Dewey Donation System
February 22, 2008 - 7:50 pm
I admire Pamela Ribon for a number of reasons, but first among them is that she conceived of, and organizes the Dewey Donation System, a once a year charity drive that gets books into the hands of children without them. I will spare you my rant about how money is spent in America, except to say this: it isn’t being spent on books for libraries. In past years, Pam has organized random strangers on the internet to send books and monetary donations to a library system rebuilding after Katrina, send an entire village of children back to school after a Tsunami, restock shelves after wildfires ravaged San Diego’s public library system, and bring library assistance to the attention of communities and governments by helping Oakland’s library system get stronger and thrive. And she can apparently make you a scarf out of a pillow case, but that might just be a flickr rumour. But I digress.
What would your life be like right now if you hadn’t had access to books as a child? Would you be the adult you are today if you did not have regular exposure to books as a kid? It is a horrifying thought to me, so I sent the following books to the Children’s Institute, one of two libraries being helped this year:
- The Color of My Words
- Silent to the Bone
- The First Part Last
- Romiette and Julio
- The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place
(I love E.L. Konigsburg!)
The best part of this though, is knowing that somewhere, a librarian is sitting at his or her desk, when suddenly, out of nowhere, the Amazon boxes start arriving. Box after box of books off of their library wishlist, showing up out of the blue from perfect strangers. Hundreds of books, just appearing out of nowhere, and no idea how it is that everything you need is being sent to you in one fell swoop from total strangers. How fun is that? When people tell me about the horreur of the internet, and how you can’t trust people online, and how it is a phantom life made up of lonely pathetic people and predators, I think to myself, that isn’t the same internet I am on. My WWW is about communion, and community, and hundreds of strangers coming together once a year to blow a librarian or two’s mind. Its a good place to be.