The Things You Do On Display

One of my tasks is to set up displays of fiction in hopes of enticing a patron to borrow and thus boosting my collection's circulation numbers. So far, my displays have been a mixed bag. Someone stole my first signs for a Naval Adventures in the Age of Sail display and replaced them with a totally inadequate version.

Let me repeat that - someone took my signs down and replaced them with their own. They even put a cartoon clip art of a steamship on it, thus completely missing the point of the SAIL part of Age of Sail. I assumed it was another librarian who did it (I had included the phrase "Run Out the Guns!" and guessed that guns were a touchy subject) but when I asked around for any other verbotten words I got shock and innocence.

On the plus side, my territorial ownership of a minor display area was thusly established. I did not realize how important it was to assert a given display area as your own, even if the one in question had like three books left over from a display for a dead author who was two months buried.

So with my fiefdom of the third floor shelf granted, I went a bit nuts with the next sign. Rather than a simple watermark image behind some text, I broke out the iPad and did me some artworks. Maybe I was trying to entrap the mystery sign replacer or maybe the spirit of the holidays filled me:

Holiday Crimes

 The signs were left untouched. When January hit, I switched over to:

For February, I had already decided to do a Blind Date With A Book (more on this in a later post) so wanted to avoid anything romance or relationship related. So we got:

This was largely an excuse for me to put out all the Darwyn Cooke Parker graphic novels I had bought, but whatevs. To be honest, a display tucked away on the third floor is not going to gather many eyeballs so I might as well keep it focused on being a semi-vanity project. I think there is some merit to branding certain display locations as being owned and curated by a particular librarian - it gives the patron who actually likes what is being put up someone to reach out to for their next read. I might try to step this up and lobby for some, well, lobby space for future fiction displays.