154 Collecting nemesis

My collecting nemesis

It is true--at this stage of my life I should be shedding things, not collecting things. I have purged a great deal since I retired but I still cannot pass up one thing: Reading Figures!

I could blame it on my parents. They gave me my first one, a lovely Hummel of a child reading. Does anyone still collect Hummels? They gave me several Hummels, but Little Scholar (I had to Google it) started it all.

I kept most of my readers in my office at the library while I was working so, of course, that invited gifts of more reading statues.

Several touched me very much. One was from a dear man, Ben Tennyson, now departed, who was a long-time library volunteer. He gave me a reading elf long before the elf on the shelf became popular.




Another surprising one came from the owner of the small cleaning crew who worked at the library when I first started working there. As angels go, I think it is pretty tasteful!





I have always been obsessed with Winnie the Pooh so I am proud that I have only one Winnie reader. Of course, I would probably buy a Tiger reader but he is probably bouncing around too much to sit and read! This Winnie is a bank.




The Library Shop at Handley Library carried some reading figures at one time. Here is one of the ones that I bought. The monkey is sitting on a suitcase that is a box.


By the way, when I retired, I did give some of my reading figures to the library. But I still have a lot. I will not show them all.

Becky Ebert, Handley Library archivist found these old bookends somewhere. Of course, she found the antiquities!

Jeannette Ewing, who was the Library's business manager, also made dollhouses and sold dollhouse parts. I thought the reader she made me was genius!

I cherish all those gifts and early acquisitions. The problem is that now that I go to yard sales and thrift shops and can't seem to pass up a reading figure.

When they are just a dollar, they don't seem as tacky! I do have standards; however, I would not buy a Precious Moments reader even it were a penny. By the way, I found the one below online offered for $70. To each his own!

But I could not resist these bookends that I found in a thrift store even though the poodles are not reading. They are so retro!

In conclusion, don't bother giving me any tacky reading figures. I can find plenty on my own!

Trish      

By the way, I also came up with the idea for a sculpture of a reader for the bench in the Handley Library Rotunda. Since my mother, Mary Moore, was a great reader and had recently died, I suggested to my father, Fred Moore, that he donate the statue to the library. He loved the idea and had the sculptor, Larry Nowlan, use his great, grand-daughter, Rea Ivey, as the model. A later donor liked this sculpture so much that she hired Nowlan to do the statue that is in the Mike Forman Reading Garden--a little boy reading!

The girl in the Rotunda is named Library Lil after a book of the same title by children's author Suzanne William, who is pictured here.

While we are on my mania for books and readers, I also came up with the idea for the flying readers at the Clarke County Library: