Brown, Eleanor. The Weird Sisters (New York: Amy Einhorn Books, c2011) 320 p.

Three daughters of a Shakespearean scholar are named Rosalind, Bianca and Cordelia Andreas. As children they pull their little red wagon to the library every week because they love to read. When the girls, now grown, come home to be with their dying Mother, Bianca (known as Bean) visits the library again.

Mrs. Landrige, the librarian who had been here in the red-wagon days, had been white-haired and stooped even then, but Bean could see her at the desk, stamping library cards with a patient hand. Bean felt a rush of sweet nostalgia for the woman who had introduced us to E. Nesbit and Edward Eager and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and she found herself desperately wanting to give the old woman a hug, not that Mrs. Landrige would have trucked with that. Mrs. Landrige, as a point of fact, didn't truck with much. (p. 47).

Later Mrs. Landrige asks Bean to stand in as librarian temporarily while she goes in for a hip replacement.

“But I don't know anything about it. I mean, I don't have the right degree.”

Mrs. Landrige, had she worn glasses, would have looked over the rims at Bean. “Don't be ridiculous. It's the Barnwell Public Library, not the Library of Congress. You've been coming here since before you could walk, and I trust you implicitly. (p. 181).

So Bean becomes the Barnwell (which she thinks of as Barney) librarian. Her first act is to buy computers and automate.

Bean sat down at the desk and pulled a long drawer of the card catalog over to her. She could do nothing to change Barney, she knew. Turning the blond wood of the card catalog into the binary code of a computer catalog was only cosmetic, would alter nothing at the heart of the town, which would still creep in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, but she could change her place in it. (p. 311).

I don't know what ever happened to Mrs. Landrige.