A fine little thing happened this past weekend.

I’ll briefly set the scene: She had some books to pick up at our local library, and I’d agreed to tag along. When we got there, I randomly thought I’d do a little vanity search, and see if they had a copy of my latest book.

And, hey. Look what the hell happened.1

A sign hung on the end of a bookcase in the Somerville Public Library. To the left is new non-fiction, to the right is audiobooks.

I’m standing in the library while wearing an N95 mask, a blue winter cap, and a long black coat. I’m looking down at my hands while holding a copy of my latest book, YOU DESERVE A TECH UNION, which my local library apparently just procured.

A library shelf of newly-acquired nonfiction books, with my latest book YOU DESERVE A TECH UNION in the middle. A person’s finger is pointing at my book from off-camera.

I’m standing in the library while wearing a KN95 mask, a blue winter cap, and a long black coat. I’m looking at the camera while I hold up a copy of my latest book, YOU DESERVE A TECH UNION, which my local library apparently just procured.

You probably can’t tell from the mask, but I was beaming. (And crying a little, sure.) I’ve been incredibly fortunate to spot copies of You Deserve a Tech Union on bookstore shelves. But somehow, this felt like a different kind of milestone. When I wrote the book, I hoped it’d be as widely accessible as it possibly could be — and I sincerely, wholly love that there’s at least one copy in my local library, freely available to anyone with a library card.

In fact, Jessamyn West kindly noted that my little book’s apparently in over two hundred libraries, according to WorldCat. This is, as you might imagine, an entirely different level of overwhelming.

But anyway. I remain, as ever, just so grateful that this little book is out in the world. And public libraries are just the best, aren’t they?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

  1. I’m not sure what weird quirk of metadata slapped the cover of Senongo Akpem’s Cross-Cultural Design onto my book’s library record, but I will absolutely take it. (Also, you should read Senongo’s book, it’s just excellent.) ↩︎