Libraries and MeBy Elizabeth George I’m a lucky
Libraries and MeBy Elizabeth George I’m a lucky woman. I have enough money to buy all the books I want, and as a result I’ve filled my own library, my office, my assistant’s office, and my bedroom with books. I have never been without a book to read for as long as I can remember, and while I’m reading one book, there is another waiting. When I reach the last page of a book, I sigh, feel immensely gratified, sometimes write to the author, and then grab for the next one. I began buying books when I was in seventh grade and began babysitting for neighbors. Books—along with Christmas presents—were how I spent that first earned money. I’m aware, though, that not everyone is as lucky as I am, and for this reason we have libraries. Prior to my having that aforementioned babysitting money, I had no funds to purchase books and although I always received a book at Christmas, as did my brother, we made short work of them and we usually finished reading them before New Year’s Eve. So early on, my father took us to the Mountain View Public Library. In those days, Mountain View, California, was not the place it is today: abloom with techies—and the industries they work for—and filled with restaurants, coffee houses, and some of the most expensive real estate in the state. Then—in the 1950s—Mountain View stood on the edge of farming land, huddled alongside the south end of San Francisco Bay where, picturesquely, the city dump was a sea gull’s paradise. Downtown featured a shoe store, a dress shop, a real Italian delicatessen, an equally real meat market, and a grocery store with saw dust on the floor. Tucked nearby this store—ah, I recall its name: Purity—was the public library. This was a storefront, and when we went inside, we were greeted by a librarian whom I can see at this moment, mostly because she had a mustache. We were allowed to wander along this tiny library’s few tall bookshelves and we could select as many books as we wanted. So we did. Some we read in the car on the way home. Others we set aside and doled out to ourselves. For we didn’t go to the library every week, only when the books were due, two weeks later. In the summer, there were reading contests. When you finished a book, a balloon was colorfully filled in on a dittoed sheet of paper with your name on it. This featured a clown holding a whole slew of balloons, and it was with a source of pride that I saw my clown’s balloons get filled in quickly, faster than anyone’s. Ultimately, a bigger library was built as the little town began to grow. A fine building not far from the Catholic church now housed the city’s books, and I can remember going there repeatedly and gnawing at the bit until the moment the next Anne of Green Gables book was returned by whoever had borrowed it. That same library is even larger now, but I haven’t been inside. Long ago, I moved away from Mountain View to seek libraries elsewhere. My favorite was the old and wonderful library in the British Museum. My British publisher arranged for me to have a card there. I remember exactly what he wrote: “Please allow our distinguished author Elizabeth George entrance to the library,” and upon this merit, I was given a card. How proudly I passed the people in line to get into the museum when it opened. I didn’t have to wait in that line because the library was already open and…I had my card. The library was a quirky and wonderful place where you could sit exactly where some of the great writers of English literature sat before you. You occupied a position in a large circle, row upon row of curved spaces upon which you could do your reading. Up above you: a deep blue ceiling. All around you: individuals studying, scribbling away on notepads, creating masterpieces….Who really knew? I was there to find books that would assist me in my understanding of the Pakistani experience in Great Britain in advance of writing a novel that I called Deception on His Mind. But…there was something about the British Museum’s great library that I didn’t understand at first. The library is vast. Its books are not on view. There were no stacks to wander along. What you had to do was put your request in and wait and wait and wait—sometimes days—for the book to arrive. What I learned later from my publicist who had worked in the library was this: The stacks occupied an enormous place below ground, so enormous that unless the librarian assistants below had more than one book requested from a given area, they didn’t fetch the one you requested. Until, of course, they had another request! Consequently, it was many days of returning to the library before I finally received my books. I’m happy to say that they were very helpful. How irritating it would have been had they not been so. Libraries exist for reasons. One of those reasons is scholarship. The other—and far more important, I think—is accessibility. Libraries give young children an access to a reading experience they might not otherwise have. They allow people who cannot afford to buy a volume of their own a chance to read the latest book in a series they love or a best seller that they’ve read about. Now, as a novelist who supports herself by selling books, I want people to frequent bookstores, of course. But I also want them to support their local library for what it can offer anyone—like the child I was—who walks inside. -- source link
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