"There are these children loving this character and they have just one book to read, and here we are in Milwaukee with all these Potter books, and rooms of other books. And it seems a shame," Kiely said. "So it was such a simple thing for us to do. We think one set is enough to start with. We can always send more."

Kiely asked Friends of the Milwaukee Public Library, a volunteer fund-raising group, to underwrite the gift. Lois Blinkhorn, president of the group, quickly agreed. "There is no greater pleasure than putting a book into the hands of a child who wants to read," Blinkhorn explained last week.

"We decided it would be really fun if we wrote something in Russian as a bookplate," Kiely said. "So we wrote a little phrase. And I asked one of the women who owned the hair salon that I go to to translate it for me."

The hairdresser, Tanya, had been a librarian in Russia. Library staffers took her handwritten Russian sentences and used a free web site to turn them into a printable Word document. The bookplates say in Russian: "A passion for reading is the greatest gift. From the Friends of the Milwaukee Public Library, Milwaukee, WI, February 2009."