[Bookstoprisoners] Guidelines for special requests-please read

[Susan Porter Bruce]

BtP volunteers,

Apologies for yet another email about procedures, but I spent the  
afternoon trying to clean up the Requests list and had some problems.

1. Does anyone remember posting Biographies of Kissinger and Joe  
Kennedy, Corvette, Chinese Dictionary, Sharks? They were all listed  
as n/a, no inmate number, so I removed them. If you can remember a  
name, we'll put them up again.

2. Does anyone remember sending out Mutts, Please Understand Me,  
Canada Crosswords, Zorba the Greek, or posting them on the special  
requests list? When I looked at the letter, I thought these must have  
been an order sent, not a special request. I fear sometimes people  
think they're supposed to list the books they sent on the Requests tab.

3. We had a bunch of books on cars, movies and photography that we  
thought would meet special requests, but when I checked the history I  
saw that the inmate had already received books on these topics. It  
may not have been the exact title, but it was very close. So please,  
if you've sent something good and close enough, don't list on the  
Requests.

4. Did anyone list Abnormal Psychology a few days ago? I couldn't  
open up the order or find a folder. We have two textbooks, different  
authors. It's hard to meet inmates' needs for textbooks, but we could  
sometimes get lucky.

How do we fill special requests?

You keep an eye out, and if you remember somebody once asked for a  
book on drawing and you see we now have one, go to our online list,  
find the inmate's number and send it or put it in the Requests box to  
the left of the computers.

All of us try to look periodically at the list and scan the shelves.

Sometimes we post titles on the Freecycle website. Sometimes we look  
for these at garage sales, and some of us have even been known to buy  
them from used book stores.

What will we never/rarely  find?

-Freemasonry, etc, the books listed on our letter.

-Very specific titles unless they're commonly known, law books.

-There's a genre of Urban Lit that we might buy sometime, but we  
rarely get: Goines (not Gaines, we have Gaines), Iceberg Slim, etc.  
We need to come up with a good list of read-alikes. Elmore Leonard, etc.

If you're uncertain whether we will ever come across a book, take a  
quick look at Amazon. If it's ranked in the really high numbers, we  
probably won't find it.

Finally, we really can't keep requests more than about 6 months.  
Things change, people get paroled, we should tell them to write back  
to us.

Here are "good" requests:  Puerto Rican History, Philosophies and  
Opinions of Marcus Garvey, "Title/author/paperback only," Spanish  
dictionary, ancient temples.

Here are impossible requests; Thiner, Scachen, Tablets of Ishtar and  
Tammuz. This last leads on Amazon to a book on Mythology, which we  
might get.

Understand that inmates sometimes must have access to Books in Print,  
but we don't. How do they get these titles?

Susan
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