NORTHAMPTON — The Book Man has turned the page.
He no longer lugs nine pounds of library books to the nursing and retirement homes around Northampton, no longer doles out tomes of made-up mystery and romance, no longer spends eight hours a week delivering stories to people who have little else but time.
He has been the Book Man for a long time — he started the job in 2003, though he can’t remember when the nickname stuck — but at the end of June, budget constraints at the Forbes Library ended his salaried part-time position, and that chapter of his life. The Book Man. They may still call him that, but officially, Frank Heston doesn’t do that anymore.
Technically, what Heston, 73, of Florence, did was work for the Forbes Library Outreach Delivery Service, which takes books to people who can’t otherwise get them because of illness or disability. But a lot of what he did was talk to the people who got the books.
They liked to hear about Heston’s travels, to places like Mexico, Rome, Bermuda. They talked about their medical problems. They made small talk and had longer conversations.
“Sometimes, I was the only person they’d see every two weeks,” he said.
Of course, Heston likes books, too. He’s not as big a reader as his wife, Anne, who recommends a lot of books to him, but he likes mysteries and books about science as well as history. He was a history teacher at Frontier Regional, and then he retired. He needed a part-time job, and he went into the library for some books one day and wound up working there. You don’t work for a library for 13 years unless you like books.
“Reading is important for older people like myself,” he said. “Keep your mind active. Encourages your imagination. It doesn’t lay it all out there for you like the TV does.”
And it was especially important for the people he delivered to — people who couldn’t do much else, who were sick, who didn’t get many visitors, or any. A book can be company, too.
“Frankly,” he said, “I delivered books sometimes to people who were way beyond the point of reading, just so they could have a book.”
For some people, Heston and his books were characters in a sparsely populated plot. But the Book Man’s cast was far more sprawling. In recent years, he would deliver to as many as two dozen locations.
The average recipient got books for about four years before the stories, along with their lives, ended.
At the end of his tenure, he delivered to 60 people. He learned a lot about them through those conversations.
“But not as much as I would’ve liked to,” he said.
Heston had known his position was on rocky ground. Lack of funding put it in jeopardy in each of the previous two years, but gifts from anonymous donors kept it afloat both times, barely. A fan of Shakespeare might call it foreshadowing, realists might call it a foregone conclusion. In the end, the result was the same. The library pulled the position, which Forbes Library Director Janet Moulding said “was very painful and a very difficult decision.”
“But we really have to focus on keeping the doors open,” Moulding said.
The Book Man misses the job, he says. He misses feeling useful, and he misses the people. He hopes that his next project, teaching an American history course at various retirement homes starting in September, will fill those voids. He thinks older people appreciate those kinds of lessons more than the teenagers he used to teach. And the Outreach Delivery Service is continuing on a volunteer basis, and that makes him happy.
Heston can’t help missing the people, though, whom he has visited only once since his retirement. He plans to visit some more of those folks later this week. Sometimes, he still talks about delivering books in the present tense.
“It’s a public service job, but sometimes, it’s kind of …” he trailed off.
Sometimes, for the Book Man, it’s kind of personal.