MONTVALE, N.J.—Late in the day, Paul Low was behind a Dunkin’ in Cliffside Park, looking for a library with no sign.
He had already been there once. His car’s directions had brought him to the small strip mall, but nothing looked like a library. He tried another address and found the permanent building closed for renovations—with a notice directing him back to the storefront he had just left.
Now he had 10 minutes until closing.
Low found the temporary library, explained his mission, and collected his stamp. The librarian walked him to the door and locked it behind him.
There was still another stop to make.
For the Montvale retiree, “Stamp Your Way Around BCCLS” had become considerably more than a summer scavenger hunt. By the time he finished, Low had collected 64 stamps, mapped routes across northern New Jersey, and discovered just how much exploring a library card could set in motion.
“For me, it was a mission from the beginning,” he said.
The Bergen County Cooperative Library System had set a modest starting goal: Visit at least three member libraries between June 15 and Aug. 15, find a hidden purple BCCLS logo, and have a paper passport stamped. Each stamp counted as an entry in a drawing for one of two $50 Visa gift cards, one for an adult and one for a child.
Low’s final tally covered 62 Bergen County locations, the Louis Bay 2nd Library in Hawthorne, and the main North Bergen library. Fort Lee was stop No. 64.
When he returned to Montvale Free Public Library, Director Giulia Bombace said, he was “like a kid in a candy store.”
He had plenty of company in his enthusiasm, even if he did not meet other stamp collectors on his rounds. Across BCCLS, participants returned 593 forms—224 from adults and 369 from children—representing 7,515 library visits, according to project lead Marcia Literati, assistant director of Tenafly Public Library. Three people visited all 86 participating locations, and four others reached 84. The system has 78 member libraries, some with multiple locations.
The adult prize winner is from Paramus and the child winner from Elmwood Park, Literati said. Names and photographs were pending notification of the winners.
Low had never needed a prize to make libraries appealing.
He grew up in Dallas, where his mother took him and his brother to the library. He later studied mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin and earned a master’s degree in operations research and statistics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His favorite library is the one in UT Austin’s landmark Tower.
“It’s a whole world that’s open to you if you just take advantage of it,” he said.
Before the BCCLS promotion, he had already set himself a goal of visiting the system’s libraries. In June 2025, he photographed nine of them. Then, early this summer, he spotted the passport display at Montvale.
“My goodness, I was totally in,” he recalled. “Here’s an organized challenge built around something I’d already decided to do.”
His first stamps came July 2 at Montvale and Upper Saddle River, the libraries he uses most often. By July 14, he had 25.
Then vacations, pickleball and time with his grandchildren competed for space on the calendar. The Aug. 15 deadline held firm. Bookmarked, if you will.
With about two weeks left, Low put his analytical skills to work. He built a Google Sheet of library names, counties, addresses and visit dates, imported the locations into Google Maps and organized them into color-coded layers. From there, he plotted routes to keep driving between stops to a minimum.
“Maps are the way to organize things for me,” he said.
On Aug. 11, he collected 11 stamps, sweeping through Closter, Cresskill, Demarest, Englewood, Harrington Park, Northvale, Norwood, Old Tappan, Park Ridge, River Vale, and Tenafly.
On Aug. 14, he collected 12—and he had started after lunch.
Not every stop cooperated with the itinerary. At Wallington, a sign announced a closure for staff training. Low continued on his route and circled back. Once inside, a staff member spotted his passport and wanted to hear about the adventure.
Low wanted to talk, too. But other libraries would soon close.
“I had an agenda,” he said.
Hillsdale made him work for its stamp. The hidden logo was tucked into a coin spiral display, visible by looking down from the third floor toward an open area on the second. Finding it took two tries.
“They decided it’s a scavenger hunt—we’re going to make it challenging,” he said.
Montvale’s logo was across from the circulation desk. Staff could help a stumped visitor with a simple instruction: Turn around.
Even at his busiest, Low found reasons to linger. Glen Rock and Oradell had especially cozy reading areas. Bergenfield’s open interior and staircases stayed with him. At Hackensack’s Johnson Public Library, the hunt drew him into the historic portion of the building.
Westwood was already familiar territory: He and his wife, Corinne, attend its annual Manhattan Short film program.
“Every library is unique,” Low said. “The librarians and staff give each library its own personality.”
That discovery was exactly what the organizers had hoped to encourage.
Literati said the BCCLS Public Relations Committee developed the hunt from its “One Card, Many Libraries” social media campaign, which highlights the resources available throughout the system. A scavenger hunt offered a way to turn that message into an outing. The dinosaur theme of Summer Reading 2026 supplied the wordplay: stamping instead of stomping.
“It was so much fun to create and we are so happy with the results,” she told us.
The committee hopes to offer something similar next summer, “with a few twists!”
For Bombace, a patron’s trip to another library can benefit the hometown library, too. Visitors return with stories about services and programs that might work in Montvale.
“Oh wow, that sounds fantastic. Maybe we could try to bring that to our patrons,” she said of the short-films program.
Low already uses his card that way, reserving materials online and having them delivered wherever pickup is convenient. The tour gave him a much fuller picture of the network he had been using.
It also left him with unfinished business. Edgewater eluded him amid renovation and conflicting address information. Essex County and the remaining Hudson County locations could wait, he said, “maybe for another time.”
He would attempt the tour again.
As for the $50 prize that helped get the adventure rolling, Low had done that calculation, too.
“I’m sure I spent more than that driving around,” he said.