Replacement Copies

There's 80,000 of you, you check items out half a million times a year, and books are not immortal* (though sometimes their contents are). The physical items get eaten by dogs, checked out and never returned, read to tatters, unaccountably lost. Though the on-order lists we post for you to look at usually are limited to titles which have come out in the last year or two, The New is not all we add to the collection. All the time we are shopping for (and/or happily fishing out of the donated books) replacement copies and titles that fill gaps.
       Just lately these replacement copies and orders have included James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, several Babysitters Club titles, several Boxcar Children mysteries, a nice fresh copy of O. Henry stories, Spiral Dance by Starhawk, Robert B. Parker's Ceremony, Rebecca West's The Birds Fall Down, and several Agatha Christie titles.
       If you notice a gap like one of those above--an Aldous Huxley title we don't have anymore, a missing volume in a science fiction series, a book we hypothetically have but it's never in--please let us know.
       * Well, most books are not immortal. There are a few items in the collection which have circulated supernatural numbers of times without wearing out or having grape juice spilled on them. The grand champion item is a copy of Dr. Seuss's And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street which went out (and came back) 162 times since we automated in 1988 and an unknown number of times before that. The runner-up item is M. C. Beaton's Death of a Snob, with 156 circulations. Some credit probably goes to the publishers when this happens : they've made a really strong book!!