Free For All [Paperback]

Don Borchert (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 9, 2010

From The Wall Street Journal to National Public Radio, mild-mannered librarian Don Borchert had America laughing with the hardcover edition of his tell-all memoir that revealed the often startling truth about modern-day libraries.

 

Not long ago, the public library was a place for the bookish, the eggheaded, and the studious—often seeking refuge from a loud, irrational, crude, outside world.  Today, libraries have become free-for-all entertainment complexes filled with rowdy teens, deviants, drugs, and even sex toys. Lockdowns and chaperones are often necessary.
 
What happened?
 
Don Borchert was a short-order cook, door-to-door salesman, telemarketer, and Christmas-tree-chopper before landing a job in a California library. He never could have predicted his encounters with the colorful kooks, touching adolescents, threatening bullies, and tricksters who fill the pages of this hilarious memoir.
 
In Free for All, Borchert offers readers a ringside seat for the unlikely spectacle of mayhem and
absurdity that is business as usual at the public library. You’ll see cops bust drug dealers who’ve set up shop in the men’s restroom, witness a burka-wearing employee suffer a curse-ridden nervous breakdown, and meet a lonely, neglected kid who grew up in the library and still sends postcards to his surrogate parents—the librarians.  In fact, from the first page of this comic debut to the last, you’ll learn everything about the world of the modern-day library that you never expected.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Jack-of-all-trades Borchert shares wholesome, guardedly witty dispatches from the suburban L.A. library system in this charming tell-all. For 12 years the family-man author has held the post of assistant librarian, keeping a wary eye on unruly kids, mollifying mystified parents and repairing sadly manhandled materials. Borchert relays a conversation with an aged librarian who reveals how it was in the good old days (staff lunches used to be served with wine), then contrasts that account with modern-day multicultural crayons and the preponderance of latchkey kids abandoned in the library for long, numbing afternoons. A few of the regular patrons are inspiring Renaissance types, but most are unsettling and unsavory, such as intensely reclusive crossword-puzzler Henry hounding the reference desk; loser Max looking futilely on the Internet for a South American wife; or the drug dealers working the restroom. From patrons who rack up hundreds of dollars in fines to missing pet rats and fist-fighting mothers, Borchert has seen it all, and his account gives a human interest spin to this undervalued profession. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

“The idea of a librarian memoir sounds really boring, but Borchert’s voice is never boring, and you keep reading because (1) he’s hilarious and (2) it’s uncharted territory” —San Francisco Chronicle

 

“Free for All aims to do for libraries what Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase did for urban schools or what Bill Buford’s Heat did for professional cooking” –USA Today

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Virgin Books (March 9, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0753515016
• ISBN-13: 978-0753515013
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,399,334 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Librarians at the Gates, May 4, 2008

By 

Bill Coan (Hortonville, Wisconsin) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library (Hardcover)

If Don Borchert worked at the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Post Office, he probably could have produced a very instructive and entertaining account of his life on the job. As it is, he works at a public library, and so he has produced an instructive and entertaining account about his life there. He is a thoughtful observer of the passing scene and a careful recorder of the offbeat. He knows what sorts of things can turn up in an overnight book drop, and he knows what sorts of things can go wrong when a police officer introduces a drug-sniffing dog to a children's reading group. More important, he knows what a public library means to the homeless, the latch-keyed, the desperate, and the socially ambitious, as well as to the more general public. He draws upon two decades of experience, and he tells a story that is by turns funny, heartwarming, disturbing, and inspirational. I read the book in a single sitting, and I've never felt better about the portion of my tax dollars that go to the local public library.

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Oh my stars and garters..., January 8, 2008

By 

N. Thomas "LibraryFiend" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library (Hardcover)

I am amused and mystified by the range of reviews Mr. Borchert's autobiographical "Free For All" has engendered on Amazon. I am a professional librarian myself -- I understand from the author's job title he is not, in fact, actually a librarian proper. However, this does not deride his work, nor does it detract from the accuracy of his portrayal of quotidian urban library life.

I myself work in an inner city public library. If nothing else, I am pleased that "Free For All" casts a blindingly truthful light on what public servants toiling in this sphere--particularly in an URBAN setting, which is as disparate from pleasant, suburban / rural libraries as the Antarctic is from the Sahara--encounter every day.

Public libraries have largely become repositories for the disenfranchised and miscreants. Of course we still have our faithful cadres of patrons who require information and who seek access to (*gasp*) BOOKS, whether they be novels or works of non-fiction. However, my own library is a virtual homeless haven, with loitering, often unconscious, individuals taking up space at the reading tables, which are only infrequently inhabited by more alert persons reading a newspaper or utilizing a laptop computer.

We also find hordes of malcreant youths, tweens, and young children, who, having no supervision of any kind in their homes, descend upon us en masse after school hours from September to June, while in the summer they arrive anywhere from 9 am onward. We do an excellent job of reaching out to these very necessary young people, but I find the majority of them have a positive aversion to behaving properly in a library setting.

Finally, I was very much pleased that this memoir-like work made it clear that librarians are, indeed, the very keepers of the modern concept of multi-tasking. We do so much for so many with so very little support from administrative circles, it's about damn time someone wrote about it.

And for the record, I laughed out loud at many of his tales. Well done, Don! William Manley himself could not have penned a better tale of librarianship in the modern world.

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Captures the Library Life, November 17, 2007

By 

Lesa Holstine (Glendale, AZ) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library (Hardcover)

Unlike some of the other reviewers, I'm not offended by Borchert's title or the book. Instead, I find it accurately portrays the highs and lows of working in public libraries. After thirty-four years, I've met most of his patrons, and lived through many of his stories. He's accurate, at times funny, and he tells the truth about public libraries as they are today. I don't keep many books, since I have access to so many. This is a keeper for me.