Jude Schanzer, the director of programming at the East Meadow Public Library, on Long Island, tells the story of a middle-class woman in her 50s who dropped in late last year after work and applied for a library card. She confided to a librarian that it was the first library card she had possessed since childhood.

“Now I don’t have to buy my books,” she told Ms. Schanzer. “This is how I’m cutting back.””

We read a lot of contemporary fiction in our house, my wife and son in particular – and when the economy first started going south, we started using the Westchester consortium. We had been a buying a lot of books that were read once and then never touched again. Now if only the catalog wasn’t so damn AWFUL.