President Rodney Rogers and his wife, Dr, Sandra Earle. Artwork is also on the block including the opportunity to have a piece created specifically for the winning bidder by Portraits in Color. The Exchange Club contributed a wagon-full of toys.
Shad Ridenour conducts the auction.
When the library announced the change in venue, Gene Klotz of Klotz, approached Penrod and offered to provide floral arrangements and plants to decorate the library for the event.
“Seeing how this community values this library is what’s kept me here for 23 years,” the library director said
Bidders, Penrod said, show their loyalty to the library by bidding up the items.
“When folks don’t even need what they’re bidding on and pay way more than face value, that really does choke me up. That level of trust just means the world to me.”
Penrod knows from his own experience the value of books. Growing up in Southeast Ohio, he didn’t have access to a public library. But his parents encouraged reading and learning, and every week he could pick out a book to buy from the Revco pharmacy. He loved “cheesy science fiction and Classics Illustrated comic books.”
He went to Ohio University, the first member of his family to go to college. He got a work study job in the library. His reaction? “Wow, this is awesome.”
For Penrod “books opened an entire world to me as a child.”
Now he sees that happen in the library he directs. Recently a 7-year-old boy gleefully showed him and Simon a picture book that he had written and created.
“This is what it’s all about. He was so excited to come in and share the book he wrote,” Penrod said. “Novel Night is helping us expand the number of stories we can offer.”
