Don’t count them out. Or think them made redundant by Google. They are damn pure magic. Portals into time travel. Archetypes of standing stone circles, temples, pantheons of all the gods we’ve worshipped over time. If we let them, they prise the spears and guns from our hands and replace them with information and empathy. With history, science, music, the novels and essays and poems we’ve crafted to explain life to each other. They are built on the wondrous belief that humans have the honor and obligation to save what we know—and offer it to each other.
I love libraries.
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In 1960, I began my working life at the McPherson Public Library as a high school freshman. Forty cents an hour. Flossie, Lavilla, and Jessie my supervisors and advocates. A classic historic Carnegie building; children’s books in the half-basement, adult fiction and nonfiction up above.
Fifty-five years later, after a string of post-Historical Society retirement jobettes, I saw an ad for a part-time library aide. Ten hours a week, $11 an hour, at the Clancy Library. I didn’t know that Clancy had a library. Evening and weekend hours–an attraction. It was January and every damned early-dark afternoon sent me howling to bad TV. And wouldn’t it just be too perfect to draw my working career full circle. I did a little reconnaissance, drove the lovely 13 miles down to a historic red schoolhouse. I turned my imagination loose; invested some serious energy in the application; and got an interview. I love libraries.
My expectations slid closer to reality when I interviewed. We talked in a battered, chilly former classroom/meeting space. A 1960’s addition housed the library rather than the historic building. The spaces were dingy, dark. The floors uneven, badly carpeted. The bathroom had served small children; stall doors didn’t lock. In fact, this building shared the primal scent of pee with McPherson’s Carnegie edifice. I didn’t know whether I’d interviewed well and wasn’t sure what outcome I wanted.
So, of course, I was offered the job—although the librarian, whom we’ll call Linda for the purposes of this essay, did ask twice if I REALLY wanted to take the position. You may remember that such offers are my undoing. All too quickly, I’m invested in “yes.”
I honored the yes for ten months—for most of 2015. I resigned truthfully and officially because I could no longer read book titles or call numbers. Macular degeneration had begun its creep across my retinas. But my heart had been struggling with THIS library for some time.
It served the mountainous, northern end of Jefferson County—just south of Helena. An adjunct to a somewhat larger facility in the county seat 20 miles south. Our patrons included doctors and lawyers who’d found scenic perches for million dollar homes; middle-class state employees in quasi-subdivisions; and a fair share of almost-off-the-grid families and bachelors. The town of Clancy itself housed a good-sized K-8 school; two churches; a small-town cinder-block post office; a bar called Chubby’s; another eatery with ever-changing ownership; and a scattering of old and new houses. It had once existed to serve hard-rock miners.
I found much to appreciate. We did an impressive, steady business. Linda had massaged our hours of business to match patron needs with available funds. Retirees, job applicants, and students put our three computers to good use. Folks who couldn’t afford the newspaper or wanted company stopped by. The area lacked cable or hi-speed Internet, so we offered an enormous collection of DVDs. And were a frequent stop for parents on their way home from work to gather weekend entertainment. The library had a sizeable collection of character cake tins that could be checked out just like books. A clever offering, it seemed to me. Books on CD were popular with commuters. An older woman with developmental disabilities spent time with us and treasured several children’s books. We hosted a summer reading program—albeit fueled not by the rewards of reading but by toys and gadgets.
Regular adult books ran to newish popular fiction, especially rom-cons and mystery series. Craft books and back-to-the-land guides held pride of place in nonfiction. In children’s nonfiction, cartoon and joke books saw the most activity. We hosted a story hour with the library’s small, but current picture books. In older kid’s fiction, we held both old favorites like Nancy Drew and newer fantasy novels. Linda maintained a paperback collection in the outside corridor– grab and go service.
I checked books in and out and shelved them; found requested items. I took more pride than I should have in remembering the Dewey Decimal system and having the alphabet tattooed in my brain. By spells, with a list from Linda’s in hand, we culled books deemed too unpopular to warrant their space on the shelves. We pulled and boxed books destined for yet another smaller branch facility several miles away. Toward the end of my tenure, I began helping with the simplest cataloguing.
I loved learning about the interlibrary loan system: the networking that shuffled requested volumes among libraries—thus vastly extending each facility’s holdings. In-state loans were free to patrons; long distance cost. The State Library contracted with a medical supply company to carry loaned books to and fro as they traveled Montana on medical business. And, for one remote community, local librarians themselves had arranged for beer truck drivers to make deliveries. Beer being the commodity sure to get delivered even in Montana winters. Everything about interlibrary loan services gladdened my heart—except the archaic, hand-written tracking system that our librarian had devised.
