Susan’s Very Busy Day

As long-term readers of this blog know, each year I volunteer at the county’s annual library sale. There, I unpack books and arrange them on tables. Until this year, the perk was first pick from over 450,000 books, but the country library gods got rid of that privilege this year, so we have to shop on Thursday with the rest of the public. (Bah, humbug.)

But anyway, this morning all of us were put to work getting the children’s tables ready. This makes perfect sense, as teachers get to choose books for their classrooms on Wednesday and most of their haul comes from the juvenile section. Unfortunately, the juvenile and board board tables are the gulag of the library volunteer world. The books vary widely in size and are often oddly shaped, making them difficult to lay out on tables, and they’re slippery. (Furthermore, for reasons I would prefer not to explore, they have a tendency to stick together.) Besides that, there are oodles of them. Moreover, seeing book after book featuring cover illustrations of Disney princesses and titles like Ducky Goes Potty brings out the curmudgeon in me. And finally (yes, I swear, this is really “finally), there is almost no chance of finding a complete set of the Paston Letters inadverently stuck in with the juvenile books.

However, my time in Juvenile was not fruitless, because while I was setting out Dora the Explorer books, I found myself wondering, What if someone wrote children’s books about Henry VIII? Such as these:

Henry meets Anne Boleyn: Henry’s New Friend

Jane Boleyn accuses Anne and her brother George of incest: Jane Tells a Fib

Anne gets executed: Anne’s Really Bad Day

Jane Seymour marries Henry: Jane the New Girl

Henry’s leg really starts to bother him: Henry’s Boo-Boo

Henry dies: Big Changes for Edward

Incidentally, if you live in the Raleigh, North Carolina area, I did notice some good pickings: biographies of Edward IV, Richard III, Henry VI, and Henry VIII, among others; two copies of Julia Fox’s book on Jane Boleyn, and plenty of biographies of Elizabeth I–and most of the history wasn’t unpacked when I left today. I also moved Margaret George’s novel about Mary, Queen of Scots from the biography section to the fiction section, and I fully expect to have to move her Henry VIII novel as well, as one invariably crops up in the biography section.)