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On the Subject of Libraries
Mar. 12th, 2012 02:44 pmThere's a little town not very far from me named Shutesbury. It's made of woods and hills, and it has a big, beautiful lake, and not much else. Houses nestle among the trees as if the people are the guests there, not like many places (some not so far from here either) where scrawny trees crouch among buildings like shell-shocked prisoners of war. The town is a wonderful place for children and has an amazing community spirit, and they are always doing all sorts of town-wide things -- bonfires during the summer, farmer's markets, and so forth -- that give me just one more reason to feel like I chose less well than I might have when I picked a town to live in out here.
The town is east of me, so every time I head towards Boston I pass through it, up this very long, winding hill, over the crest, and down down down the far side towards the wilds surrounding the Quabbin Reservoir. Sometimes, coming home, I will put my car in neutral at the top of the hill and see how far I can get before I either roll to a stop or (not so often as you'd think) get someone impatient on my tail. I've come pretty close to the five mile mark.
At the very top of that hill, there is a silly little building, beautiful and cute and unique. And tiny. Very tiny. The first time I drove past it, and saw the sign out front proclaiming it the town library, I could not believe it. I joked once that you could probably count on your fingers the books that'd fit inside.
Town Library it is, though, and aside from being cute and too small, it is also very old, and has no running water, and is otherwise not really sufficient to house a functional town library. The town held a vote on whether or not to fund a new library by raising town property taxes (already a whopping 19.56) and it was an exact tie. It's not that no one wants a new library, it's that folks are poor, and the economy is still tough, especially out in this end of the state, and for some people a few more dollars in taxes means less food on the table. The state has said that if the town can raise 1/3 of the cost to build a new library (a little over $1M) they'll pay the rest, so the town is trying to raise money via donations. They even put a video on youtube:
Since making that video, it appeared on Boing Boing and has been tweeted by Neil Gaiman, among other people. It's getting attention. It may not be getting a lot of donations.
I didn't post about this here to get you to go give money to this cause, although if you do, that's wonderful, and you certainly should if you can. But I read through some of the comments on BoingBoing this weekend, from very supportive to a few idiots (yes, I say, idiots) who don't think libraries are important anymore. One suggested that the entire town should just all get ebook readers instead. Ebook readers are great, sure, but they aren't the same thing; it's not a fungible exchange. Libraries are about communities, about exploration and discovery, about gathering and sharing knowledge and entertainment and wonder. Libraries are about people.
(Also, Shutesbury has no high-speed internet. If one tried downloading all one's ebooks over dialup, one might be less enamored of them as a viable alternative.)
Last night, another friend posted on Facebook about having stumbled across a beautiful old library in the middle of a nearby city struggling with poverty and crime and the quality of education available to their youth, and the library's sign indicated it was open a total of fifteen hours a week, all but an hour of it during working hours. This is not atypical; there are stories like this from all over the state, all over the country, even from Canada.
It's not only sad, it's horrifying that such an important resource, the one resource free to all, no matter how young or old, no matter how poor, is being removed from the collective assets of each of our towns as a community, from each of us as an individual citizen. Now more than ever we should be prioritizing libraries higher than ever, as they serve a vital role for those who would otherwise be marginalized and cut off, as they open a portal to the internet and the world, as they provide a truly egalitarian environment for communities to bond with each other across economic divides, and most importantly as they give children a quiet corner and a stack of books and an afternoon of dreams and wonder and new worlds to visit, so that when they are adults they have the vision to pursue what might otherwise have seemed out of reach, or even worse, unimaginable.
I spent a lot of my childhood in the library of my home town, sitting on a bright blue rug I can still remember vividly, though I have no idea if it's still there. I read every single Tintin book dozens of times each. I read Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and John Christopher and so many other things that are still a part of my inner landscape today, and I am a richer person for it. Today I have the internet, and bookstores, and far, far too many books of my own (and far too little time to read them) but none of it -- none of it -- adds up to that blue rug, the book shelves full of surprises and comforting favorites, friendly librarians, and quiet Saturday afternoons. At times, it saved me.
