Parker Adey | On Library Holds

The library will give you anything that you ask for as long as you are patient enough to receive it. I love putting holds on books, forgetting about them, and then being surprised when the book shows up weeks or months later. The whole ritual is is magical.

Holds appear on a special shelf in the library with their spines turned away. Each book wears a printed band showing who it is being held for. Elastic bands hold the printed slips on the books. When you put pick up your hold, you put the elsatic band in a little recycling bin so it can be reused for other holds. The whole setup is daintily anonymous.

My holds are labelled 8466 GL. There is another patron whose label is 8466 HU. Our books rub shoulders all the time but we have never met, as far as I know. I have no idea what they read. Despite this, I feel like we are colleagues, or even friends, in some secretive way.

Someone else at the library uses the hold system to take out dozens of graphic novels at a time. Often there are two or three linear feet of holds waiting for them. I have never seen this person come to collect their vast reading but I am curious to see how that works. It must be a spectacle. Do they carry the books in a wagon?

The process of placing holds and retrieving them changes your relationship with the library. It is more premeditated than just visiting the library and seeing what turns up. You place holds on content that you already know that you want. It is moderated through the library’s catalogue. The procedure doesn’t allow for chance encounters with books in the same way that browsing the shelf does. And that’s totally fine.

I tend to put a hold on anything that I’m curious about that I see mentioned online. I recently found out that Cassandra Calin had a new graphic novel coming out. When I looked it up, there were already two hundred or so holds on it. As I’m writing this, a few weeks later, I’m #63 in line for one of 24 copies; it’ll still be a bit of a wait¹. When a friend recommends a book, and I put a hold on it, I usually send the friend a little thank you note when the book shows up.

It is a small miracle that you can just ask for things and the library will give them to you. The whole system formalizes the neighbourly ritual of borrowing a hammer or a couple eggs. I wish that more things worked so pleasantly.

I wrote this little note about library holds after coming back from vacation and finding a couple books waiting patiently for me at the library.

Unrelated to all this, I just remember that you can borrow Ontario Parks passes from the library. I popped a hold on one of those too. There are 639 holds on 293 passes. ↩︎

On Library Holds

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