Cecil Maness, owner of Library Movers of America, shows off the “book caddy” shelves he designed for use in moving quantities of books in September 2002.
Daily Journal Archive Photo
News from around Johnson County as reported on Sept. 28 in the pages of the Daily Journal and the Franklin Evening Star from the last 111 years.
On this day in 2002, the main story on the front page of the Daily Journal was about a local man who was in high demand for helping libraries move books.
Cecil Maness was a Johnson County resident with a national reputation in an unusual business. He founded Library Movers of America, whose clients since the 1970s had included libraries, museums and universities from Washington, D.C., to Vancouver, British Columbia.
The work called for specialized equipment — some of which Maness had designed and built himself — and no shortage of on-the-spot ingenuity.
“I’m just a whiz at general nothing,” the then 61-year-old Nineveh Township resident said.
A week earlier in September 2002, Maness, his wife Peggy, and their four-man crew were in the New Whiteland area, moving the contents of the Break-O-Day Library to what was then the new Clark-Pleasant Library on Tracy Road.
That was a fairly small, one-week job for Library Movers — just 20,000 books and 6,000 audio-visual items, plus shelves and office furniture. During the previous year, they had worked at Duke University in North Carolina, Central Michigan University and the University of Illinois at Springfield, finding time in between for smaller local jobs.
Moving libraries required an expertise that went beyond loading and unloading boxes. Color-coding and meticulous care were required to keep the materials in order, or in some cases, to rearrange and recombine collections.
Maness continued to work at the company until he retired in 2010. He passed away in March 2022.
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Other memorable Johnson County stories from this day
1993
About 20 landowners in the Bargersville Fire Protection District sued the Johnson County Commissioners, alleging the creation of the district was illegal.
1985
The Indiana Department of Transportation was planning to do a study on the creation of a Interstate 65 interchange at County Line Road.
1963
The Greenwood Chamber of Commerce was planning to probe the future economic effects of the construction of I-65.
