Does anyone else recall hours spent in front of one of these?
While printed card catalogs are now a nostalgic relic for folks like me, I’m thrilled that actual libraries are still a thing of the present and hopefully future, ad infinitum. In fact, during the pandemic shutdown, I heard many people lament about just how much they yearned for their local library to reopen.
Among the must-reads for those who treasure libraries, “The Library Book” by Susan Orlean is a beautifully written hybrid of a true crime mystery (who set the blaze at the Los Angeles Public Library?), autobiography, and parts history, anatomy, and physiology of libraries themselves.
And a story about a “library” of a completely different type, “The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek” fictionalizes the lives and work of the Packhorse librarians who served about 100,000 people in the Appalachian Mountains during the Great Depression. I get antsy waiting for ON HOLD books at my local library to arrive, so I am exceedingly happy that I don’t have to wait for a horseback librarian to cross “hollers” and hills.
CELEBRATE National Library Week this April 4-10. In the eloquent words of author Neil Gaiman, “…libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.”
