Somebody at this library decided that mysteries should be findable. So every mystery on the shelf is stamped with a red skull. You walk the fiction section and the skulls jump out, and suddenly discovering a new author in your favorite genre takes thirty seconds instead of a conversation at the desk. One regular, a reader of police procedurals and international series, named that as the reason he keeps finding writers he’d never heard of. It’s a small idea, executed once, that pays off for every mystery reader who walks in for the next twenty years.
Somebody’s rubber stamp delights me more than it has any right to. A few afternoons with a stamp pad made life easier for every mystery reader in town, and I have enormous respect for small, practical kindness like that.
What is Dunedin Public Library?
The city library at 223 Douglas Avenue in Dunedin, Florida, a block off the Main Street shops. The phone is 727-298-3080 and it sits under dunedin.gov. Three hundred and five Google reviews at four point seven. That’s the highest review count of any library in north Pinellas.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
The building is the first surprise. One long-time resident remembers when it was a small room-sized building next to a supermarket. What stands now is bright, well laid out, and larger than the town’s population would predict, with exhibits set up through the public areas and a design people compliment without being asked.
It’s part of the Pinellas Public Library Cooperative, so a card here works across the county and holds can be placed from home and collected at the branch that suits you. One reviewer, coming back after years away, put the pull simply: they’d visited four times in ten days.
Summer Reading for adults
Most libraries run a summer reading program for children. Dunedin runs one for adults as well, and it’s the reason that reviewer was there four times in a week and a half.
The children’s version exists to stop reading levels sliding over the holidays. The adult version exists because grown-ups will also read more if somebody gives them a structure, a list and a reason to come back.
An adult summer reading program is an idea I’d like to see copied everywhere. Grown-ups get told reading is homework for kids, and a library that hands adults a list and a reason to come back is treating them as readers too. The extra events around it are what fill the calendar in June and July, and they’re the busiest weeks in the building.
There’s also a cooking class for children that runs regularly, pitched clearly enough that a three-year-old can follow the instructions. That’s a harder brief than it sounds.
What the staff are like
This comes up in almost every review, from both desks. People describe the front desk and the reference desk as consistently helpful, and one visitor was struck enough by the head librarian’s operation to mention it directly. Another called the design and layout beautiful in the same breath as the staff, which is the combination that produces a 4.7 across three hundred reviews.
The reference desk is the part most casual visitors never use and should. If you’re chasing a fact, a local record, a newspaper archive or a genealogy thread, a reference librarian will find in ten minutes what you’d spend a Saturday failing to find. That service is free, it’s sitting there unused most of the day, and almost nobody under sixty asks for it.
It frustrates me how few people use that desk. A reference librarian is a free research assistant with years of practice, sitting there waiting to be asked, and I’d tell every writer in the county to go and ask.
What does Dunedin Public Library offer writers?
Three things, and the first is the room.
The reference desk is the part most casual visitors never use and should.
Dunedin is open until eight on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Very little in this county is. If your writing happens after dinner, a bright well-designed public building with tables and no obligation to buy anything beats most cafes. I’ve covered the alternatives across the county in the Writing in Tampa Bay series. The second is the reference desk, for the reason above.
The third is the way the shelves are organized. That red skull system is a lesson in genre signalling that applies directly to covers. Readers want to identify a category instantly and without help. A library solved it with a rubber stamp. A publisher solves it with a typeface and a color palette, and the ones who get it wrong lose the reader in the same two seconds.
Self-published covers get this wrong constantly, and it makes me wince. A thriller dressed like a cozy loses the sale before anybody reads the blurb, and this library worked out the fix with a stamp.
For getting your own book onto these shelves, the piece on Pinellas library shelves covers how selectors really buy.
When is Dunedin Public Library open?
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from nine thirty in the morning until eight at night. Thursday and Friday nine thirty until six. Saturday nine thirty until five. Closed Sunday.
Six days, an early-ish start, and three nights that run late. That’s a generous schedule by the standards of this county and it’s the main practical reason to choose Dunedin over a branch closer to you.
Three late nights is a gift I don’t take for granted. Too many library systems have trimmed evening hours to the bone, and every cut locks out the people who work days and read at night. Douglas Avenue is a block from Main Street, so the library sits inside the walkable part of town. Parking is the library lot and street parking around it. The obvious pairing is Back in the Day Books on Main Street. That’s a few minutes on foot and stays open until nine Thursday through Saturday. Library in the afternoon, bookshop after dinner, and the Pinellas Trail runs between them.
Where it sits
North Pinellas libraries divide by what they’re for.
Palm Harbor is the independent district library with the separate children’s wing and the Friends bookstore. Tarpon Springs runs used books at five for a dollar and museum passes. The Clearwater branches share a city system and a catalogue.
Dunedin is the one that’s simply bigger and busier than it should be, with the longest evening hours in the area and the best review record. It’s a general library doing the general job unusually well, in a town that clearly uses it. (See also the museum that digitized forty years of the Dunedin Times)
My take
Study the red skull stamp before you design your next cover. Readers want to spot a category in two seconds without help, and a thriller dressed like a cozy loses the sale before anyone reads the blurb. People who write after dinner should use the three late nights. I don’t take them for granted. Pair an afternoon here with Back in the Day Books on Main Street in the evening.
The skull stamp
Libraries get talked about in terms of budgets, square footage and circulation numbers. Almost none of that is why anybody loves one.
People love the thing somebody thought of. The red skull on the spine. The adult summer reading list. The cooking class a toddler can follow. The reference librarian who found the thing in ten minutes. Three hundred and five people have reviewed this building and given it a 4.7, and the reviews are full of those details and almost empty of anything about the collection size.
That’s what I want from a library, and Dunedin gives it. Whoever thought up that red skull cared about the people walking the shelves, and I’d put this building up against any library in the state on that score.
