Okay, so I want to tell you one of my most favorite library moments. I think I was, maybe, 25 years old. It was a November afternoon, and I was wandering around the Williston Library at Mount Holyoke College. What a cool library!
The entrance is this sweeping four story foyer with cafe tables. There’s this divided staircase that wraps its way up to the second or third floor. And if you follow it, you end up in this palatial reading room with these enormous arching wooden rafters, and giant stained glass windows and balconies. It feels like you’ve been transported back to some medieval cathedral. The basement is this dark catacomb with ancient hand-cranked rolling stacks. And all over are these hidden classrooms tucked away in hidden corners. And you look into them and the sunlight is lancing in through the windows. And it lights up the chalk dust in the air.
At some point I was wandering down this linoleum hallway with buzzing fluorescent lights. I remember there were folding chairs stacked up in piles against the wall … very functional, very … institutional. At the end of this hall was a nondescript wooden door … no sign … the kind of door that you’d expect to open into an office … or a storage closet full of mops.
I totally expected it to be locked.
But it wasn’t.
The knob turned … the door opened … and …
Lace curtains. Claw-foot arm chairs with ottomans. A big hearth around the fireplace. Built-in bookcases lined the walls. It was a nineteenth century sitting room. I half expected to see Emily Dickinson dipping her pen in an inkwell at a little desk by the door.
It was as magical to me as stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia.
I love pretty much everything about libraries–the one-point perspective of book shelves running into the distance, the musty smell of all those pages, the electric energy of a brightly lit media center, the reverent quiet that makes someone feel like you’re in a temple.
I think I come by this love honestly. My mom’s a librarian … and my cousin … and my aunt … and my sister-in-law … and my grandma … you get the idea.
My mom worked the evening shift two nights a week, and on those nights, she would cart my siblings and I to the library to spend that liminal time between when she started work and when my dad arrived from his work to take us home. It’s hard to overstate how deeply influential those few minutes each week were. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to call that library a third parent. Or at least … maybe … a wise, old aunt. That library noticed my curiosity and encouraged me to follow it without being overbearing or smothering, gently challenged my unquestioned beliefs and taught me to empathize with other points of view, introduced me to people who would become my heroes, taught me hobbies that would become a lifelong joy, and gave me hope when I (a nerdy, anxious kid) felt impossibly lonely.
Public libraries don’t care if you pass a test of ideological purity. They don’t care if you don’t have any friends. They don’t even care if you can’t read.
Libraries don’t ask anything. They just say, “Here! Here is everything I have. Everything that is good and everything that is bad. Everything I know about the world. You can have it without judgment and without a filter. And if I don’t have what you want, I’ll get it for you. (Side note: I once interlibrary loaned a copy of Colin Tudge’s The Variety of Life from the National Library of Barbados. That was so rad.)
Your library doesn’t care whether you read the world’s oldest poem translated from the Sumerian cuneiform or flip through the perfumed pages of Cosmo.
Everyone is welcome. I know of nothing in the world that comes closer to the democratic ideal.
I worked in a library once … for about two years … a fabulous college library just a ten minute bike ride from my house. It might be the best job I’ve ever had. I worked from 4:00 pm until midnight … And for most of that time, I was the only person working there. This was awesome because I got to do everything–checking books in and out, troubleshooting computer problems, cataloging, shelving, fielding reference questions. And I got to talk with all the students on their way through.
One evening, I was packing up to go to dinner … … when a student stopped to chat.
“You leave for dinner?” he asked.
And I said, “Yeah, dinner at the dining hall is one of the perks of the job.”
“So does the library close down?”
And I said, “No,” and I showed him the sign which I left at the front desk that said, “I’m at dinner. I’ll be back shortly. Thanks for your patience.”
He looked at me incredulously for a minute, as if thinking, how could a library possibly run this way … then his gaze swept across the rows of books and let out a conspiratorial little chuckle. “Huh, huh! Free books.”
