Behind the scenes at Monterey County Free Libraries, a team chooses which books to buy. Readers choose which ones to lose by letting them gather dust.

If you’re looking for the latest John Grisham novel at the library, good luck – all eight copies of The Judge’s List in the 16 branches of Monterey County Free Libraries are checked out. It’s common for best-sellers like this to generate long waiting lists, even when there are multiple copies in circulation. Christopher Gallegos, branch manager for the Gonzales library, is responsible for stocking the MCFL system’s adult fiction collection. He uses a 3-to-1 ratio for ordering hits – for every three people on the waiting list, he’ll order one copy. “I don’t want to buy 15 copies of a book that’s a hit and then after the buzz dies down, we have a copy at every library that’s just there forever,” he says.

Numbers are a big factor in the development of MCFL’s collections, which total 331,459 items – that includes books, e-books (6,803), audiobooks (5,029), periodicals, movies.

Keeping those collections current but without the library’s constraints of physical space and budget is part art, part science, and the collections development team is responsible for identifying and buying new titles. Be Astengo, MCFL’s collections team lead, says keeping it current is part of the job: “We definitely have all the best-sellers. We purchase those because that’s what people want to read. At the same time, we want to give space for a different perspective and different voice, and maybe less well known and lift up those voices.”

Celebrity book club recommendations tend to generate a lot of requests. There are 19 copies of Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens in the MCFL system, and it’s gone out a whopping 362 times.

During the pandemic, Gallegos says books categorized as “beach reads” – light, feel-good stuff – moved especially quickly from shelves. “My thought is, maybe people want to read something light and comforting in the midst of all the doom scrolling,” he theorizes. But the other genre to move fast was dystopian stories, which surprised him: “You think, how many people want to read a made-up story about Covid while they’re still living in it? People want to read about a pretend universe that mirrors things.”

But the most sought-after titles remain the best-sellers: novels by Danielle Steel, James Patterson, Nicholas Sparks.

Gallegos himself tends toward classics, and is now on a fifth reread of his favorite book, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, published in 1952. But he doesn’t want to weigh in on the virtues of one choice versus another. “Everyone can read what they want,” he says. “It’s a judgment-free zone.”

Classics tend to have long shelf lives, especially if they are assigned to students. Part of the collections development responsibility is weeding old titles, due either to poor condition or because they haven’t circulated.

Space is a limiting factor; so is budget. Paperbacks usually run about $15 and hardcovers $25. For digital copies – which grew in popularity during shelter-in-place, both audiobooks and e-books – the library purchases a license that ends after a maximum number of downloads or one year, whichever comes first. Digital items start around $28, and the price increases with popularity. Astengo chose to forgo a license for Paul McCartney’s book of lyrics, because the one title would’ve run about $200.

“We have a very limited collection budget,” she says. MCFL has $350,000 for acquisitions, compared to $1.2 million in Santa Cruz County’s library system.

Astengo is currently reading a new acquisition, Amanda Gorman’s Call Us What We Carry. “She’s such an amazing thinker,” Astengo says. “She’s got quite a masterful command of language, and it’s very evident in her poetry.

“To be able to read or listen to a book takes you out of your own place. To me, going to the library and reading a book is a major form of self-care. Reading about a situation beyond myself is a transporting experience, it is healing.”

View the MONTEREY COUNTY FREE LIBRARIES’ complete collection online at emcfl.org.