I needed longer than I should have to learn the library’s computer system for checking books in and out. It wasn’t hard, but I found myself flustered when patrons or other staff watched. Names were forever on the tip of my tongue as opposed to where I could say them out loud. I seemed often to be one slight misstep away from trouble when I opened or closed. Or when I retrieved books from the book drop. I’ve never had an easy relationship with lockers and keys.
Truth be told, practical realities contributed to my interest in leaving the library. Standing on poorly carpeted concrete caught up with my hips and back. Getting up and down from bottom shelves was difficult. Ten hours a week didn’t seem like they should interrupt the rest of my life. But those hours occurred over four days, required a change of clothes and the assembly of a mid-shift snack, and rarely ended on time. The space could be plenty hot or plenty cold. I’d come home too knackered to sleep. 13 miles was easy except in snow. And, after many years of managing offices, I didn’t take to being supervised or to some of the supervisor’s practices.
The librarian did not, in fact, welcome the woman with developmental disabilities. Or get along with the person who managed the little museum housed in the actual red school house. Or, for that matter, with the library board. She devoted 80 or more hours a week to the library—sweetly martyred when any of us proposed alternatives. And because she was so keen to expend her entire life for the library (all of holiday weekends, for instance), her sacrifices became odd leverages. Stealthy demonstrations of her rectitude. Further damning in my eyes, Linda’s politics dictated a steady stream of dicey purchases—far right conservative diatribes, confidently displayed. Without buying the work of liberal writers. Or moderates.
In the end, though, it was all about the classics. And what their treatment demonstrated. Linda stoutly refused to shelve classics (think Little Women or Treasure Island or Grapes of Wrath or Moby Dick) where they belonged among all the other books. Most were, instead, shoved into a storage cupboard set apart from the library. They didn’t appear in our computerized catalog. Patrons—usually students—were left to approach us at the desk and ask if we had Alcott or Stevenson or Steinbeck. And that required us to leave the library unattended, dash down the hall, unlock a cupboard, and rummage among a heap of volumes not even alphabetized. More recent significant books (think Wendell Berry’s novels, for instance) that weren’t judged as classics just got culled.
I queried and pushed Linda farther than she liked. Her reasoning seemed to be grounded in numbers. If she counted the classics as part of our collection, the library’s per-volume assessment from the State Library increased—and decreased the number of more popular books we could purchase. To which my inner voice still rose up and shouted: “They’re the classics!” To placate me, Linda mused about moving the classics back into the library space and housing them on a shelf so high someone would need a stool to scan them. Literally beyond reach.
Barring the possibilities offered by the interlibrary loan system—functional but cumbersome as it was—we were a library built wholly on what was popular. And especially on what was popular with our patrons. Where once I felt that libraries threw a rainbow of diverse and fascinating material into the world, I found that our little library whirled in a downward spiral. Since the common denominator for survival on our shelves was popularity (or the librarian’s political leanings)—that common denominator itself became skinnier, more contracted.
Years ago, in my Washington D.C. summer as a guinea pig, I’d toured the Library of Congress. And grew goose bumps as I peered down into the reading room’s astonishing beauty and heard the guide describe the Library’s mission: to hold EVERY book published in the U.S. and many more beyond. And anyone—anyone—was welcome to research in the Library. That experience threw into greater relief the narrowness of spirit, the poverty of intention with which our little place functioned.
And is this all moot? In the six years since I left the little library have Google and Kindle supplanted our need for or interest in public libraries? That was the prediction. The answer is: not in the least. Humans have a stubborn attachment to the tactile experience of books; the reassurance of paper; the convenience of leafing through a tome and settling on what we want. Which means, that libraries remain pertinent, singular. For those of us who are intense readers, we crave browsing—skimming along shelves, stopping at an odd title, perusing the books that neighbor the one we thought we wanted. And therein the poverty of my little library.
No library can acquire and hold everything—though philosophers in the ancient city of Alexandria tried for a time in the 200s BC. And every librarian makes difficult choices, with active circulation being one criterion for a collection. But excellent libraries seek to afford their community the best of humanity, or at least a sampling of that, as captured in media of all sorts. Small or large, libraries—librarians—can choose to shape their holdings with curiosity, with the breadth of their own reading. With delight in offering their community of readers and searchers more than the mediocrity of what’s fashionable.
Helena itself is still served by such a place. Then, remember Kay, my art teacher family friend from Minnesota? In the golden years of her retirement, Kay volunteered to shelve books in Hallock, Minnesota’s tiny library. The library was part of a regional system managed by a person who shared Linda’s views on culling anything that didn’t circulate much. Kay’s greater contribution to the library was to check out endangered classics—of all vintages—often so that the computerized system marked their popularity. The back seat of her car held those treasures just long enough to demonstrate their importance. I love libraries and those that fuel their great dreams. ©
With real thanks for the opportunity to learn and the friendships this job offered!
