The Lure of Libraries

What draws people to the public library?

I said I would not post until I had completed a draft of my thesis, but I want to record some thoughts and observations about libraries, based on my extensive experience in them--all kinds of them--of late. For the past month I've settled on my town's local library and I've had time to observe that the same people show up every day, and each follows his or her own routine. A dark-haired, thin, tall man with high cheekbones and very red lips who never smiles monopolizes the lounge chairs reading magazines from the early morning till evening. Two teenaged boys show up in the afternoons and crouch in the stacks near my carrel, reeking of cigarette smoke and drinking alcohol. I can smell it, and I hear them unscrew the flask and they even bring shot glasses and toast one another, whispering. An old woman with thinning, disheveled hair schlumps daily down the aisle to the carrel behind me. Perhaps she brings her books with her, because I have never seen her carry one to her carrel, or leave her carrel to search the stacks. I hear her heavy sighs and constant snorting of phlegm from her sinuses into her throat. I wonder: what does each gain from visiting the library? How do they feel when they're there?

Now, it would require a lot of work for me to unravel the power of the public library, and I will have to put off that work temporarily. But I've been recording observations about people in libraries for a while, and because I feel frustrated that I cannot currently expend the mental energy in delineating the theory and spirit of Academy of Readers, I am going to copy some of these observations from my journal into this posting. Guiding me to this admittedly lazy method of producing a posting is a barely articulate conviction that the manner in which all sorts of people utilize the space of the public library offers some of the closest insights into the power of the book. I can write until I turn blue about what happens in the moment a reader pulls a book off the shelf, but the reasons why someone might frequent the local library cinches everything I would work so hard to describe. Here goes:

1. Giant Bookworm

"I love walking among the bookshelves in libraries. The bookshelves--like apartment buildings in miniature--and the multitude of books, grouped together in neat rows by subject like silent, rectangular family members. I feel a certain guilty curiosity as I walk among them, as though I am snooping, a voyeur, irreverently nosing around in a sacred place.

"But it is my right. I can thunder like a hungry giant through these rows of shelves and sniff around greedily for something to satiate my appetite. Fee fi fo fum.... I pull a book at random from the shelf: Medieval Sculpture in France. The last 'date due' stamped inside the back cover of the book is November 30, 1960--44 years ago. In 44 years, no one who visited this library wanted to know about medieval sculpture in France--or, if they did, they did not choose to learn about it from this book.

"I put the book back on the shelf and step back to regard it. It is a hardcover book, a faded, brownish red, and its spine, bearing the title in gold letters, is well worn, flimsy. It stands dutifully in line with all the other books about French sculpture. I stare for some minutes at the book, and, moved somehow, I take it once more from the shelf and sit down with it. There is a table of contents and I read the succession of chapter titles: Beginnings, Southern Schools of Romanesque, The Northern Schools and the Beginnings of Gothic, The Thirteenth Century, the Fourteenth Century, and finally, The Last Gothic Sculpture. The pages are yellowed around the edges but glossy, and there are black-and-white photographs amidst the text, which runs for nearly 500 pages. Closing the book, I stand up and put it back on the shelf with all the other books on medieval French sculpture. I do not have time to read it, and besides, there are so many things in which I am more interested. I leave the book to perhaps another 44 years of silence. Or perhaps there will be someone else who will want to read it--someone who, like me, will in passing encounter the book, pull it off the shelf, and with the exclamation, 'This is exactly what I was looking for!' will check the book out of the library and run eagerly home with it, and there spend several joyful hours taking in every word."

2. The Homeless Physicist and the One-toothed Dreamer

"...surrounding me at the Boston Public Library were primarily homeless people, misfits of one form or other who did not have any place to go during the day. I remember the man with the close-cropped grey beard and duffel bag. He looked to be about 60 years old. He dressed shabbily, as though he were poor, but he did not seem dirty and he did not smell. He spent all day, every day in the library. I always wondered what he was studying--my guess was physics, or some branch of mathematics, because from afar I could see his notebook covered in symbols. I wonder what he was studying for, and what he had done in his life. Was he retired from a distinguished career as a university professor? Was he too poor to attend college when he was young, and carried his yearning to study mathematics into middle age? Perhaps he was unemployed--maybe even homeless. Why did he carry his luggage around with him all the time? Maybe that was it: he had a B.A. in physics and was , in the words of a very downtrodden, brilliant young man in my high school as he outlined his hopes for the future, a "no-name person in a lab," and got laid off, and had divorced his wife and his children were grown and had moved away, and he was always a little eccentric, so he moved out of his small, cluttered apartment and into the YMCA. Or his wife kicked him out and he was staying in hotels. Or he slept in the street, but was conscientious about cleanliness and had a few friends and showered at their places sometimes. He was a dedicated student, very focused. What did he hope to gain with this knowledge? Was he trying to make himself eligible for a higher-paying or more interesting job? Or was he trying to teach himself something he had always wanted to know about but been unable to find the time to study? Or was he trying, through the exploration of some vague curiosity, to raise his mind out of the middle-aged rut into which he had dug himself?

"That's what the old woman with one tooth was doing, I am sure. She was not focused like the man. She read one thing one day, another thing the next, she smelled, her eyes wandered. She took a liking to me, it seemed; she always ferreted me out in the vast research reading room and sat across from me, much to my dismay. For her, the library provided safety, communion--probably the closest thing to companionship that she had. And as her eye roved over the page (it wasn't fiction; it seemed to be whatever was on the shelf closest to the table we shared), she became one with herself, and was free to dream, and to organize her life in her mind. There was no spark of imagination or deep emotion in her eye, but her expression was not entirely bland. She seemed to be slightly off mentally: one day she made a big show of snatching away the dictionary I was using, eying me testily--but nevertheless there was a vague aura of thoughtfulness about her. She seemed, in short, to be one of those people whom life had overlooked. I'll bet she didn't really read her books; more likely she created herself on the page, in her mind, thinking through her hurts, feeling her placelessness, and building a place for herself in the peace and solitude of the library.

"Whether this man and woman gained objective knowledge in the library is uncertain. But they did acquire footholds, a way to organize their minds and feelings that their lives had denied them. But did this lift them out of who they were, make them see themselves and the world in a new way?

"Books, after all, are more reliable than people. You go to the library and the books are always there. Not that books should replace people. But books provide order; books themselves are static. That's what is so incredible about them--that then they speak to you in endlessly fresh ways, because of course, it is through books that your mind speaks to you. And then, after much hard work, something gives, and you begin to apprehend the whole structure that shapes the underlying ideas of the book, and then it enters your mind, changes you, enables you to think in a new way...."