Cool--kudos to her and other public librarians serving the needs of small communities

Turning A Page Inside A Rural One-Room Library

There's one state highway running through Myrtle, Mo. It's a sleepy town in the Ozarks, population about 300. There's no bank or restaurant here, but enormous oak and persimmon trees loom over a small stone building right next to the road. Half of it is a post office; the other half, a one-room public library.

Rachel Reynolds Luster took over this branch four months ago with the goal of creating a learning hub. She calls herself a curator, not just a librarian.

Her first task? Filtering out some of the favorites of the previous librarian.

"It's been interesting working this transition with her," Luster says. "She was quite upset that the cooking magazines were gone. But we recycled them all, and we kept some holiday cookie editions."

Luster scanned her shelves for the one book she felt every library must have: the Greek epic The Odyssey. "I looked, and we didn't have one — no library in our system had one," she says.

I spent a couple of years in a small town in Kansas, population 1706, according to the census at the time, and the things that kept me sane were my friend Deana and our town library, which was one room. It was there I discovered Susan Cooper and many fantasy books. I appreciate having had that at a difficult time in my life (late junior high, early high school). I am glad that refuge was there, and I'm sure others in small towns are happy that people like Rachel Reynolds Luster care about them.