What do you remember of the library where you grew up?
What do you remember of the library where you grew up?
— Heather Christle (@heatherchristle) November 11, 2021
Mine was the Wagner Library, maybe three miles from my house? Close enough that I could reach it on my bicycle. I used to ride over there a couple of times a week from age twelve or thirteen on. Before that, my mother took me, generally as often as I liked.
There was a children's room, down a short hallway to the right of the desk; the books for adults -- including a tiny science fiction section -- was directly facing the desk. It smelled of books and paste and library tape, my favorite smell in all the world. Well into my adolescence, the librarians still stamped due dates on little Manilla cards kept in pockets in the back of the book. Also, you could only take ten books out at a time, which was why I went back at least twice a week.
This is what it looks like now -- not at all what it looked like when I was a kid. Then it was cream-colored brick and giant darkened windows. Also it was square, not whatever shape this is. But it was exactly that tiny, which explains the limits on how many books could be taken out.
No lie at all, this library kept me alive through some dark times. We didn't have much money in those days -- later, when my father went to work for LOOP, we had more. So my mother couldn't buy us many books. (My father thought reading fiction was a bewildering activity, and couldn't see why we would need to buy books when we already had books.) If I'd been limited to books my mother could buy for me, or those I could buy myself when I started earning money, my scope and my mind would have been much narrower.
(I remember the first book I ever bought with my own money: Door into Summer, by Robert Heinlein. It cost seventy-five cents and was a skinny paperback, but it was a revelation. I had money now. I could buy books.)
I remember when I was eight years old walking into this library and taking a deep breath of that delicious smell, being so happy I was going to get more books. I was so overwhelmed with gratitude for all the people who had written books for me to read, that I decided I would have to write books when I grew up, to pay them back.
You can blame this library for my life, I guess is what I'm saying.
1 comment:
We went to the library every single Saturday. I checked out piles of books. When I ran out of books downstairs in the childrens section, I discovered the humor and plays in adult non-fiction. Then entertaining non-fiction (as much as Asimov was a terrible person, he wrote great non-fiction, and of course there were lots of entertaining math books by people like Martin Gardner and Raymond Sulliman sp?). Then I wandered into adult fiction and got into mysteries and fantasy.
My mom would also take me to the university library so she could work and she would set me loose on the top floor in the children's section from back when the university had a lab school (NOBODY else spent time on that floor-- it was just me and books). It was sort of a time warp of books published before 1980. But I read a lot of great stuff there too.
Post a Comment