In Praise of Public Libraries
Years
ago, I lived in a remote mountain town that had never had a public library. The
town was one of the largest in New York State by area but small in population,
with a couple thousand residents spread out over about two hundred square
miles. By the time my husband and I moved there, the town had lost most of its
economic base—in the nineteenth century it had supported a number of tanneries
and mills—and our neighbors were mainly employed seasonally, if at all. When
the regional library system’s bookmobile was taken out of service, the town had
no easy access to books. The town board proposed a small tax increase to fund a
library, something on the order of ten dollars per household. It was soundly
defeated. The dominant sentiments seemed to be “leave well enough alone” and
“who needs books?” Then there was the man who declared that “libraries are
communist.”
By
then, through the machinations of the town board, which scrounged up $15,000
from its annual budget and deputized me and two retired teachers
to—somehow—turn that money into a lending library, we had around three thousand
books on loan from the regional library consortium tucked into a room at the
back of town hall. We’d been advised by librarians at the consortium that five
hundred library cards would take us through the first year. They took us
through the first three weeks. Our librarian, whose previous job was running a
used bookstore, turned out to be a master of handselling, even to the
rough-and-tumble loggers and guys on the road crew who brought their kids in
for story time and left with novels he’d pulled for them, and then came back,
alone, for more. Books were being checked out by the bagful; there were lines
at the circulation desk. Children especially, but sometimes adults, couldn’t
believe it was all free.
By
year’s end we had signed up about 1,500 patrons, and there was a book club, a
preschool story hour, movie night, and a play-reading group. High school
students, many of whom did not have Internet access at home, came in the
afternoon to do their homework. People pressed books into the hands of
strangers who did not stay strangers for long.
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A
statement issued by the Public Library Association in 1982 called “The Public
Library: Democracy’s Resource” said:
The
public library is unique among our American institutions. Only the public
library provides an open and nonjudgmental environment in which individuals and
their interests are brought together with the universe of ideas and
information…. The uses made of the ideas and information are as varied as the
individuals who seek them. Public libraries freely offer access to their
collections and services to all members of the community without regard to
race, citizenship, age, education level, economic status, or any other
qualification or condition.
Free
access to ideas and information, a prerequisite to the existence of a
responsible citizenship, is as fundamental to America as are the principles of
freedom, equality and individual rights.
How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality,
Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
by
Eric Klinenberg
Crown,
277 pp., $28.00
by
Susan Orlean
Simon
and Schuster, 319 pp., $28.00
a
film directed by Frederick Wiseman
Bates
Hall reading room, Boston Public Library, 2017
Haizhan
Zheng/Getty Images
Bates
Hall, the reading room at the Boston Public Library, 2017
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