Libraries: A Personal History

In honor of National Library Worker's Day:

I suppose it was nothing to be terribly proud of, back then. No, at our tiny missionary school in Peshawar, Pakistan, there was definitely something weird about the way, when our rusty old school-bell rang for recess, that I would run in the opposite direction from the other kids. They ran to the tiny room outside where we kept our motley assortment of cricket bats, basketballs and jump ropes. I ran further inside the school building towards the back, to the drafty room that served double-duty as assembly hall and library.
I fell in love with libraries, at first, out of pure necessity. In our school, as in so many others, pecking order was established, at least among the boys, through athletic talent. Popularity rose and fell, cliques formed and disbanded, in time with the waxing and waning of certain sports fads. One week, soccer was in, and the wirier and faster among us ruled, if not with an iron fist, then with a nimble foot. The next, basketball took its place and left the chunkier of us red-faced with exertion, embarrassment or both. I don’t remember exactly when I threw in the towel on the whole thing, but I felt ever so much better when I did. The library was waiting.

The library didn’t, however, exactly put together a welcoming committee. Indeed, there was hardly even a staff. You checked out books by scribbling your name in a tattered notebook by the door, but returning materials functioned on the honor system and due dates were flexible, to say the least. It was a musty-smelling room but well-lit, with wall-to-wall carpeting in a dramatic shade of red that seemed designed to match the rug burns it gave when you scooted across it. I liked that room. It became mine, by geeky default, because everyone else was outside playing. That suited me just fine. I started out just reading. Binge reading, really; “The Berenstain Bears”, from start to end. Back issues of “Ranger Rick” magazine. The Black Stallion series, but not from start to end, because we were missing a quarter of them. I even started out on a few “real books”: Black Beauty, Misty of Chincoteague, The Island of Blue Dolphins, Oliver Twist, all of Jules Verne, all of Mark Twain. I wasn’t trying to be brainy. I just grew up out of some books and into other books, and the feeling was as natural, comfortable and satisfying as trading in your too-small shoes for the right size.
My hours in the library were simply a good time, maybe the first time I had ever really intentionally set out to sit down and read. I remember that very clearly: this time was mine to do with it exactly as I liked, and that was reading. I started thinking of reading as something more significant than a hobby. I’d always gotten books for birthdays and Christmases, but I thought of them as a back-up option in case there was nothing good on TV. At some point, stretched indolently on the dark red carpet, I developed a habit. Books, I learned, were headily, happily addictive.

There were other things I’d be learning. As the weather changed – got too cold, or as was more often the case in Pakistan, too hot – other kids drifted into my library. I don’t think I resented this. There were no stats, but the checkout notebook got fuller and more tattered, and I enjoyed seeing which books came and went. I knew nothing about circulation trends or patron surveys, but I began noticing patterns. When soccer was the playground fad, a British soccer novel called “Here We Go!” was in constant motion, bouncing from person to person. I felt a small, secret joy at knowing this; it gave me some sort of leverage (mostly imaginary) over the more outgoing kids, who’d ask me where to find things, or what other books on soccer we had. I knew nothing about the political aspect of librarianship either, nothing about issues of censorship or free expression or readership feedback, but I laughed when I noticed that words like “durn” and “heck” were blacked out in all the books. I wondered what the point of having “I Hate Your Guts, Ben Brewster” in the library was if I wasn’t allowed to read it. This knowledge, these questions, fascinated me. They meant that there were answers; answers about books. They meant there was another world out there, where books were bread and water to people who could spend hours, lives, careers, involved with reading and helping other people read.

I came a little closer to that world when we moved to America. Here of course, they actually had public libraries, not attached to schools. That was a somewhat new experience to me, and very exciting. There were buildings stuffed corner-to-corner with books and all it took to take them home was a library card. The social significance of libraries became importantly clear to me. The local library in Franklin, situated in the middle of the lower-income housing, seemed to offer its free services to exactly the people who needed it most. Information, the great equalizer, was there for the taking. The seeming inexhaustibility of the Franklin Library drove home to me the power of knowledge in a deeply visceral way; the very vastness of the materials available was, more than I could articulate, a lesson in education: it taught me how much there was to learn and how much I didn’t know yet, and it showed me the faint beginnings of the paths to learning what I wanted to know.

These paths, I’d come to learn, weren’t dizzying alleys, but structured highways, with exits, connections and overpasses – even stop signs and traffic lights. The beginning of my sophomore year of college, I began working in the school library to pay some of my tuition. I was in the library once again and as always, but this time from the other side of the desk. This, then, was a library: a living, organic, functional entity, with rules and customs and traditions; not the petty censoriousness of my elementary school library, nor yet the stifling straitlaced places of popular imagination. There were rules to follow and reasons for following them. There was a system in place that powered the beautiful efficiency I associated with the library, as well as the plenitude that I loved. I would come to learn this system and to love it as I loved the results of it. I found that comforting, in a way. It rooted my passionate love of books to a certain system that would guide me wherever I wanted to go. And the places to go were endless.

Back then, it might not have been something to be all that proud of. Libraries were, and still are, seen as musty places haunted by stern matrons with knitting needles embedded in their hair. The dire portents of Kindles and audiobooks and decimated budgets and shrinking readerships sound ominously in the distance. They’re only books, after all, and they are going to have to adapt to the changing of times. But if there’s one thing I learned (even only by osmosis) in our bedraggled little library in Peshawar, Pakistan, it’s that libraries are amazingly resilient places, because they adapt to demand, no matter how petty. They will remain bastions of free thought, forums for discussion, exemplars of egalitarianism, and one of those rare instances where selflessness makes a practical positive impact in the life of the community: nobody’s getting rich off the library, but everybody’s better off anyway. I certainly was. The libraries in my life have opened the door for a love of thinking and ideas, and then provided an endless supply of ideas to think about. Now, as a part of a library system, I take pride in the responsibility of providing information to people. Libraries, at their heart, are about community and connection: repositories of shared experiences, accessible through shared resources. Libraries allow us to read others’ stories and share them with each other. In giving me the chance to read so many other people’s stories, libraries have become a significant part of my own, and taught me the significance of stories in general. That might just be something to be proud of after all.