In the wake of the closure of so many beloved book stores I’ve been casting around lost and lonely in search of a source for books. In the midst of this, I’ve discovered a strange and wondrous place. It’s called a library, it’s full of books, and they let you read them for free. What a brave new world. And check this out, there are two whole shelves in this magical building full of knitting patterns. And it’s full of people who help you find books, and audio books, and movies. And get this: apparently they have these magical places in just about every town, like it’s an institution or something.
All joking aside, my parents will be the first to tell you that this is not a discovery but a rediscovery for me. I would have happily lived at the local library as a kid. I volunteered in the children’s section for a couple of years when I was around 12, I guess, fixing book bindings, re-filing the easy readers, and the like. This was back in the stone age when the catalog was organized on little bits of processed wood pulp called paper. From memory, I still tell you where the Encyclopedia Brown books were. I spent one summer reading each and every one of them.
Somewhere along the line though, my interest in an afternoon at the library fell off. I suppose it had something do with high school and hormones. Then when you reach the university, an afternoon at the library takes on a whole different meaning: research. There is little in way of pleasure reading to be found there. I know where the soil surveys are and I can find my way around the map room so well now that it’d do better to find it’s way around me, I think, but I never found any mysteries about kid-detectives solving crimes for the neighborhood in there. I spend my college years wandering the dusty aisles of used book stores like Bogey’s lightly fingering creased covers wishing that I had enough spare moments to actually purchase one and read it.
The world has moved on, however, and having children puts a spin on your life’s priorities...ambitions... Well, on your life, actually. Do I mean to imply that I was trying to broaden my child’s horizons? Become a literary role-model? No, not exactly. But a few months into parenthood, I was desperate for a place to go where the noise and the occasional odors of my small earthling wouldn’t solicit irritated glances from passersby, and the library had a story hour.
So thither I went, and seated on a round rug with my then 3 month old drooling in my lap I found myself singing Itsy-Bitsy Spider with a whole lot of parents like me and listening to tales of how Spot baked Fluffy a birthday cake with 1 - 2 - 3 candles. Afterwards, I took a tour through the easy readers. We worked our way through Dr. Seuss and Nate the Great. I tip-toed out of the kids area and found books for big people too. Then I found the knitting shelf. I was home.
And for slackers like me, lo and behold, librarians have discovered the internet. You can renew your books online at three in the morning the night before the due date in your underwear and bunny slippers. Not that I’d do that. Ahem. Moving on...
And check this out, you can order a book online, if they don’t have it, they’ll get it from another library, and they’ll call you when it’s ready for you. Apparently the government sponsors these libraries so they do all this stuff for you for free, like it’s some kind of social service or something. Some mumbo jumbo about paying taxes-who-see-what-its.
All my nonsense aside, I wonder if the future for readers isn’t a step into the past. The local bookstores lost to the tide and temper of our society have left a hole in me that’s not easily filled. Shawn and I made several dates out of dinner and a long tour through Bogey’s. Half of the Crow manuscripts were drafted at a little table in The Next Chapter, with a mug of tea in one hand and the familiar tables of new books looking at me over the top of my laptop. Though it pains me to lose that source, I wonder if we’re better off to replace it with a resource. It’s a shift in our very American thinking to prefer communal knowledge shared and lent and borrowed, reused and restored instead of purchased and hoarded. But I wonder if it isn’t the wiser and ultimately inevitable path.
How long has it been since you’ve walked into one of these mystical buildings? Do you even know where your library card is? Do you think you could make the switch?
And, do you think we could get them to serve coffee? Sigh. Probably not that last one.