Every time I’ve moved, I’ve been closer to the nearest library. The libraries have gotten bigger and the service better. My latest hometown built a beautiful new library, and the staff constantly find new ways to help the patrons.
Still, these libraries can’t measure up to my first library, in the city. Maybe it was the long walk there that was an urban adventure every other week, with a stack of new adventure to take home with me each time. Maybe the old stone building looked more like a library is supposed to look. Maybe it was just that reading was still new.
But the new library offers things the old libraries didn’t. No cafe, but access to books throughout the county system, Interlibrary Loans in a day; the library ordered a new book just because I ask and because there wasn’t a copy in the system yet. Performance rooms, meeting rooms, quiet rooms, more room for books, more computers.
One regret is that I haven’t been able to pass a serious love of reading to my kids. Yes, they read, even for fun, but I don’t think they love it like I do. I have managed to convince them to use the library, showing them how much we pay for the library through our taxes. What a great bargain it is - thousands of books and more, for less than a dollar a day!
My mom is a reader, and my two sisters and I are readers, but none of my brothers are readers. They read but aren’t readers. I think I vaguely pity them and they vaguely pity me.
Every time I am at the library, there is usually one person arguing over an obscenely small fine like 40 cents.
I mean, if this was next door at Target, you would say To Hell with it, it isn’t worth my time to argue over 40 cents, but at the library it is time to step into the cage for that money.
It has been years–maybe even decades–since I was in a library that made more than a cursory effort to alphabetize paperbacks.
I mean, sure, they tend to fling the books onto the shelves in such a way that if your author’s last name begins with JKLMNOP or Q, you know roughly where on the shelves to start looking (somewhere in the middle), but that’s pretty much it.
I don’t get it. You alphabetize hardcovers all the time, right? Well, when you get one of those funny little books with the bendy covers and the tendency towards genre fiction–do it to those too!
