Columnist Susan Snyder: Getting a read on new books

Friday, May 2, 2003 | 9:35 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

Remember Nancy Drew's mystery, "The Secret of the Old Clock?"

I do, and so does my mother.

She's 78.

And although the Nancy Drew mysteries are classics, nonfiction books dating back 50 years or more aren't classic when they're sitting on the shelves of our school libraries.

They're just old.

So it's easy to understand Vicki Dailey's glee over 800 brand-new books that were delivered to Mabel Hoggard Math and Science Magnet School's library about two weeks ago.

The books were purchased with $10,000 that Wells Fargo Bank Nevada donated to Clark County READS, a Clark County Public Education Foundation program that puts new books in the county's school libraries.

Dailey, Hoggard's librarian for three years, plucked the Nancy Drew volume from its spot on a shelf along the back wall. Its cover was worn and faded with age and use.

Its copyright date was 1959. The parents of some of Hoggard's pupils probably weren't even born yet.

Dailey said she wouldn't mind replacing such classics with newer editions, but that's a lower priority than nonfiction volumes. She said 99 percent of the new books are nonfiction.

"Our average copyright date was 1980, and we're a magnet school for math, science and technology," she said.

I'm no science or computer whiz. But Microsoft started in 1975 and introduced MS-DOS operating system for IBM personal computers in 1981. I'm thinking kids in a technology magnet school could learn something useful from technological advancements beyond the 1980s.

Outdated books on technology and science, biographies of old sports stars with whom children no longer identify and books about countries that no longer exist were among the 1,000 books tossed from Hoggard's shelves to make room for the new ones.

Dailey was especially glad to receive an entire set of U.S. presidents' biographies. The new collection also includes biographies of famous Americans, such as Rosa Parks, that are written in story form.

For example, in the book about Parks titled, "If a Bus Could Talk," a municipal bus tells a little girl the story of Parks' historic ride.

On Wednesday, about 10 days after the books arrived, Dailey had all 800 cataloged and numbered. It is a daunting task when you consider that she has only a part-time aide to help, and adding a single book can change the entire numbering sequence of a section.

"It was exciting to see the books come. But when the door kept opening and the boxes kept coming, I was like, 'I don't think I need them all at once,' " Dailey laughed.

She was kidding. Dailey and other librarians across the valley would take new books delivered by truck or yak. According to Clark County READS, Nevada's minimum standard is 20 library books per student. Clark County's ratio is 11 volumes per pupil, and many of those are outdated.

Dailey said Hoggard probably has 1,000 more old books on its shelves. But for now she is thrilled with 800 new ones. The Internet is useful, but it can't replace books.

"Technology can't fill all the gaps," she said.

Nope. It's hard to curl up in bed with a computer screen to read about mummies.