Library

New in the Library! November 2024

December 1, 2024 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

Would you believe we have added over 500 books to our library since New Year’s Day? I could hardly believe it when I had a look at our LibraryThing account and saw that. We currently have over 3,600 books available for borrowing, plus a few hundred double-ups or others that we chose not to make available for one reason or another. I thought it would be nice to do a post once a month to show our new arrivals. So, here is the first edition!

We have acquired all the other books in the Hidden Heroes series when Sonlight offered them on their clearance sales, but they don’t use Witness Men in their curriculum. Esther and I decided we needed this one on the shelf to complete the collection! I’m looking forward to reading it aloud some day. The others have been great stories about little-known missionaries and places. See our reviews of some of them here.

For a little while after I started this post with that first title, I wondered if this would be the month we didn’t accumulate more books–what irony! I shouldn’t have wondered about that, though. The middle of the month, I took the little girls to town. We didn’t manage to accomplish our primary goal for the trip, but we went to a couple of op shops and came home with several books.

Little Miss was delighted to find this collection of Beatrix Potter’s little Peter Rabbit books. The cover is rather rough, but inside is beautiful.

I always snatch up Jungle Doctor books when I find them. These fun stories are based on the author’s experiences as a missionary doctor in Africa. We now have eight of these books.

I found these two fun easy readers–just the kind of stories Miss Joy loves right now! We have a large collection of easy readers, because I spent so many years trying to teach my older boys to read and hoped that they would help. I don’t add to that shelf very often, but when I saw these…

Little Miss loves to peruse children’s cookbooks, so when I saw this one, I picked it up for her. It has step-by-step line drawings with the instructions in each recipe.

When I found this book illustrating several of Shakespeare’s plays, I snatched it up. It looks like a great way to introduce the Bard. I need to go through it myself, though, before I put it out for the children to read.

Rich Dad Poor Dad is one I’ve heard of a number of times, so when I found it for less than a dollar I decided to get it and add it to my pile to read *someday*.

And then, there are the usual few that looked like they might be good but I need to read them myself before adding them to the shelves. City Night and The Wild Boy in the Bush are set in New Zealand. Jenny’s Cat and Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine just look like fun ones. We’ve found that a lot of the older Scholastic books are fairly good. I got Little Foxes because I’ve heard a lot of times that Michael Morpugo is good but haven’t read any of his books yet.

Elijah didn’t know what to give me for my birthday last month, so he told me to think of a book I wanted. I didn’t have anything in mind then, but a few weeks ago I read a newsletter from Living Books Press in Australia. They had just published The New Zealand Bird Book, similar to The Burgess Bird Book, which was one of my favorite books as a child. I thought, “That looks like a book to get one of these days,” and immediately forgot about it. The next morning, a local friend emailed me a link to the advertisement–she was going to buy one of the books. So, I asked her to get me one, too, to save postage, and asked Elijah if he would pay for it for my birthday present. When the book arrived, Miss Joy was immediately intrigued, and wanted me to read it to her. It is beautiful inside! So nice to have a book with our local birds in it!

More New Shelves!

August 25, 2024 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

We love books around here. We are addicted to buying books. That creates a problem. We keep running out of shelf space! The good part about that is that we have a person in the house who likes to build things out of wood, so I asked Elijah to build us more shelving in the library. The library is a very wide hallway in the center of the house, and we now have floor-to-ceiling shelves all around it. Elijah took advantage of a weekend when most of us went away for two nights to do the construction. He had been away a lot just before that, so didn’t want to be gone again, and Esther wanted to stay home, so they took care of the cows and the house, and built.

Esther helped take the books off the shelves as soon as they finished the morning work, and then he got busy. She sent us several pictures throughout the day to keep us updated.

After we got home, we put the books back on the shelves, and since then I’ve done a little tweaking to organize them better. Now, Esther and two of the boys just arrived home from a month in America, and brought a lot more books in their suitcases. We’re soon going to run out of space again!

Hallway Makeover

August 8, 2021 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

The day before Christmas, we replaced the carpet in the living room. It looked wonderful! We had enough left to do two more rooms, so we decided to do the hallway next. It still had the old carpet from the 1930s, which was very pretty when new, but by now…. It was quite threadbare. This is what it looked like:

When I took that picture in early February, I had already packed all our books and we had taken the bookshelves out (this hallway is wide enough that we have made it into our library, with bookshelves on both sides of the room). Elijah finished ripping out the carpet so it was all ready to lay the new carpet when he and his boss had time to do it. This next picture shows Elijah working on laying the carpet, with his boss overseeing him.

The end of the hall toward the laundry room/entry to the house looked like this. In May or June, I got the idea that floor-to-ceiling bookshelves would be a much more efficient use of the space, so asked Elijah if he would be interested in building them. He was! I used my spare time one day to draw up plans, and then one day when Elijah had an unexpected day off, he went to town and bought wood for building the shelves.

Over the next month or so, Elijah worked on the shelves when he had time, and once they were in place, I painted them. It took a few more weeks for the wood to completely dry, but last week I was able to fill them with books. Instead of having books here and in our bedroom, they are all here now, and very well organized. I even labeled the shelves so everyone knows where each category of books is supposed to be! (We’ll see how long that lasts.) I dreamed, when I was a little girl, of being a librarian. It looks like that dream has come true!

Elijah was excited to put the games on the second-to-top shelf yesterday. They had been in a deep closet, where they were hard to find. Now, we can easily see which one we want, even if not all of us can easily reach them!