Finding Bed Bug-Proof Chairs No Easy Task

After Clint Eastwood's recent "chair conversation" with "President Obama," his appearance at the Republican National Convention was lampooned relentlessly — even the Huffington Post satirized the night, producing a "video" of the chairs that had supposedly auditioned for the actor's monologue in Tampa, Fla.

Vince Juliano, assistant director of the , a man of decidedly good humor, found himself in a strangely similar situation recently — auditioning chairs — after — and the library was tasked with finding replacements.

“It is little tricky,” Juliano said. “We wanted to avoid the traditional padding of wood furniture which looks great and is comfortable and inviting — but we want it to be uncomfortable for bed bugs.”

Which means non-fabric chairs — and there aren't many out there that are affordable enough, can be purchased in bulk, and last a decade or two.

The city council this week approved a $30,000 expenditure to purchase new chairs for the library, after bedbugs were found in some this July. The full cost of replacing all the library chairs is $50,000, and the remainder of the funds would come from the library’s endowment.

On July 31, the Russell Library was closed for more than two days. "The health department got an anonymous call about a bed bud in a DVD case and staff confirmed there were bed buds in the adult DVD area and the upstairs adult computer area," Mayor Dan Drew said at the time.

Pest-sniffing dogs and an exterminator were brought in and eventually high heat was used along with pesticides to eradicate them.

At first, Juliano said, 175 chairs will be purchased from the Newington-based company OFI, whose primary line is the Herman Miller Aeron chair, something every National Public Radio listener is familiar with, but may have never seen.

And staff? Those chairs will be purchased with the city and endowment funds after the public portion is settled. They will be more expensive, since librarians and other workers sit in these chairs for many hours per day and they must be ergonomically designed.

All of the third-floor adult public computer area chairs and those on the second-floor landing, where all the large wooden table perch.

There is a purchase order ready to be submitted, as soon as the city’s 15-day paperwork window ends, Juliano said.

And when can patrons expect to see new chairs? “I’m hoping for the end of September but it could be into October,” he said. “It’ll take a while to replace every chair. It’s going to be a work-in-progress."

Members of the public, he says, could be sitting in these chairs from anywhere from 10 minutes to two hours — some people sit in the chair virtually all day.

One thing Juliano is really eager for — and he’s worked at plenty of other libraries and seen this — is, “we’re really looking forward to getting chairs that are big enough for a person can curl up with a good book, where a mom and dad and child could come in and feel comfortable.”

“If we can locate something that’ll do the trick,” Juliano said, it would be a real assett to the Russell Library.

Bed bugs, while shocking to some city residents, are not uncommon in libraries and other large places where people congregate and there is a high turnover — movie theaters, college auditoriums and the like.

In late July, when the Russell Library closed to deal with the bed bugs issue, Juliano said, he was on vacation on the West Coast with his son and family.

“I was at three airports, two times on four different airplanes; two different movie theaters, to different doctors’ offices and waiting rooms, and several restaurants.”

All those places, he thought at the time, are potential places where bed bugs could easily nest.

Not long after the Russell Library news, the Hamden library shut down for a similar problem.

Juliano said the city of Danbury a few years ago had bed bugs, and this summer, one to two libraries in the Midwest, even the same week as the Russell Library’s issue, one popped up in Michigan.

Juliano doesn’t know the last time the Russell Library purchased chairs in bulk.

But he’s worked at many other libraries during his career.

“Usually when libraries buy furniture, they buy good quality pieces that last for decades. You can’t really redecorate when you’re getting government funds,” Juliano said.

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