Visitors to the children’s room at the Epsom library will not only notice the spacious new digs, but the 110 new hard-cover children’s books that the library was gifted on May 23.

The library won a $2,000 rural library grant from the Vermont-based Children’s Literacy Foundation. The grant was a voucher that enabled librarian Nancy Claris to pick titles from a catalog of 700 books, which included local authors, Caldecott and Newbury winners, and classics, to fill gaps in the libraries collection.

“The children’s library here has been in a tough situation for a long time,” said Claris. “For years, we were in a trailer adjacent to the small building. We only had space to shelve about 500 titles at a time, so twice a year we would rotate the collection.”

Epsom opened the new, larger library last December and now the children’s collection has room to spread out.

Claris said her book budget is $12,500 a year, split between adult and children titles, and that this grant has really helped beef up the library’s collection by filling in gaps.

Duncan McDougall, a Dartmouth graduate and executive director of the Children’s Literacy Foundation, said they have sponsored more than half of the rural libraries in New Hampshire and Vermont. McDougall defines rural as having less than 5,000 residents, and finds that these libraries are the ones that often have their budgets pinched when town money gets tight.

The Children’s Literacy Foundation is funded by donations. The Epsom award was made possible by a gift from Laurie and Bob Potter of New Hampshire.