Dear Friend of Reader To Reader,

I hope you enjoy this newsletter about the Reader To Reader Book Project. Our success is very much due to your donations of books, postage money, and most of all your generous spirit. Please forward this newsletter and help us spread the word.

This month I’d like to share with you one of the myriad tales on how we acquire the books that we send to needy libraries. It is always an adventure.

Recently an 85-year-old woman called me. Her voice was panicked and she wanted me to come to the rescue. It seems someone had left a large quantity of books out by the trash dumpster at her apartment complex and she couldn’t bear to see them end up in the trash.

I hopped in my car and headed down to her apartment complex. Sure enough, there were boxes of books by the dumpster. In fact, there were many fine novels in excellent condition, as it was likely a college student was moving out and simply wanted to discard them.

As I gathered them up, out hobbled the woman who had called me. Extremely frail, she wore a pale green housecoat and a babushka. She was very delighted that I had indeed come to the rescue. Even though her eyesight was failing and she could no longer read, she deeply valued books and couldn’t stand to see them thrown out like a pair of old shoes. As I finished collecting them she held out two books of her own -- leather-bound Latvian dictionaries. She implored me to take them and find a good home for them. She told me that she was of Latvian descent and that she had special ordered them in order to learn Latvian. Unfortunately, now her eyesight was failing and she had given up any hope of studying Latvian. However, she still wanted to help someone else achieve that aim.

After dropping off the rescued books at our basement storage facility at Amherst College, I sat down at my computer to hunt for a needy Latvian Language program. These days Latvian is not a very common language option at most schools. I did manage to track down the Atgimimo Mokykla School in Naugatuck, Connecticut. They are a small nights and weekend language school run by Erina Balsiene and they were delighted to have the dictionaries for their students.

And I was delighted to help an 85-year-old woman find the right home for two books she truly treasured.

Here are just some of our recent book shipments:

Davidson High School, St. Joseph, Louisiana

• The Complete Works of Michelangelo
• The Right Stuff
• The Dictionary of American History (10 volumes)
• Notes of a Native Son
• Words By Heart (collection of African-American fiction)
• The Confessions of Nat Turner
• Drawing & Painting
• 30 sci-fi novels
• Lonesome Dove
• 45 assorted thrillers and mysteries

Holly Grove High School, Holly Grove, Arkansas

• The Duke Ellington CD Collection Box Set
• Our Continent
• Beloved (on tape)
• Alistair Cooke’s America
• Journey to the Planets
• Hamlet
• Macbeth
• King Lear
• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
• Island of the Blue Dolphin
• 20 Agatha Christie mysteries
• Waiting to Exhale,
• African Treasury (edited by Langston Hughes)
• 20 assorted thrillers and mysteries

Lee High School, Marianna, Arkansas

• Encyclopedia of Family Health (12 volumes)
• McGraw Hill Science and Technology Encyclopedia (28 volumes including supplements through 2000)
• 10 mysteries
• 20 sci-fi
• For Whom the Bell Tolls
• From Slavery to Freedom,
• Eric Sloan’s Weather Book
• The Fire Next Time
• Meridian

Lake Providence High School, Lake Providence, Louisiana

• Planet Earth
• The American Land
• The White House
• Glacier Bay
• These United States
• Deerslayer
• Dune
• A Farewell to Arms
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• 10 thrillers

Navajo Pine High School, Navajo, New Mexico

• The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum
• The Book of Eskimos
• Planetary Encounters: The Future of Space Flight
• Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken
• The Sun Also Rises
• Nancy Drew books 1-16, 26, & 47
• Contact
• Collected Poems of Amy Clampett
• Robert’s Rules of Order
• 10 thrillers

John Duggan Middle School, Springfield, Massachusetts

• The All About Encyclopedia (15 volumes)
• 200 assorted paperback fiction, including Goosebumps and Babysitter’s Club

Mendenhall School, Mendehall, Mississippi

• The Encyclopedia of the American Constitution (8 volumes)
• 200 assorted children’s books
• 20 thrillers

Eudora High School, Eudora, Arkansas

• The Way Things Work
• Masters of Photography
• Forces of Life
• High Country Animals
• The 12,548 Best Tings ever Said
• The Burgess Shale
• Britain in Color
• The Story of Writing
• Wildlife in America
• Running For Women

John Essex High School, Demopolis, Alabama

• Medicine Woman
• Freedomland
• Flying Home
• In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens
• Light in August
• The Earthsea Trilogy
• Waiting to Exhale
• Black Sisters: Poetry By Black Americans
• Bury My Heart At Wounded knee
• Everest
• Paris
• London
• The fire Next Time
• Great Gatsby
• Catcher in the Rye
• Ironweed
• 15 sci-fi
• 10 thrillers

And lots more!

Special thanks to Corina “Corky” Lopez and June Turcotte for volunteering their time to collect, organize and box up books.

Until next month,

Sincerely,

David Mazor

Reader To Reader

To be added to this newsletter please email dmazor@readertoreader.org