Some library memories

So, there was a Forbes article that has made the rounds of the internet (I'm not going to link it; you've either seen it or you can find it) where the author, an economist at a private college, argues that libraries should be closed down to save taxpayer dollars, and instead Amazon should open bookstores in every town.

And rightly, this has caused a lot of ire, but also a lot of speculation.

For one thing: Even though I am not really a fan of my tax dollars going for everything and anything (there is a "rec center" in my town that's being paid for by a penny on every dollar's worth of groceries I buy. It is in an inconvenient place in town and is not used as much as was intended) and also I do feel there's a lot of waste and fraud in local government (a couple referenda here failed recently and I am SURE it is because a plurality of people were unconvinced the tax moneys raised would actually go to the projects being promoted, but would rather wind up in the pockets of politicians instead), I feel like libraries are one of the "goods" that our tax dollars pay for - and one of the clear "goods" at that.

Of course, I have happy associations with libraries.

And also, the whole "Amazon will open stores in every town" - oh, haw haw. I would bet many many dollars that if that project were rolled out we'd not get one, but rather be told, "Oh, you can drive to Sherman (or perhaps: to Dallas or Oklahoma City). And we don't have a bookstore to begin with (the paperback exchange even closed, and the campus bookstore has just a shelf or two of general-reading books).

But there are other things libraries do. For example, here, the closest thing to cooling stations we have are the campus library and the public library. People without air conditioning are welcome to come and sit (provided they abide by library regulations, and I know the now-retired head of the library talked about how she had to have campus police come and remove people who were drunk and loud and also other people who were harassing a woman student).

But there are also my own memories of libraries.

The Hudson Public Library (which in those days was just off the town green, right in the midst of downtown) was a huge thing in my young life. We went there weekly (sometimes twice a week in the summer). I was a kid with almost no allowance (as I've pointed out before) and even though our town had a nice bookstore, I rarely had money for books.

But I had a library card.

(And in those days, our cards were a piece of cardstock - kids' cards were a peachy-orange, "adult" cards - which you got at 14 and that allowed you to check out record albums in addition to books - were tan. And there was a little metal plate on them, embossed with your library card number. The whole system was sort of mechanical, kind of like those old-school credit-card "sliders")

And that meant I could check out books. (And again, one of the sweet little rites of passage as a kid was getting your first library card - I think I was either in kindergarten or first grade when I did? And then, later, getting the "adult" card that gave you more privileges)

So one big feature - really, the biggest, for me - was having access to thousands of books. I started with the Beatrix Potter books (little small books bound in green cloth, with a picture of the main character on the front) and Bill Peet (who wrote stories mostly about animals and illustrated them in a cartoonish style he honed in a brief stint at Disney) and graduating up to "chapter books" and also there were all kinds of non-fiction books for kids...craft books, and I remember one on creative writing that had story prompts in it, and I remember checking out Steven Caney's "Kid's America" many times (a huge mix of things, from a recipe for corn dogs to how to make a kite in it, a great book to fight summer boredom with)

I don't remember the incident, because I was probably quite small (I learned to read at 4, which was lauded as "early" then, but in these hypercompetitive days, might be sneered at as "Hm, is she a little, you know....slow? then?"). My mom (who was our usual library companion) encouraged me, and later, my brother, to check out as many books as we wanted....sometimes more than we could easily carry (we had special "library book bags" my mom made out of denim for us).

Anyway, I had my usual huge stack of books (this was probably picture books, because I was small) and when I set them up on the counter for check-out, some woman waiting in line behind us sneered, "Well, did you leave any books for anyone else?" I mean, duh. It was obvious I had - I probably only had, at most, fifteen books. And little kids don't understand sarcasm and are often hurt by it. My mom said she was so shocked - why would an adult try to discourage a little kid that she didn't even know from wanting to read? that she couldn't say anything, but a dismayed look passed between my mom and the librarian on duty and the librarian checked us out as fast as possible.

(My mom said she was so shocked at the time she couldn't say anything, but said "In retrospect, I probably SHOULD have said something to her" but I can't imagine anything my nice mom could have said to change the opinion of someone sour enough to say something like that to a tiny kid.)

We also went there on hot summer days just to hang out - they had air conditioning, we did not. So we could go and get a few books and stake out a place at one of the tables and stay for an hour or two and read and get cooled down.

They also did "story hour" when I was a little kid (it was in kind of an empty basement area where they set up chairs for the kids and there was a little stage for the librarian to sit on). The much-beloved Miss Grissom (later: Mrs. Origlio, and I was sad to learn she has since passed on) was the person who read. She was the children's librarian for YEARS. Probably my entire childhood....and I remember her well. Like all the librarians there, I remember her as being kind and welcoming, and being excited about books and reading.

Story hour was important to me because it showed me that other adults, not just my parents, were excited about reading and about reading to kids. Maybe that's also part of the value of a library: the idea that "it's not weird to enjoy reading, here is a whole group of people who feel the same as you do." The library was one of my 'safe places' like home (and later, church) - even if the kids at school were mean to me or I felt I didn't fit in there, the librarians seemed to value me hanging around and I felt welcome at the library.

The library also had a library cat - like many library cats, his name was Dewey Decimal. He was a grey cat, maybe even part Russian Blue. He was a pretty mellow cat, I remember petting him as he laid on the counter next to the checkout area.

For many summers, they did a summer reading program. I know I've written about these  before

The typical program was thus: there was a theme. You read books and for every book (or every five books, I think, some years), you got a "sticker" (really a cut-out piece of paper you could color in, and they had gluesticks to paste it on your folder). One year it was horses, and the folder was a meadow scene, and you could put horses and trees in it. One year it was monsters, and you got horns and eyes and stuff for your monster.

As I said before - I liked them so much I did them far past an age when it was "cool," and once I aged out, I volunteered a couple summers to help - to man the sticker table, or cut out more pieces-parts for stickers, or hand out the McDonald's coupons to kids who had read 10 or 25 or 50 books. (For years - until I was in high school - there was no McDonald's in town, so the coupons for free-small-fries or free-shake tended to languish in my household. And anyway, for me, the folder and the stickers was the real attraction, not free McDonald's food).

It was all very low-tech, in a way that libraries might be told today was unacceptable for today's "online kids." But I loved it. There was a sweetness to it.

The library also had used-book sales. For years, I think the prices were: fifty cents for hardbacks, a quarter for paperbacks (with books deemed "valuable" priced higher and set aside in a different room). As a broke teenager, this was a Godsend - I could walk in with a couple bucks and walk out with numerous books. (And sometimes they had "blowout sales" where you could buy a paper grocery sack for like a dollar and then fill it as full as you could). I still even have a few books that came from those long-ago sales: I know my big omnibus volume of Jane Austen's works came from them.

And of course, now, there's so much more: access to computers for people who don't have one at home (or don't have internet). And classes - the public library here does ones on basic tax prep and on computer usage and I think they also have some literacy classes for adults and at one time they may have had an ESL class? And, I dunno - but it seems like libraries are an excellent investment; we seem to get so much back from them. I don't know how much of my property taxes go to the local library but as I said on Twitter, it feels to me like a "purer" use of my tax dollars than many things on the basis of how many people, and how wide a segment of our population is served by it. And also how visible the benefits are...

I also donate unwanted books to their used book sale, which raises money for them but also when I took a batch in the librarian kind of pounced on them (I had a lot of the Redwall series in there) and said "Oh wow, we are going to put some of these in our collection to replace the worn-out copies" so I guess they benefit in another way.