Library Love

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

“I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library… I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt.” — Ray Bradbury

I remember how thrilled I was when I got my first library card.

It was an actual card, it had my name on it. And it meant I could go in and take books off the shelf and check them out and take them home, just like a real person.

And so many books! Shelf after shelf, there for the taking. The library back then was almost like a church. You treated the space reverently. You only spoke in a whisper, and then only if you really had to. (These days libraries sound more like greasy spoons where waitresses shout, “Gimme a ham on rye!”)

I’ve never met a writer yet who didn’t have a love of the library. Early and often reading is  fundamental for a future writer. It’s how you get the structure of a well-tuned sentence into your head, how you learn to string scenes together that make readers want to turn the page.

The library is also a place of inspiration. John Fante, the great L.A. writer of the 30s, captured that in a passage from his famous novel, Ask the Dust. It’s about young Arturo Bandini who dreams about becoming a writer, and spends hours in the main branch of the L.A. library downtown.

Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town. A day and another day and the day before, and the library with the big boys in the shelves, old Dreiser, old Mencken, all the boys down there, and I went to see them, Hya Dreiser, Hya Mencken, Hya, hya: there’s a place for me, too, and it begins with B, in the B shelf. Arturo Bandini, make way for Arturo Bandini, his slot for his book, and I sat at the table and just looked at the place where my book would be, right there close to Arnold Bennett, not much that Arnold Bennett, but I’d be there to sort of bolster up the B’s, old Arturo Bandini, one of the boys, until some girl came along, some scent of perfume through the fiction room, some click of high heels to break up the monotony of my fame. Gala day, gala dream!

When I read The Illustrated Man in junior high, I exploded with the desire to write. I’d go to my local branch and look at the Bradbury books on the shelf. The B’s! And maybe Bell would be up there someday, bolstering up the B’s….

Some years later, after I’d been published, I went to that same branch when Bradbury came to speak. He supported libraries all over town. I had him sign my copy of Zen in the Art of Writing and talked to him a bit. He loved other writers and gave me his signature and a hearty “God bless you.”

That local branch is still my home base, about seven minutes from my house.

I was in there the other day, to pick up a book I’d requested. As is my custom, I wandered past the new releases, and the mysteries and thrillers. Hya Coben, Hya Connelly, Hya Parker. I took a few off the shelf, went to a chair, and read the opening chapters. In about five minutes I could hardly wait to get back to my keyboard.

Tell us about your first encounter with a library, and how it impacted you as a writer. Do you have a favorite library now?

28 thoughts on “Library Love”

  1. This wonderful post is of course near and dear to my heart, Jim. I’ve previously told the story here at TKZ about how, in the fifth grade, while sitting in the back of math class in a modular class room, I felt the siren call of the school library and slipped off to visit it. I was caught of course, and many years later, working at the public library, I would tell the story to kids and finish with the line, “and see where I ended up!”

    My first actual encounter with the public library was while I was in the third grade, living about five blocks from the Beaverton City Library. It was a single story building, a far cry from the big, multi-story library now on that site, but it was a palace of books to my young self. I remember walking in for the first time, and seeing what seemed like endless rows of shelves stuffed with books. The thrill of getting my first library card, a paper one with the metal stamp attached to it, was like getting the golden ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

    Four years later, in junior high, I began plowing through the school library’s collection of science fiction, starting with Jules Verne, and soon began writing a Verne pastiche. That was my the first story I wrote.

    Now I’m writing the third book in my 1980s cozy library mystery series, Fine Me Deadly. The fictional Fir Grove library of my series is my favorite library at the moment, because it embodies both the libraries of my youth and also the public libraries I worked at in the later 1980s and 1990s before the internet changed everything. Back then libraries had rich reference collections and of course, the card catalog.

    Thanks so much for today’s wonderful love letter to libraries, it means a lot.

    • I indeed thought of you, Dale, as I was writing this. Love your analogy comparing that first library card with the Golden Ticket.

      And another great title in your series, shades of Spillane!

  2. I don’t know that I can remember my *first* encounter with a library, but my strongest memory of libraries remains, as a teen, coming home with a huge stack of those tan/red/blue Zane Grey hard-cover novels–as big a stack as I could tote out of there. He was my introduction to the beauty of the west and an escape from dreary, featureless Maryland. Would also come home with piles of those blue-spine Hardy Boys books.

    Also spent my share of time in the rare books room doing research or pouring through microfiche doing historical research. I admit I’m grateful that a lot of historical newspapers have been digitized so that you can do some of that research from your computer. It’s still time consuming, but easier than being dependent on microfiche.

    I’m just thankful that people had the sense to preserve historical records.

    • Ah yes, BK, how well I remember the Hardy Boys shelf.

      When I was writing my historicals, taking place in early 1900s Los Angeles, I spent many hours downtown in the mircrofiche room looking at issues of the Times and Examiner (the Hearst paper).

  3. Like the “previous” Mr. Smith, I haunted the school library, wandering the stacks and checking out more than I could read before they were all due back.

    I s’pose I was in the third or fourth grade when Mom took me to the Coral Gables Public Library, housed in the 1930’s South-Florida Mediterranean styled Women’s Club – surrounded by (as I recall), tall, dark trees and “mystery.” It’s where I checked out a book that forms one of the kernels of a longstanding WIP.

    They must’ve been planning the new, replacement library at that time, as I got to watch it being constructed a few blocks from home, and couldn’t wait to go inside it’s contemporary mid-century modern (late ’60’s) white box… the smell of new construction – new carpet, fresh paint, turned earth – stays with me and carries me back to that building, and perhaps influenced my choice of “day-job.”

    I (was) moved to just south of Atlanta when Pop transferred, and first thing went to the Carnegie Library on the Court Square and got my first real smell of old paper and leather covers. That library card served as a passport – quite literally, until I got my driver’s license, allowing me to travel on family vacations to Mexico, Canada, and parts of the Carribean…

    In college, studying architecture at Tech, I was assigned a paper on building foundation systems, and chose the then-being-built Atlanta Central Library, a massive, “brutalist” nightmare of a building, hard to navigate, by a “name” architect (and just recently renovated to bring in more light and ease of circulation – for the patrons as well as the books and other media…)

    My current branch is three miles from the house, part of the statewide system that allows me to go online and search with a few keystrokes, request, and wait for whatever to be shipped to this branch – amazing in its simplicity and reward, but I do miss the wandering among the shelves that this modernness (and madness of my schedule), has supplanted.

    I’ve held a library card since that first one in the Gables, and instead of the metal chip it’s now got a bar code… and they don’t stamp the back page when you check something out

    I guess I never really realized how much, how big, a part libraries have been in my life – almost as large and important as church, which, in a way, you might say they are.

    Thanks for the post, Mr. B, and for letting me ramble… and I’ll see you before Bradbury and Brautigan…

  4. In middle & high school, libraries were my safe space. From hanging with the Peanuts gang, learning about submarines, to reading the adventures of Jack London, the library is a place I consider to be a power place.

    I live 2 blocks from our beautiful designed and stocked local library and love it. Just driving by it makes me happy.

    When I travel I love to see famous peoples libraries and what they read. I love visiting other towns libraries.

    Benjamin Franklin’s greatest contribution to America.

  5. I love Ray Brad bury. So cool that you got to meet him.

    I’ve always scoped out a spot for my books on the shelves as well.

    Growing up, our little library is Fairhope, Alabama was a social center. You could talk. If you browsed the shelves fellow browsers would point out their favorites.

    Our Winter Park, Florida library is not like that. We recently built a new one. It’s beautiful and they seem to be trying to be friendlier than they used to be (which was not at all) but I just go there to vote now. I do my book reading on line.

    • With digitized reading, one wonders what the future of brick-and-mortar libraries will be. I’m sure we’ll always have them, but how many? And print books do wear out. Maybe the bound volumes will be in glass display cases so kids can see what books used to look like.

  6. My fourth grade class was IN the school library. Not enough quonset huts for us postwar Boomer kids, so the library it was, and we pulled books from the stacks to study California history and food groups. Mrs. Griswold taped Palmer method writing charts to the bookshelf ends. I wrote my first book report there, giving me for the first time the notion: Hey, I could do this!

    And here 75 years later I’m in charge of 800+ paperback and hardback books in the clubhouse library for our senior living community of 234 households. It’s my favorite library now because its all crime and mystery genres with a sprinkling of biographies. We struggle for shelf space because of the books newcomers bring. I love the place.

    Thanks, Jim, for the reminder of where it started.

  7. I just had my 66th birthday, but I remember my first library like it was yesterday. I was in first grade living in South Carolina. One week my whole class went to the school library and we all checked out the same book. It was The Three Little Pigs. The teacher used it to teach us reading since we knew all the words in the book. The next week, we took our books back and the librarian had another stack of books with the same title. But three students had done so well, they were allowed to select their own books. I was one of those three. I chose The Three Little Pigs because I knew I liked that book. The librarian and teach laughed and the librarian said she’d do the same thing. I raced home to show mom MY book that I’d selected. I still do that. I still read favorite books over and over again. My favorite library is whichever one I’m standing in. I celebrated my birthday by getting my library card (we’ve just moved to a new town) and found a book I’d been wanting to read. Walked home, poured a soda, sat down, read the book cover to cover. I haven’t done that in a long time.

  8. Jim, you inspired me to google my first library in San Diego. It was the centerpiece of an entire block, elevated on a grassy hill, higher than the rest of stores and buildings in the area. Lots of trees and benches around it. Across the street used to be a corner market where my mother shopped while I hit the library.

    I remember the excitement when a dark blue-covered Nancy Drew book I hadn’t read yet would show up on the shelves. Dark blue covers and pen and ink illustrations. Later Sherlock and Agatha Christie and so many other great mysteries.

    The building is still there, although remodeled.

    Thanks for the good memories.

    • I know there are a ton of Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys inspired writers out there. I remember my 10 year old son excitedly telling me he had discovered why he kept wanting to read a Hardy Boys. “Every chapter ends with an exclamation point!”

      A valid insight…and we ought to think about ending our chapters with a figurative exclamation point!

  9. I have so many good memories of libraries. Thanks for writing this post and reminding me of them.

    My favorite library will always be the Woods Memorial Library in Tucson, Arizona. It was the first public library I ever visited. My grandmother would take me and my brother there when we spent the night with her. I can still smell the books, see the shelves in the children’s section, and hear the “ka-thunk” of the big machines the librarians used the check out the books. (I’m not sure what those machines did.)

    I remember that we couldn’t take the books from the shelves to check out. We had to write the titles on a piece of paper and take our list to the front desk so the librarians could bring our books to us and check them out.

    As a side note, I was thrilled when my fifth grade homeroom teacher allowed me to help in the elementry school library a few times a week. I worked there again in sixth grade, and then worked in my junior high library for two years.

    I’m sure that my love for books inspired me to write. I think I started writing my own stories when I was in grade school.

  10. What an *awesome* post! (The word doesn’t do it justice.)

    Memories, memories…

    My paternal grandparents worked for our town’s library, in addition to owning apple orchards. He drove the bookmobile, she worked in the basement repairing bindings. They lived bicycling distance away. I spent hours some weekends when we visited, sitting out in the orchard grass under a tree with a book in hand.

    But the best part was when I’d visit the library, card in hand, get some books, then go visit Gramma. I can still smell the glue she used, and see some of the book spines in the light of her desk lamp.

    I discovered me in the library. Lovely, just lovely.

    Happy Sunday!

  11. What a beautiful tribute to libraries, Jim. I don’t remember my very first library experience, but I do remember visiting the library as a child and being amazed by the shelves and shelves of books. So many to read. So much to learn. I have that same sense of awe when I go into a library today. It still inspires a sense of reverence.

    There are lots of branches of the Memphis Public Library system. I like the main library best, though it’s a bit of a drive. We also belong to the Germantown Public Library and the Collierville Public Library — evidence of our love of reading.

    • Yes, Kay, a sense of awe. That’s still a part of it. That I can go on the website and any book in any branch that’s in circulation, I can have sent to my local. Downtown has a treasure trove of old books that don’t circulate, but that you can read onsite.

  12. Not long ago, I drove by where the Cossitt Library used to be in Memphis. They’ve made an office building of it now. My mother took me there before I started school, and they wouldn’t let me have a library card until I was in 1st grade. Like others have said, it was cardboard with a metal strip. Funny that I didn’t even think about writing then…all I wanted to do was read.

    I live in a small town now, and the library is a couple of miles away. Don’t go there much except to give talks on writing…I do most of my reading on my Kindle app.

  13. Late to the dance as usual. I’m convinced I’m a night person. The library in my smallish town in New Jersey was all the way across town so I rarely went there, being a south sider. I never spent a lot of time in the school library and I never really got the drift of it until I went away to junior college and then I discovered what a good collection of books looks like.

    Nowadays you can’t keep me out of them, and Des Moines has a very good public library system. I can have them put a hold on a book and send it to my branch a few blocks from here.

    I do love exploring the stacks in a good university library though, and when I was getting my LLm from the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, we grad students all had keys to the law library so we could go there any time of the day or night.

    There were a few things that stuck with me from way back when I was a school kid. One was Martin Russ’ The Last Parallel which I always keep a copy of. The other was the collected poems of Coleridge.

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