And I looked at him for a second and said, “Well … yeah …That’s the idea.”
I tell this story because it’s funny, but also because there’s something really interesting here. The fact that libraries work so well defies our intuitions. They work because we trust each other, and they surprise us because, most of the time, that trust is well justified. In seeming defiance of the tragedy of the commons, people are good to these books that they don’t own. They return them. They don’t steal them even though it would be so easy to.
We only have libraries because millions of people all over the world choose to respect them. Your local library only exists because you can trust your neighbors to play by the (mostly unspoken) rules.
But it’s more than that. Libraries don’t just happen. They’re expensive to build. The books and DVDs and recordings and computers and magazine subscriptions and free-to-use computers do not come cheap. Maintaining these things in a Universe that wants to break and degrade and mold everything is an endless battle against the elements. Paper is fragile. You only have a local library because your neighbors decide that it is worth it. People in your town have to say to themselves, year after year, “Even though our town is small, even though our budget is tight, we will put aside land and maintain a building and pass the hat for tax money to take care of this because we believe in it.”
Public libraries exist because good people, who could easily get higher-paying jobs, devote their careers to getting the books you want into your hands–mostly because they just believe that the world is a better place because they do it.
They exist because other people sign up (almost always without any pay at all) to do the boring work of sitting in regular library board meetings to keep the lights on and worry about how long the boiler can run before it needs to be replaced.
But it’s even more than that. Every shelf in your library is a kind of triumph of the human spirit. I have in my life written several books and I can tell you it’s not easy. Every book requires sacrifice. And not just from the author but their families and friends who must give them the time to pour months and sometimes years of their lives into a project that will probably never bring them wealth or fame. Publishing even ONE book is an effort that requires years of work from dozens of people. Think about how many books are on your library’s shelves. Even one shelf contains the culmination of thousands of minds and centuries of labor.
There is so much to say about this. And I can’t say all of it here. But there is one more critical thing that we need to remember that our libraries do for us. And it’s something that a nerdy bibliophile like me can sometimes forget.
Libraries are built around books, but libraries aren’t about books. Yes, it’s true that modern libraries are space-age media centers with 3-D printers and makerspaces. There are some libraries where you can borrow garden tools or electricity usage monitors or day passes to nearby cultural attractions or museums. All of that’s awesome, but it’s not what I’m trying to say.
Libraries are one of the modern world’s last great common spaces. There are precious few places in the typical American town where someone can just go–no membership fee and no obligation to buy a cup of coffee. They don’t expect anything. They are not obsessed with keeping your attention. To be there, you don’t have to submit to a sales pitch or a sermon.
You don’t need to justify to the library why you are there. You can be fifteen years old and show up to sit and do math homework with that cute girl in geometry who agreed to be your partner. You can be the two awkward guys who play D & D in the corner by the windows. You can be the homeless kids whose mother had no other place for them to go while she walked to 7-11 to submit a job application. My daughter learned to play chess in a library. My friends have given poetry readings. My town had an eclipse viewing party on the lawn. And that’s where people in our town gathered to figure out how to support bands of incoming Afghani refugees.
In the depths of the pandemic, on the last day of school, my wife had arranged an individual Zoom conference with every single one of her kids to celebrate with them all the obstacles that they had overcome–both academic and personal in that hard, hard year. She was setting up for the first one when the power went out at the house. And do you know where she went? The library. She sat in her car and used the open wifi and said good-bye to her first-graders. Even when no one could go in, our library kept on giving.
When I discovered that nineteenth century sitting room poetry section at Mount Holyoke’s library, I felt like I’d stepped into Narnia.
The thing about Narnia is that you don’t get to decide to go. Doors open up at Aslan’s whim. And eventually, you get too old to go back. But libraries have no such provision. As long as we decide to keep them, they will keep us and our story … all of it … or at least as much of it as we have … even the parts that no one cares about … except maybe you.
Great story