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Just Another Day At Your Local Public Library: An Insider's Tales Of Library Life
Library humorist Roz Warren, author of the popular Our Bodies, Our Shelves: A Collection of Library Humor, is back with a new book about the joys and challenges of library life, Just Another Day at Your Local Library: An Insider's Tales of Library Life. Roz, whose work has appeared everywhere from The Funny Times to The New York Times, will make you smile, laugh out loud and maybe even groan with disbelief as she shares her real-life stories about what goes on behind the scenes at your local public library.
What really happens behind the circulation desk? And in the stacks? And what does your favorite librarian REALLY think of you? Roz, who has been featured on both Morning Edition and The Today Show, tells all! What's the nuttiest excuse ever given for returning a book late? The most shocking sight captured by a library security camera? The funniest location a misplaced DVD has been found? What simple thing can you do to make a librarian's day? In twenty-six entertaining essays, you'll meet librarians looking for love, coping with challenging patrons, dreaming impossible dreams, finding amazing surprises in the book drop and saving lives. The most closely guarded library secrets will be revealed. You'll never look at your local public library the same away again!
What really happens behind the circulation desk? And in the stacks? And what does your favorite librarian REALLY think of you? Roz, who has been featured on both Morning Edition and The Today Show, tells all! What's the nuttiest excuse ever given for returning a book late? The most shocking sight captured by a library security camera? The funniest location a misplaced DVD has been found? What simple thing can you do to make a librarian's day? In twenty-six entertaining essays, you'll meet librarians looking for love, coping with challenging patrons, dreaming impossible dreams, finding amazing surprises in the book drop and saving lives. The most closely guarded library secrets will be revealed. You'll never look at your local public library the same away again!
164 pages, Paperback
Published March 15, 2017
12 people are currently reading
508 people want to read
About the author
Roz Warren
28 books35 followersRoz Warren writes for everyone from the Funny Times to the New York Times, has been featured on The Today Show and Morning Edition, and is the author of the books Our Bodies, Our Shelves: Library Humor and Just Another Day At Your Local Public Library, both of which you should buy immediately.
http://www.rosalindwarren.com
http://facebook.com/writerrozwarren
http://www.rosalindwarren.com
http://facebook.com/writerrozwarren
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
June 13, 2022
I stumbled across this book online and thought the cover was funny (we also make up BINGO cards like this at our library). Unfortunately the content was mostly verbatim Facebook comments from questions posed by the author, and from the sounds of it, her followers are mostly older librarians with "boomer humor." One essay about single librarians made us all sound like desperate cat ladies who would love to be picked up by a patron (if there were single male patrons who weren't homeless, mentally ill, or just plain gross). In another essay the author congratulated herself on waiving fines for a Black patron. One chapter was all tweets from an anonymous librarian's account - overall this collection just felt lazy. I wish it had been funnier, because there are so many strange and wild things that happen at libraries, but at least it was short.
August 24, 2017
Thanks to a Goodreads contest, I got a copy of this wonderful book. A librarian writes about the joys and the not-so-joyful aspects of working in a library today: Crazy excuses for late returns, strange stuff in the book drop and weird requests from people. This is a great book to read and I highly recommend it.
January 18, 2019
Fun, quick, relatable read!
April 20, 2017
We all love Roz. She has been our neighbor for many years and now that our daughter has learned to love the Library we enjoy seeing her at work when we drop by. Roz has amused us personally and professionally and this book is yet another enjoyable experience from our friend over the hedge. Way to go Roz! We love that you are enjoying such success and just know that if all of this never came to pass we would love you no less. Thanks for the book and I am giving it all my 5 stars since I see no need to keep any of them in reserve.
March 30, 2017
This follow up book of humorous essays to Our Bodies, Our Shelves, is NOT disappointing. A mild-mannered library worker, Roz Warren has a knack for turning an average day in a library into a laugh-out-loud experience. Lesson here: Always appreciate your librarians. They are truly unsung heroes and heroines!
