Libraries

The library for my home town occupied a small room in the War Memorial Building with a Sherman tank in the front yard by the flagpole, exactly one mile from our house. To a little boy, the War Memorial Building was vast, smelling of times long disappeared, with high ceilings and dark wainscoting and dust and flies buzzing and adults going about their business (for some of the county offices were there, spilling over from the court house across the street). My mother used to bring me to the room in the back that said in black letters painted on the frosted-glass window: “Public Library.”

Inside, there was a small wooden desk with an ancient white-haired lady seated behind it; she must have been at least fifty years old (and closer to seventy by the time I left high school). As I would learn, she was kind to children so long as they were quiet, and I was, partly because I never encountered another child there. Normally, my mother and I (and perhaps my sister) were the only patrons in the room, but occasionally there would be other ladies whom my mother always knew, and they would exchange pleasantries (in whispers, of course). There was one goodly-sized oak table in the middle of the room with wooden chairs around it, and a ceiling fan turned lazily on high.

And there were books. Three walls of the room were shelved from floor to ceiling, with a ladder that could be used for the higher shelves. Tall books, short books, paperbacks (not many of those), hardbacks, most of them old, some of them (I would now realize, were I to return) dating to the mid-nineteenth century.

In the book “Rocket Boys,” which was set in a nearby county and in a time just a bit earlier than that of which I speak, one of the teenage “rocket boys,” Quentin Wilson, had read every book in the McDowell County Library. That made me feel better, for by the age of seventeen I had at least opened and sampled every book in our library, and had been forcibly impressed by my experiences at school that this was Not Done, not by anyone who had hope of a social life.

Some of the books in the library, especially the adult contemporary fiction of the time, I quickly laid aside as “boring.” Some of the books were so far over my head that I found no connection with them. But I believe that many books have their own time and place for us, and wait until we are ready for them, and early experiences may pave the way.

I especially devoured anything that had to do with science or mathematics -- thinking back, I do not recall anything whatsoever about music, my other passion as a teenager, not even a music dictionary. Nor do I recall anything in a language other than English. The card catalogue, guarded by the ancient librarian on her desk, was one unit of three side-by-side drawers: Subject, Title, Author.
In truth, I spent relatively little time in that room, except when I would take one of the reference books over to the big table and read for a while; mostly, I checked books out to take home, armloads at a time.

From there, I went to college. Not just any college, but a school with one of the major research libraries in the United States. My chief memories of freshman orientation are three: the fine gothic Chapel, the quarters of the music department (a dilapidated pile that would be condemned as unfit for human occupation the next summer), and the card catalogue room of the library, with the circulation desk nearby: a roomful of cards, several times the size of our entire library back home. The ancient and kindly librarian at her desk was replaced by squadrons of busy work-study students, processing books in and out and with no time for nonsense from callow freshmen. And the “real” librarians, those in charge? They would no more notice a lowly undergraduate than a gnat.

I spent little time there; it was not a place to linger, and the music library (where I later became one of those busy work-study students) was on the other campus. But I still dream of that place sometimes, usually in one of my frantic-search-for-something dreams. And I found one little corner that I liked. It was the Classical Studies collection, which was in the furthest corner of a sub-basement with utilitarian metal shelving, and at the end of some of the rows against the wall, small metal desks and chairs of (probably) World War II vintage. It was a good place to get away from everyone, for almost no one ever visited these old books, row upon row of them in Latin and Greek, with more scholarly commentaries than there were primary texts, and shelves full of journals, covered with years of dust. I hope they haven’t been consigned to a landfill, for we might still need what is in these dusty old books.

In later years, I used to visit another small town Appalachian library, the only one in the county. It was on the ground floor of what had once been a bank, and had more enthusiasm and space than money or books. Despite their limits, they served as the cultural focus for the county in many and creative ways, which were lost on most of the people in the community. But it was a haven for the score or so of us who cared about books and ideas. When I moved away from that county, I donated most of my books to them, including some that I wish I had kept.

My graduate school was strictly a music school, with an excellent (if specialized) library, clean and modern and efficient, and the finest reference librarian I have encountered. She is retired now, and I still see her at Hymn Society conventions. As always with every library since my first, I lacked the time to do more than sample the riches that were in the collection -- the tall bound volumes indexed in Historical Collections and Monuments of Music -- things like the Denkmäler Deutscher Tonkunst or Tudor Church Music, or the collected works of Beethoven, and Bach, and Mozart, and Haydn, and pretty much anyone else that would come to mind. I remember one fine spring day, my exams complete, every paper submitted, my degree work complete, when I spent the entire day there, browsing. It was heavenly.

Later still, there was yet another small town. Its library was a fine Victorian mansion, donated to the town some years before. The large central reading room on the ground floor, with newspapers and other periodicals, had comfortable high wingbacked chairs. One could settle in with a magazine or book and read for hours, with the tall windows, their glass wavy with age, overlooking a flower garden and tree-shaded lawns sloping down to the river. It was on the way home from work, and I stopped there almost every day to read the news, both in print and online. For they had computers, two of them, with Internet connections, something we did not have at home or at the church.

This library was an unmatched place to browse, for the collection was divided up into the many rooms of the old house, all with their tall windows and wide windowsills. One room that was perhaps unique was what the librarians called the “Little Boys’ Room.” It was in the basement, and housed books that had been bequeathed by an engineer in the town and maintained as a special collection in his honor. I loved it: a whole room of books on science and technology, with special emphasis on architecture, boat-building, automobiles, motorcycles, airplanes, and space travel.

Nowadays, I have cards for two libraries. The one close to the church is larger and has an excellent collection; the one in the nearby town where I live is friendlier. I love that place, and wish I could spend days there. It is filled with comfortable places to read or work; there is a little cafe right there, and a natural-foods cooperative five minutes’ walk away with excellent sandwiches. It is a sufficient collection with pretty much anything I would want -- and if it doesn’t have it, I can try the larger library by the church.

Finally, there is our own library at home, or I should say two libraries -- for my office at the church is more library than office. At home, my wife and I each have our own desks, both of which she made. Hers is a genuinely fine piece of furniture; mine is smaller and utilitarian, but still, being from her hand, priceless to me. There are plenty of books within reach without rising from my chair, and my computer (on which I write most of these Music Box essays) is to the right. There is almost always a cat nearby -- as I write, she is sleeping on the cherry chest to my left. There is a fine view of the sky, and all the comforts of home are close at hand.

Most of all, there are books. Many of these books are my old friends -- though there are, when I think about it, far too many books that I own but have not yet read, probably more than I can ever read. I still want to read them just as much as the day I bought them, but other things have taken precedence.

The books overflow the library into the front room, where the Harvard Classics reside next to my rocking chair. They came into my life after college where I bought the whole (incomplete and somewhat battered) set at a Planned Parenthood booksale. For the years that followed, they were the core of my “collection.” My wife made a bookcase out of scrap wood specifically to fit them, along with my Classics Club volumes. That was a mail-order book club to which I subscribed in the late 1970’s; every two months brought a shipment of two volumes until the set was complete, and at the outset one selected which volumes were desired. I used it to fill in the gaps in the Harvard set. I got behind on the Classics Club books, and still have not quite read them all (six remain, all of them nineteenth century novels), but I did make it through the Harvard Classics and know them well enough to find what I want in them readily enough.

Every good book, even the non-fiction books on technical subjects (such as Strong’s Concordance, mentioned a few weeks ago), takes its reader into its own universe. It may be the world of King David and Asaph and the Sons of Korah which one enters through their language, or (to name a few titles within reach) Marcus Aurelius, or Anton Bruckner (a biography), or Aesop’s Fables, or the Army of Northern Virginia (“Lee’s Lieutenants” by Douglas Southall Freeman, the companion volume to his biography of R.E.L.) and the wider scenes of that conflict (Shelby Foote’s three-volume history, “Civil War”), or A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs, or the Federalist Papers, or T. S. Eliot, or the fictional land of Chalion, with Cazaril and the Five Gods (Lois McMaster Bujold, with Miles Vorkosigan and his friends beside the Chalion books), or Flatland, or the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or The Food and Drink of Mexico.

In some respects, books make civilization possible. And disdain for books hastens its decline. This puts librarians, along with booksellers, readers, and others who love books, on the front lines.