The Friends sponsor special library programs as well as staff development and staff recognition.The Friends help promote the library, develop activities, present special programs, and encourage reading and use of the library.Donations are also welcome to the Friends of the Findlay-Hancock County Public Library Fund at the Community Foundation.The Friends also welcome bequests for the enhancement of the library. As a Friend, your membership dues enable special library programs to continue and expand.The Friends are enthusiastic supports united by a common concern for the well-being of the library.The Friends of the Findlay-Hancock County Public Library is a volunteer, non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the library and its relationship with the community.“I still think the guy was hiding money from the wife,” Diane says. Was it terrorism related, I asked? The agent couldn’t tell me, but said the information was ‘good.’ Was it very good, I asked? Yeah, it was very good, he said.” I heard nothing after that, but got a call a year later from an FBI agent thanking me.

“It was right after 9/11, so I called the FBI,” he says. “I thought, ‘son of a gun, this husband was hiding money from his wife.’”Įric, who had been a Navy pilot for 29 years, and served as aviation support for Navy Seal specials ops, saw terrorism inside the book, not a man keeping a secret stash from his wife. “I opened it up and somebody had cut out the inside of the book, and in the hole there were three passports, and bank books with deposits of $600,000. “We had a box of big, thick books come in, and when I picked one of them up I knew it was not as heavy as it should have been,” she says. Some books even talk back to Diane with great mystery stories of their own. to 2 p.m., she could use a few more, she says. She lost some of her staff during COVID when they were shut down, and now that they have reopened every Saturday from 10 a.m. If they don’t have the book you’re looking for, they’ll take requests, and give you a call when it comes in, says Rose Topliss, head of volunteers. New, 2022 books are $3, 2021 books are $2, but older than that, which is the vast majority, are $1. We just need to move the books, that’s the idea.” The space is free, the books are free, I’m working free, and the people (volunteers) working here are free. It’s not like we have a lot of overhead to worry about. A dollar is the reason people keep coming back. “People tell me we should push up our prices, but why?” Diane asks. Two million bucks, much of it a dollar at a time, to fund summer reading programs for kids, and provide the library a $2,500 monthly allowance to buy new books the county won’t or can’t afford to buy.Ī buck a book to put on quality community programs, buy new, high grade furniture for their library, and renew magazine subscriptions the county no longer does. “He clutched the book in his arms and hurried out,” says Eric Haupt, Diane’s husband and treasurer of Friends of the Library, which has raised more than $2.1 million dollars since 1987 to support this local library branch.

“A dollar” he replies, That’s all?” He hands her a $10 bill and doesn’t wait around for the change. The man practically cries when Diane hands him the book. She’s been talking to books ever since she was a little girl crawling under the covers with a flashlight to read a book after her mother shouted up to her room to turn off the lights.

“It’s just a quirk in my brain,” Diane says, trying to explain. Like obedient children, they heed the book whisperer, and do not fall. “Stay there, do not move,” she orders the other books. She finds it on a back shelf next to a tall stack of books teetering on the edge of collapse. “Do I talk to them? Oh, gosh, yes, all the time,” Diane Haupt says, searching her mind to remember where she put this particular one. She does this seven days a week, six hours a day with thousands of books donated every week. She holds them in her hands, notes their dust jacket and color, and welcomes them to their temporary new home in a cellar. The book whisperer has no librarian training, and doesn’t use the Dewey Decimal system or computer spreadsheets to keep track of the books that arrive and where exactly she puts them. They are given to an online retailer, who kicks back 35% of the sale price to Friends if a book sells. The book whisperer thinks she may have a copy somewhere in the back storage area where newly donated books arrive to be sorted, and old ones that didn’t sell in a year depart to make space for them.

The book cellar