circs to Austen

I made a rough estimate of the backlog of paperbacks I have stacked up on shelves in the workroom here at Claremont: 160

I'd say with 95% certainty that I have between 150 and 200 paperbacks waiting. But I'm not going to count them to find out how right I am. Cuz who cares.

I processed a batch earlier. Mostly general fiction, a few mass market-size mysteries, a romance. I can do 'em pretty fast these days. A barcode, an RFID tag, rubber stamp "Claremont Branch", a spine label with the first two letters of the author's last name, some tape covering stuff easily torn or rubbed off, and an item record in the computer. Then out onto the shelves to see if anybody wants to read 'em.

Saw a book had circ'd (that is, had been checked out) 30 times in the last three years. That's a lot. Standard circ period for a book is three weeks and renewals don't count as circs.

I can't remember what it was ...

Oh yeah. The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. Not quite three years, actually. I put it out there in August '06, so that's 2 1/2 years for 30 circs.

I was just scanning the list of paperbacks and I think it's the only one to have hit 30. In order to be sure I'd have to check through the stats on each individual title and I'm not that obsessive.

A few others that have more than 20 circs in 3 years:

Michael Cunningham's The Hours
Elmore Leonard's La Brava
Zadie Smith's White Teeth
Yann Martel's Life of Pi
Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex
Tom Perrotta's Little Children

At 27 circs Little Children is closest to catching The Jane Austen Book Club. And, no, at present I do not have any Austen-authored novels in the browsing paperbacks collection. On the other hand I do have latter day sequels:

Jane Fairfax: a companion to Emma by Joan Aiken (12 circs) and Elizabeth Aston's The Second Mrs Darcy (2 circs in the 4 months it's been on the racks).

Moments after writing the above a patron came up to the desk to check out Aiken's Jane Fairfax, so I suppose we should say that one's got 13 circs now.