Collar tips and walls of books

Work for me today. Ady took Davies and Scarlett off with him for the day and they did the rounds of some London stores taking in Ikea and Costco where they particularly enjoyed looking at some crabs and lobster. Ady tells me they also had an interesting conversation about suffragettes. They did come home for lunch but headed off again and were actually home about half an hour after me in the end.

I had a good day at work. We were short staffed which meant I spent the entire morning on the enquiry desk. James, who is 18 and wants to be Prime Minister one day was wearing a skinny tie and I suggested he’d look good with collar tips on. No one else seemed to even know what collar tips were so I spent the first half hour or so googling for images of collar tips. The best one I found showed the cast of Beverley Hills 90210 which sealed it for me as a winning look but didn’t do much in convincing James. We did a bit of a straw poll of borrowers but most of them seemed to either say ‘collar tips? what are collar tips?’ or said unless he was moving to America then no. I suggested it was merely that Lancing is not ready for such trend setting.

I have since been reminiscing about my own western fashion in my teens when I went through a phase of wearing denim shirts (complete with collar tips), a waistcoat and cowboy boots.

A regular borrower came in then with her two children (one of whom came to the last Chatterbooks sessions). I talked to her son for a while and when his mum said he had to ask me a question because we were sitting at the ‘Information Desk’ his question was ‘how many books are there in the library?’ I said I didn’t know exactly but I’d always thought there were more books just in Lancing than you could read in a lifetime and we speculated on this for a while. They went off to look for books and I did some research about reading speeds and average words per book. I learnt the accepted fast average for actual comprehension is between 200 and 300 words per minute, an average word count per book is about 80000 which gives an average read time of just over 5 hours for an average book. If you called that an average of one book read per day it would seem fair.

I then counted the average number of books on a shelf and made it about 30, most of our 4foot fixtures have 4 shelves but often the top shelf is display only so only has about 4 books on it, so I averaged 100 books per 4ft section of shelving. Of which we have 56 of books downstairs in the library, so 5600 before we count books on tape and books on cd, aswell as films and music.

Oh what a productive morning 🙂

After lunch I did several stints on the counter aswell as some more work on a header board for an Arts and Crafts display I’m doing next month.

Back home we’d had a couple of replies to my batch of emails sent out yesterday and have booked two more hosts. Thanksto an interesting reply from one we have asked for a 3 week stay with them which if they agree to means we have almost half the first three months booked up. We have had quite a lot of non-responders though so may have to look at some filling in time or dotting about a bit more.

Eventually the others arrived home and the kids played in the garden for a while before coming in as they’d been in the car for far too long today. We read several chapters of King of the Cloud Forest before bed.