The Lantana Library is located in an old bank building.
Sid Patchett has been library director since 1996.
Photos by Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Ron Hayes
Atop the clutter on Sid Patchett’s desk in the Lantana Public Library rests a keepsake box, about the size of a briefcase and colorfully disguised to look like a very large book.
Open the cover and you will find the secret weapon with which the city’s library director is plotting to joust with the giant.
“Whenever I catalog a new book, I check the county’s Lantana branch catalog to see if they’ve got it,” he explains, resting a hand on the box. “And if they haven’t got it, I put a copy of my cataloging slip in this box.”
Someday soon, Patchett promises, he will unveil a new feature on his library’s website: “Books Goliath Hasn’t Got.”
Goliath is the Lantana branch of the Palm Beach County Library System, which opened in April 2009 at the corner of Lawrence and Lantana roads, not five miles west of Patchett’s much smaller town library at 204 W. Ocean Ave.
The county branch has access to more than a million books, CDs, DVDs and magazines.
It has five study rooms, a conference room and a meeting room that seats 115.
It has both a children’s area and a teen area.
It has 62 public computers, including 17 in the children’s area alone.
The Lantana town library has 23,000 books and two computers. No DVDs, no CDs, no separate spaces for children and teens.
If the county library is Goliath, the town library is David.
“The county built a big-box facility just to our west, and we thought that might be the end of us,” Patchett says. “But what we’ve decided to do, instead of trying to compete head-to-head with DVDs and CDs, is to turn ourselves into an alternative to the big box.”
Quality instead of quantity.
“We don’t stock multiple copies of the bestsellers. We use our limited budget to create the thinking person’s library,” Patchett explains. “We’ll get just one copy of a new Stephen King, and then we’ll get, say, The Princeton Guide to Evolution.”
Watch for it on Books Goliath Hasn’t Got.
“We try to shop ourselves as the serious reader’s alternative.”
The philosophy is right there at the top of the library’s website: “A place for serious readers.”
For example, most any library will carry The Moonstone and The Woman In White, by that popular Victorian boiler of pots, Wilkie Collins.
Patchett has those, and four or five lesser known titles as well.
The Anthony Trollope collection stretches more than a foot along one shelf, and you’ll find most anything from the University of Florida or Pineapple Press is available.
“Our shelf space is so limited we can’t hold more than 24,000 volumes,” Patchett explains, “so we’re running a self-screening collection. If it isn’t a classic, or hasn’t been borrowed in the past couple of years, it’s a candidate for the used book sale.”
Now to be honest, Patchett’s slingshot potshots at the “big-box” Goliath are a wonderful publicity ploy even cynical newspaper reporters couldn’t resist. But the competition is illusory. The truth is, any book Goliath hasn’t got can be easily transferred from one of the other county branches.
And while Patchett’s little city library can’t boast multiple meeting rooms and dozens of computer terminals, it has free Wi-Fi, subscriptions to 28 magazines, including The New York Review of Books and Forbes, and online access to about 1,000 newspapers from around the world.
There is no children’s room, but the children’s shelf is perfectly respectable. And large-print editions, as well.
“We’re the only public library in the state that offers free color printing, 10 sheets a day per user,” Patchett boasts. “A person can bring in their laptop, use our Wi-Fi and we’ll print out what they’ve downloaded or created.”
To imagine how far the Lantana Public Library might go in its quest to compete with the big box, look at how far it’s come.
The collection was born in 1947, when the former bridgetender’s house on Lantana Road became the town’s first library, run by the local Woman’s Club and stocked with a mere 5,000 donated books, mostly bestsellers.
When the Carteret Savings & Loan on West Ocean Avenue failed in the early 1990s, the town bought the building, and the old bank became the new library.
Mayor Dave Stewart calls that purchase “the best part of the whole little story.”
“If you don’t have your own library, you have to pay the county system,” Stewart says. “So it’s actually saved the residents hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes.”
The current budget is about $170,000, supplemented by donations from the 150-member Friends of the Library.
And yet Patchett, the library’s director since 1996, doesn’t even live in Lantana. Five days a week for the past 18 years, he’s commuted from Coconut Grove.
“I leave about 8:15 a.m. and get back … well, it depends on what the idiots are doing out there and how many smash-ups there are.”
A 1968 graduate of FSU with a master’s degree in library science, he came to Lantana after running teachers libraries in Papua, New Guinea, and Malawi, in Southeast Africa, where he met Katrina, his wife of 28 years.
“We’re Palm Beach County’s best-kept secret,” says the Lantana library’s most enthusiastic booster.
But what of those poor library patrons who hunger for the latest page-turner?
Doesn’t a library that puts The Princeton Guide To Evolution before the latest Stephen King novel risk being accused of elitism?
“Probably!” Patchett exclaims. “And we don’t give a tinker’s damn. We don’t think it’s elitist. We think it’s an opportunity to serve upward striving people.”
For more information, call 540-5740 or visit www.lantanalibrary.org.
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