Mail order library

When I wrote recently about my history using the local library (or not...!), I forgot about one unique aspect of my library user experience.  I was reminded about it by my mother, who set me off on a trip down memory lane this weekend when she responded to a friend's Facebook post about having books in the home and encouraging children to become readers. She mentioned libraries as a way to facilitate literacy and added, "When we lived in (a small town in rural Manitoba), we were able to order library books through the mail."

It was called the University of Manitoba Extension Library service.  Someone told my mother about it shortly after we moved to this town, in the late 1960s, and before long, we were avid users. There were catalogues of available books (with a brief description & order number for each book), including a catalogue just for children. My sister & I would pore over the catalogue & mark off which books we'd read and which ones we wanted to read. Then -- decisions, decisions!!  I think there were limits on how many books you could order at once (and at any rate, limited room on the order form).  I don't remember how long it took to receive our order, once it was sent (never soon enough, of course!), but a lumpy package would arrive in the mail full of books, with a blank order form tucked inside (and, once a year or so, an updated catalogue, or, occasionally,  a note about recent additions to the library). I think we were allowed one month to read the books we'd ordered.  When we were finished, we'd package them up again (I remember re-using the original envelope -- eventually, the library moved to a canvas package with snaps and a plastic pocket on the front where you tucked in the address card) -- along with an order for more books. I don't believe we ever had to pay for postage, either.

What fun to receive those fat, lumpy packages full of books in the mail!   I devoured every book by my favourite authors that the extension library could provide. Non-fiction books too. This is where I was introduced to the works of Lucy Maud Montgomery, Betty Cavanna, Betsy Allen (who wrote the Connie Blair mysteries -- & I just found out, as I was Googling for this post, that she & Betty Cavanna were the same person!), Rosamund DuJardin, Anne Emery, Janet Lambert, Lenore Mattingly Weber, Catherine Woolley, Beverly Cleary... One of my teachers had introduced us to the "Adventure" books by Enid Blyton, but it was the extension library that brought me the Famous Five, and furthered my reading in popular series such as Nancy Drew, the Dana Girls, the Happy Hollisters, Vicki Barr (flight stewardess) & Cherry Ames (nurse).

It was such a blessing. We did have a small school library, but the selection there was limited.  We were able to occasionally order books through the Scholastic Book Club, which was a lot of fun. We could occasionally get books at a stationery store in a bigger town 40 miles down the road, or on the paperback rack at the drugstore... but the closest "real" bookstores were the book department at Eatons department store in downtown Winnipeg, 250 miles away, and a Coles bookstore chain outlet at the Polo Park Shopping Centre there. (No mega-bookstores then... certainly no Internet, or Amazon!)  I would save up my weekly allowance & then blow it all on books during one of our rare visits to the city. At 50 cents to $1.50 a pop, you could buy a LOT of paperbacks with $30 in those days...!

When, five years later, we moved to a larger town, closer to the city, I remember sending in an order from our new address -- and being told we no longer qualified for the extension library service, since we now had a library in our new location. It was bittersweet to finally have access to a real, well-stocked library again, but sad to know there would be no more fat packages full of books in the mail any more.

I did a Google search to see if what I could find about the history of the service, and whether it still exists (or when it went out of service), but wasn't able to find much, beyond a couple of PDF documents from 1956 , 1959, 1962 and 1964.

Did you have easy access to libraries & bookstores when you were growing up?