“Take what ye can!”
“Give nothin’ back!”
Confession time. I’m a book pirate. Have been since my first library card. Some people you just can’t trust with books.
Blame my parents. My dad read my sister and me story after bedtime story, night after glorious night. My mom showed me where to find the treasure–our public library. She’d come home with an armful of Agatha Christie novels; I’d come home with a stack of Andrew Lang, Enid Blyton, E. E. Nesbitt and C.S. Lewis.
More what you’d call guidelines than actual rules
I sailed the seven seas for books. I pillaged my public library. My elementary school and junior high school libraries. Even my Sunday School library.
I had a very Captain Jack Sparrow attitude. I borrowed…with every intention of bringing them back. But I didn’t.
Not on time, anyway. I just couldn’t bear to part with my pirate’s hoard.
Once a pirate always a pirate
Today, I dig for treasure at 4 public libraries. I still come home with stacks of books, and I still can’t bear to return them. (Pirate!)
I pay a small fortune in library fines. So when I found this fun video, made by the librarian from Liberty Elementary School in Worthington, Ohio, I had to share.
I dedicate it to the fierce librarians of my childhood: Mrs. Hiebert, Mr. Hughes and Mrs. Woodhouse. And to my parents, of course, who made me a book pirate in the first place.
Arr!!
Give a shout-out to your favourite librarian. What book have you been tempted to “borrow…with every intention of bringing it back”?