Librarianship hasn't always meant sitting in front of a screen and navigating databases. Today, Public Services Librarian Kelly Clever tells us about The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes, in which librarians deliver reading materials on horseback.
This book was recommended to me by a friend who knows that I grew up in the mountains and had horses. For some reason she said that the based-on-real-history novel about the "pack horse librarians" of Appalachia made her think of me...
Alice, a bored and frustrated young Englishwoman, falls fast and hard for a hunky traveling American from Kentucky. The two young people quickly marry and head back to the States for what Alice expects will be a glamorous socialite life in Lexington.
As it turns out, however, Alice is headed for a small mining town and marriage proves to be anything but what she expected. Desperate to get out of the house, she volunteers to ride for the new pack horse library and help provide the isolated cabins in the mountains with reading material. It's hard and sometimes dangerous work, but Alice soon finds that the elements and the distrustful mountain folk are the least of her problems.
I like to think that I would have made a good pack horse librarian if I had lived in eastern Kentucky back in the 1930s. My dear departed pony, Buddy, would have been deeply annoyed by the mileage and the weight of the saddlebags, but I expect we would have done okay.
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