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My first job out of library school was in a corrupt public library, something theretofore unimaginable. There were numerous financial perfidies, such as grants being diverted, but the worst concerned the collection. The library, which served more than 100,000 people, purchased new books only once a year from a remaindered-books dealer.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines this sort of book as one “that remains with a publisher after sales have fallen off, usually sold at a reduced price.” Remainders usually aren’t desirable, so the discounted prices are reduced 50 percent or more, yet all the books the corrupt library bought were purported to cost the retail price.

I photocopied the book prices, and gave them to the county attorney. The library director was never prosecuted, and, after nine months on the job, I gratefully found work elsewhere, replacing a small public library’s director. An unexpected part of my new duties was writing a weekly column about the library for the local newspaper, which, come next spring, I’ll have done for 25 years.

More than 1,300 columns and a million words later, I’m sometimes asked, “Why bother?” Foremost is the great exposure the library receives. I stray from the usual library column model by emphasizing interesting bits of information that crop up in libraries, rather than listing new books and upcoming programs. The strategy is to entice readers with entertainment while slipping in a few library-related insights along the way.

In truth, the column’s a hobby, an excuse for me to romp in the sea of information known as our library. The “why I write” question has been answered more eloquently by others.

One of my high school teachers occasionally passes along writing-related tidbits he gleans from the Internet. A recent example, titled “Why Do You Write?” quoted George Orwell’s “four great motives for writing.” Orwell lists “sheer egoism (desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grownups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one).”

The others are “aesthetic enthusiasm (perception of beauty … the firmness of good prose ... desire to share an experience),” “historical impulse (find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity)” and “political purpose (to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society they should strive after).”

I fit under Orwell’s “historical impulse,” an excitement to share intriguing, or simply odd, facts. No illusions of literary grandeur are harbored here, and my book of columns, “Books Range,” seems something of a sham, since I didn’t set out to write a book, just one brief 700-word essay a week.

Compiling a book doesn’t seem to replicate the dedication required to author a book on purpose. I’ll admit it engenders tremendous satisfaction, especially since all profits from its sale go to the Library Foundation, the local nonprofit dedicated to making our library better. It is the gift-giving season, and purchasing “Books Range” (available at Gulliver’s Books and Noel Wien and North Pole Libraries) provides a gift for both the library and a loved one.

Speaking of holidays and nonprofits, the winter holidays will be celebrated once again at the library with the Fairbanks Garden Club’s Christmas tree displays at Noel Wien Library. A limited number of local nonprofit organizations can place trees on a first-come, first-served basis. Stop by Noel Wien Library for details.

And speaking of trees, the American naturalist author Terry Tempest Williams offers more seasonally sensible reasons for writing.

“I write to make peace with the things I cannot control,” Williams wrote in an essay originally appearing in Northern Lights Magazine in 2001.

“I write to create fabric in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change. I write to honor beauty. I write to correspond with my friends. I write as a daily act of improvisation. I write because it creates my composure. I write against power and for democracy. I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams.”

Greg Hill is director of Fairbanks North Star Borough libraries.