December 27, 2018
“Just Another Day at Your Local Public Library- An Insider’s Tales of Library Life” by Bala Cynwyd, PA librarian Roz Warren should have been funny but wasn’t. Her narrative is a stream of complaining about patrons and she also “confessed” that much of the content was derived from other librarians’ posts on her blog. The funny, light read I was hoping for with this book didn’t happen.
November 13, 2019
If you thought libraries were dull, Just Another Day at Your Local Public Library: An Insider’s Tale of Library Life by Roz Warren will prove that you’re dead wrong. I’m taking a quick break this week from mental health books because I know Roz from over at Medium.com and she’s hilarious.
The book is based on Roz’s own experience as a librarian and responses from other librarians to questions she posed on Facebook.
Here are some highlights:
One librarian was accused of “making children turn gay” because there were LGBT books in the library’s junior section.
“A patron whose internet I blocked lodged a formal complaint against me for interfering with his ‘basic human right to watch pornography.’”
What’s the best excuse for not returning a library book? “Destroyed in a prison riot” and “I lost it in a tornado” were my favourites.
One patron “brought in a mounted wildebeest head and asked if we could store it in the archives for the summer.”
Apparently, pooping in random places is a regular occurrence in libraries. You can also find quite the odd hodgepodge of items in the book drop, including a dead rabbit, a live lobster, and a live chicken.
Want to make your favourite librarian happy? Roz suggests that you “don’t use risqué photos, strips of bacon, cigarette butts or unused condoms as bookmarks.” And while you’re at it, please be at least “kind of sober” when you visit the library.
This book is laugh out loud hilarious. The guinea pigs probably wondered what I was choking on. If you’re a library patron this will open your eyes to a whole new world of library adventures. And be careful the next time you’re dropping off a book – those lobster claws can hurt!
The book is based on Roz’s own experience as a librarian and responses from other librarians to questions she posed on Facebook.
Here are some highlights:
One librarian was accused of “making children turn gay” because there were LGBT books in the library’s junior section.
“A patron whose internet I blocked lodged a formal complaint against me for interfering with his ‘basic human right to watch pornography.’”
What’s the best excuse for not returning a library book? “Destroyed in a prison riot” and “I lost it in a tornado” were my favourites.
One patron “brought in a mounted wildebeest head and asked if we could store it in the archives for the summer.”
Apparently, pooping in random places is a regular occurrence in libraries. You can also find quite the odd hodgepodge of items in the book drop, including a dead rabbit, a live lobster, and a live chicken.
Want to make your favourite librarian happy? Roz suggests that you “don’t use risqué photos, strips of bacon, cigarette butts or unused condoms as bookmarks.” And while you’re at it, please be at least “kind of sober” when you visit the library.
This book is laugh out loud hilarious. The guinea pigs probably wondered what I was choking on. If you’re a library patron this will open your eyes to a whole new world of library adventures. And be careful the next time you’re dropping off a book – those lobster claws can hurt!
May 2, 2018
ok compilation of humorous responses by other librarians to questions/topics she poses [worst excuse you got for a late return; how do you handle strange or loud or rude patrons?; do customers hit on you? how about those stacks of tax forms and instructions amirite?]
i like to think i'm funny or at least appreciate others who are, but i don't think i have the same sense of humor as the author -- a lot of it just sounded like frustrating interactions with entitled people, which are a dime a dozen if you've had any sort of job entailing interaction with the public [don't get Barack Obama or me started about Baskin-Robbins customers!].
might have helped to elaborate more on the particularly good stories -- instead it's mostly a barrage of one-line responses people gave online to her prompts. I must admit i enjoyed this one though:
"the word 'webinar' comes from the Greek for "you're not going to learn anything"" (p. 123).
picky copy edit about one of my favorite actors: it's Sally Field, not Fields (p. 104).
i like to think i'm funny or at least appreciate others who are, but i don't think i have the same sense of humor as the author -- a lot of it just sounded like frustrating interactions with entitled people, which are a dime a dozen if you've had any sort of job entailing interaction with the public [don't get Barack Obama or me started about Baskin-Robbins customers!].
might have helped to elaborate more on the particularly good stories -- instead it's mostly a barrage of one-line responses people gave online to her prompts. I must admit i enjoyed this one though:
"the word 'webinar' comes from the Greek for "you're not going to learn anything"" (p. 123).
picky copy edit about one of my favorite actors: it's Sally Field, not Fields (p. 104).
November 24, 2022
A wonderfully funny book for all librarians or people who use the library frequently. It's amazing what creative excuses patrons come up with to explain overdue or damage books. There are things that patrons ask a librarian, to do such as "take care of my 2 year old while I run next door and finish shopping", or " will you look up my ancestor and write down all the information you have on him." There is an another wonderful chapter on things that have been found in the book drop.
If I had been writing the book, I definitely would have mentioned the patron who worked near the library and came in at lunch time to read his newspaper. Sometimes he would fall asleep so, knowing his schedule, we let him sleep until it was time to get back to work and then someone gently woke him up.
Read the book and see if you have a funny story to leave here.
If I had been writing the book, I definitely would have mentioned the patron who worked near the library and came in at lunch time to read his newspaper. Sometimes he would fall asleep so, knowing his schedule, we let him sleep until it was time to get back to work and then someone gently woke him up.
Read the book and see if you have a funny story to leave here.
December 21, 2020
I had high hopes for this book. When I saw it at the library, I expected each chapter to contain a well-crafted anecdote told with humor and heart that would captivate me and maybe make me laugh.
Instead, what I read was a collection of chapters without any overarching flow that predominantly consisted of copy+pasting other librarians' Facebook comments—if I wanted to read those, I could've just looked on Facebook!
It's clear Roz loves her job and is passionate about this project and her library community, but I think this project could have benefitted from a LOT more crafting, structure and narrative in order to make it engaging and accessible to those of us who don't work in libraries.
Instead, what I read was a collection of chapters without any overarching flow that predominantly consisted of copy+pasting other librarians' Facebook comments—if I wanted to read those, I could've just looked on Facebook!
It's clear Roz loves her job and is passionate about this project and her library community, but I think this project could have benefitted from a LOT more crafting, structure and narrative in order to make it engaging and accessible to those of us who don't work in libraries.
January 12, 2021
I received this as a swap gift at work, all of us library staff are rotating books about libraries and librarians. This one was okay. It was nice to see that the things we go through here at our library are actually similar to many others, I was cringing at some of this though because I hope some things NEVER, EVER happen here! There was some curse words, sexual references, political views and marijuana talk sprinkled in the book so that was sort of weird but... hey... whatever goes!
September 3, 2022
As a librarian I loved seeing the funny and relatable content. Some parts were funnier than others, but that is just because some chapters weren't my type of humor. I mostly laughed at seeing the crazy things that have been found in book drops.
March 3, 2024
Much praise for this book
Very interesting, entertaining, humorous, book about working at a library. I have come to the conclusion that librarians are unsung heroes. I now habe a goid idea of some of the craziness and silliness librarians encounter. You can't make this stuff up.
Very interesting, entertaining, humorous, book about working at a library. I have come to the conclusion that librarians are unsung heroes. I now habe a goid idea of some of the craziness and silliness librarians encounter. You can't make this stuff up.
July 7, 2017
Mostly just a collection of responses from other librarians to specific questions posed by Roz Warren. Funny at times.
May 20, 2018
Y'know, I thought what was said on ALA Think Tank stayed on ALA Think Tank...
February 13, 2020
Hysterical. And completely accurate. Not to be read while amongst non-library people. They look at you in confusion when to tryto explain why you’re laughing!
April 3, 2020
A great romp through life working at the library!
April 22, 2025
This book was very entertaining. I love reading books about libraries and bookshops especially from the staff's perspective.
February 5, 2024
If you love books, libraries, & a good sense of humor, then this is a must-read book! This was our 2024 kick off book for book club; a year of reading books about books... Straight from the librarian's mouth, this is a collection of humorous responses to frequent Library occurrences and questions. A compilation from both the authors library, & librarians across the country. From puzzling, to funny, to cringe worthy, such a fun read!
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews