Libraries

Last week, a House Appropriations subcommittee voted to recommend level funding for libraries in FY2018, which would mean roughly $231 million for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), $183 million for the Library Services and Technology Act, and $27 million for the Innovative Approaches to Literacy (IAL) program.

ALA president Jim Neal called the subcommittee vote “one important step in the lengthy congressional appropriations process,” but a development that nevertheless shows that “elected officials are listening to us and recognize libraries’ importance in the communities they represent.”

N. West Moss was the winner of the Post’s 2015 Great American Fiction Contest for “Omeer’s Mangoes,” which, with “Absence of Sound,” appears in her first short-story collection, The Subway Stops at Bryant Park (Leapfrog Press, 2017). This story first appeared in Neworld Review. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, McSweeney’s, and Brevity, among others.

These shelves exist because poet and novelist Richard Brautigan described a library of unpublished books in his 1971 novel, The Abortion: An Historical Romance. And 27 years ago in Vermont, a man named Todd Lockwood decided he would create the library for real. Lockwood fielded submissions from as far away as Saudia Arabia but in 1995, he ran out of money. The collection was orphaned until 2010, when John Barber, a Brautigan scholar, arranged to have the library brought to a new Vancouver home.

My English teacher claimed, that if I survive the first 20 pages of any book, the reading will get much easier because the words that occurred on those pages constitute 90% of all words in the book. So after you reach this threshold you don’t have to go back and forth to the dictionary. Was he right? (TLDR: Kind of.)