MISQUAH — The Misquah Public Library’s summer reading program has enrolled forty-one children this year, the most in the program’s history, and it has done so with its head librarian away and a substitute at the desk — a fact the substitute is too modest to take credit for, and that this newspaper will therefore take credit for on her behalf.

The program, which has run on a tiered system since 2003, asks children to read their way up a hand-drawn paper ladder taped to the wall of the children’s corner, each rung marked with an animal sticker earned at a milestone. Forty-one is a considerable jump from the twenty-nine enrolled two summers ago, and from the mid-thirties of last year, and it has put visible strain on the sticker supply, which Megan Tollefson, minding the desk, describes as “under pressure and holding, like everything else around here.”

The climb has produced at least one policy innovation. Brynn Solberg, entering fifth grade, having last summer requested that reading be added as a category to the Fourth of July field events, this year requested — and received — a separate rung on the ladder for books read aloud to a younger sibling, on the reasoning that it is harder and ought to count for more. The library agreed. The rung has been added, in pencil, and named for her, in pencil, pending a decision on whether that sets a precedent.

Ms. Tollefson attributes the record less to anything she has done than to the simple fact of a hot July and a library with air conditioning that mostly works. “It’s cool in here and the books are free,” she said. “I’m not going to pretend it’s more complicated than that.” She allowed that the ladder helps. “Kids will do remarkable things,” she said, “to put a sticker of a moose above a sticker of a rabbit.”

Mrs. Aune, recovering at home, is reported to have received the enrollment figure with satisfaction (see accompanying story), and to have asked whether the ladder had been kept full in her absence. It has. Whether it can be kept in stickers through August is, Ms. Tollefson said, “a live question, and the only genuine crisis I’m managing.”