So this is why I posted this, and I'm sort of hoping someone else out there likes this idea and makes a post of their own. Show us your library -- the one from when you were a kid, or the one dear to you now -- and tell us why it means something to you, or to your own kids. Tell us if it's in trouble, if it is. Tell us whatever you think we need to know, to see it through your eyes, and in your heart. Lend us your library!
If you do post about your library, I'd love it if you'd let me know in the comments.
This is the library I grew up in:
The town is east of me, so every time I head towards Boston I pass through it, up this very long, winding hill, over the crest, and down down down the far side towards the wilds surrounding the Quabbin Reservoir. Sometimes, coming home, I will put my car in neutral at the top of the hill and see how far I can get before I either roll to a stop or (not so often as you'd think) get someone impatient on my tail. I've come pretty close to the five mile mark.
At the very top of that hill, there is a silly little building, beautiful and cute and unique. And tiny. Very tiny. The first time I drove past it, and saw the sign out front proclaiming it the town library, I could not believe it. I joked once that you could probably count on your fingers the books that'd fit inside.
Town Library it is, though, and aside from being cute and too small, it is also very old, and has no running water, and is otherwise not really sufficient to house a functional town library. The town held a vote on whether or not to fund a new library by raising town property taxes (already a whopping 19.56) and it was an exact tie. It's not that no one wants a new library, it's that folks are poor, and the economy is still tough, especially out in this end of the state, and for some people a few more dollars in taxes means less food on the table. The state has said that if the town can raise 1/3 of the cost to build a new library (a little over $1M) they'll pay the rest, so the town is trying to raise money via donations. They even put a video on youtube:
Since making that video, it appeared on Boing Boing and has been tweeted by Neil Gaiman, among other people. It's getting attention. It may not be getting a lot of donations.
I didn't post about this here to get you to go give money to this cause, although if you do, that's wonderful, and you certainly should if you can. But I read through some of the comments on BoingBoing this weekend, from very supportive to a few idiots (yes, I say, idiots) who don't think libraries are important anymore. One suggested that the entire town should just all get ebook readers instead. Ebook readers are great, sure, but they aren't the same thing; it's not a fungible exchange. Libraries are about communities, about exploration and discovery, about gathering and sharing knowledge and entertainment and wonder. Libraries are about people.
(Also, Shutesbury has no high-speed internet. If one tried downloading all one's ebooks over dialup, one might be less enamored of them as a viable alternative.)
Last night, another friend posted on Facebook about having stumbled across a beautiful old library in the middle of a nearby city struggling with poverty and crime and the quality of education available to their youth, and the library's sign indicated it was open a total of fifteen hours a week, all but an hour of it during working hours. This is not atypical; there are stories like this from all over the state, all over the country, even from Canada.
It's not only sad, it's horrifying that such an important resource, the one resource free to all, no matter how young or old, no matter how poor, is being removed from the collective assets of each of our towns as a community, from each of us as an individual citizen. Now more than ever we should be prioritizing libraries higher than ever, as they serve a vital role for those who would otherwise be marginalized and cut off, as they open a portal to the internet and the world, as they provide a truly egalitarian environment for communities to bond with each other across economic divides, and most importantly as they give children a quiet corner and a stack of books and an afternoon of dreams and wonder and new worlds to visit, so that when they are adults they have the vision to pursue what might otherwise have seemed out of reach, or even worse, unimaginable.
I spent a lot of my childhood in the library of my home town, sitting on a bright blue rug I can still remember vividly, though I have no idea if it's still there. I read every single Tintin book dozens of times each. I read Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and John Christopher and so many other things that are still a part of my inner landscape today, and I am a richer person for it. Today I have the internet, and bookstores, and far, far too many books of my own (and far too little time to read them) but none of it -- none of it -- adds up to that blue rug, the book shelves full of surprises and comforting favorites, friendly librarians, and quiet Saturday afternoons. At times, it saved me.
So this is why I posted this, and I'm sort of hoping someone else out there likes this idea and makes a post of their own. Show us your library -- the one from when you were a kid, or the one dear to you now -- and tell us why it means something to you, or to your own kids. Tell us if it's in trouble, if it is. Tell us whatever you think we need to know, to see it through your eyes, and in your heart. Lend us your library!
If you do post about your library, I'd love it if you'd let me know in the comments.
This is the library I grew up in:
