The Fort Langley library is something of the same experience for me. I am usually in there at least once a week, mostly to pick up books that I’ve ordered on line. We are borrowing more and buying far fewer books these days. And this is the great thing about public libraries. There was a time when we thought maybe books as we know them would be replaced by Kindle or Smart Phones but somehow it is not quite the same as the intimacy of book-in-hand. Libraries still serve the public good.
Lindsey Mead captures some of the magic of those old libraries in these words. “How hopelessly antiquated, and wildly charming, a card catalog seems now: the tiny drawers, each with the beautiful hooked handle, and the neatly arranged rows of dogeared cards. In those rows of small cards lived a whole world: rifling through those cards, I felt as though clouds of memories, of people’s fingers and thoughts, rose with the actual dust.
“I thought about the ways that their spaces [the library] can cradle us, urging us to new and deeper thinking. I thought about how the profound celebration of writing and ideas can be simultaneously comforting and inspiring, both safe haven and spur to think harder, deeper, more truly. I thought about the brilliance of architecture [not so on 13th Street] in the libraries I have been fortunate to know, the interplay of light, the outside world, and the weight of historical thought as recorded in miles of books. I thought about how immensely lucky I am to love books like I do, to find solace and kinship in their pages, how deeply I hope my children grow up with a same sense of passion for and identification with books.”
Fortunately, it's still all there to be experienced in any number of little towns and communities and big cities; the joy of libraries.