26 Books in Truro, and a Brewster Card Will Get You One

The two books Kenneth Hawkey carried out of the Truro library a few weeks ago were about dogs and about coffee. Man’s Best Friend. How Do You Like Your Coffee? His mother-in-law went through both of them the same afternoon.

She had been a reader her whole life. An activist — a woman who read about political issues, and mysteries, and novels, the way some people eat. Over the last two years it has become hard for her to hold onto what she reads.

"She cannot read a novel or an article at all," Hawkey says.

That afternoon she turned pages of dogs and pages of coffee cups, and he watched her do it. She "seemed happy and seemed to feel accomplished," he says. She may not remember having read them at all. She has gone back to them since, more than once. He’s borrowed two more — Our Fascination With Birds, and Puppy Poetry.

Twenty-six books, bought with donations

The library has added twenty-six titles from Reading2Connect, an outfit out of Connecticut. They are short. Large type, wide margins, a photograph on one page and ten or fifteen lines of text on the other, plain sentence construction, thick paper that doesn’t tear easily.

What they are not, and Chris Kaufmann is careful about this, is dumbed down. The vocabulary is adult. These are books made for grown people who read all their lives and would notice immediately if you handed them something written for a child.

Kaufmann has run the library since late 2024. She started in libraries in 2011 at Brooks Free in Harwich, then the Brewster Ladies’ Library, then Yarmouth, where she built out resources for patrons with disabilities. She is dyslexic. She is working on a doctorate in disability studies and library accessibility, which is a fairly serious commitment for a person who already has a full-time job in a small town.

"The number one thing that matters for accessibility is librarians’ attitudes," she says. And here, "we are very well-trained in figuring out what you need."

The books were designed by Susan Ostrowski, a speech-language pathologist who spent much of her career inside long-term care facilities in Connecticut, working alongside Peter Dixon, an internal medicine physician. They started the company about a decade ago in Niantic.

"I realized that most people living in long-term care can still read," Ostrowski says.

What she’d worked out was that the field had been badly underestimating people — that the trouble usually wasn’t comprehension at all. It was everything a printed page asks you to do simultaneously.

"There’s the meaning of all the words. There are grammatical units. There’s the past tense, future tense. Contractions have to be decoded. Plurals."

Take enough of that load off and what’s left is a person reading. So the sentences put the subject first and the verb second and end before you have to hold anything in your head. Most of the books are nonfiction. She figured a lot of it out by testing on the residents where she worked, including residents with dementia — which is how she learned that a book about cats holds people and a book about baking bread does not.

"For people of any age, no matter what their disability, part of being human is our curiosity, our imagination, and our love of learning," she says. "All that can be nurtured with text."

The rest of the building has been quietly changing too

There are several dozen Wonderbooks now, shelved in the children’s section and the adult section both — print books with a speaker built into the cover, so you can hear the page and read it at the same time. Kaufmann points out that the same object works for somebody losing their vision, and for a six-year-old learning to read, and for a person learning to hear again after a cochlear implant. One book, three entirely different problems.

There are large-print books. Audiobooks in several formats. Assistive listening devices. A video magnifier that will blow up whatever you put underneath it — a prescription label, a letter, a photograph.

And there is home delivery, which this library has always done. Just don’t be startled when the director turns up on your steps with the books herself.

Where the library sits

Truro’s median age is about sixty-four. Massachusetts’ is about forty. The American Community Survey estimates that roughly five percent of Truro residents have a cognitive difficulty. Across Barnstable County, 36.4 percent of residents are sixty-five or older.

In Massachusetts, roughly 135,200 people over sixty-five are living with Alzheimer’s, and about 220,000 people are looking after someone without being paid to do it.

The library shares its campus at 7 Standish Way with the Truro Community Center and the Council on Aging. On Thursdays from ten to one, the Alzheimer’s Family Support Center runs its social engagement and respite program in the building next door, lunch included, from the Truro Community Kitchen. The center itself is in Brewster; its services are free regardless of what anybody can pay, and it runs more than forty support groups across the Cape, including a caregivers’ group for the Outer Cape and a companion group at the Provincetown senior center.

Melanie Braverman, who co-founded that center, says the librarians here are "clearly addressing a need in the Truro community."

Jane Paradise, a photographer in Provincetown, used to order books like these off Amazon for her husband, Frank DiGirolamo, who lived with Alzheimer’s for several years before he died. Sometimes he went through them upside down and it didn’t seem to matter.

"He liked turning the pages," she says.

"And he loved to rip them apart."

That is the whole thing, really — that a book can be a good afternoon without being a book in the way we usually mean it. Something to hold. Something to do with your hands while somebody sits with you.

You do not have to live in Truro

The collection is on the shelf now, and Truro put it into CLAMS — the shared catalog running across thirty-eight libraries on the Cape and the Islands. Which means a card from Brewster or Orleans or Wellfleet or Chatham will get these books delivered to your own library for pickup, no different from any other hold.

Two other Cape libraries have built something adjacent. The Brewster Ladies’ Library keeps a memory support collection along with circulating kits — a baseball one and a garden one, each with a puzzle, a couple of books, and conversation starters. Brooks Free in Harwich has an adaptive living collection with a dementia section: puzzles, matching games, conversation cards, four books.

Both of them, as it happens, are places Chris Kaufmann worked before she came out here.

Truro Public Library | 7 Standish Way, North Truro · (508) 487-1125 · trurolibrary.org
Tue 10–8 · Wed 10–5 · Thu 10–8 · Fri 10–5 · Sat 10–4 · closed Sun & Mon
Request through CLAMS from any member library.
Alzheimer’s Family Support Center of Cape Cod | 2095 Main Street, Brewster · (508) 896-5170 · alzfamilysupport.org

Hawkey’s mother-in-law does not remember reading the book about dogs. She keeps opening it anyway.