Herbert Landau, author of the T/he Small Library Survival Guide: Thriving on Less,/ comes from the corporate world. After retiring, he hired on with his local public library, hoping to spend the end of his working career in a small bucolic rural library in Pennsylvania. The first six months was anything but that. Hit with a 43% cut in state and county funds, he was faced with draconian reduction in hours or services. He took the "you get lemons, make lemonade" approach and brought his business skills into play. By strategically finding services the library could take on and raising its profile in the community, he was able to raise funds to make the institution stable again. The book promotes some non-orthodox methods: charging businesses for meeting room usage; establishing a U.S. Passport application center; parking lot flea market; recyclinig cell phones and ink cartridges. But, Landau's hunch proved correct for his community, and sufficient cash was earned to make the bottom line to actually expand services and resources.

The book is divided in 12 chapters and eight appendices. These cover the panoply of small library adminsitration applications, from defining the library's role in the community; to ongoing marketing; tin finding innovative programing on the cheap, and finding the staff for your library plan. Appendices include sample survey questions, direct mail soliciation letter and donor reply card, press elease guidelins, etc.

The two important small library how-to manuals of the past six years are S/ally Gardner Reed's Small Libraries: A Handbook.../ (2002) (RBB Dec. 1, 2002), and John Moorman's /Running a Small Library: A How -to-do it Manual/( 2006), (RBB Dec. 15, 2006). Even if you have these on your shelves Landau's user-friendly volume is worth adding for its outside the main stream approach.