In contrast to Manguel, Scott Douglas offers a more parochial, gritty and irreverent view of working in a library where bookish isn't always the most apt adjective.

His memoir, Quiet, Please: Dispatches From a Public Librarian, deals with both the frustrations and joys of life in a branch library in Anaheim, Calif., where one of his fellow staffers is certain that Thomas Pynchon is Julia Roberts' latest boyfriend and the patrons are full of surprises.

Douglas, a contributor to McSweeney's website, is too self-consciously hip for my tastes, though it's hard to argue that libraries would benefit from more creative staffs with a sense of humor. He organizes his stories around the Dewey Decimal system and sprinkles his text with hundreds of footnotes that are meant to be jokes but often fall flat.

Douglas raises useful questions about the power of mass media and technology. He likes to challenge authority and writes, "The trouble with so many things is there aren't enough visionaries in the world, because the visionaries got stuck going to trade school."

He mentions but doesn't really do much with the two dramatic changes in public libraries in the past decade: the coming of computers and a new wave of immigrants.

But he does come to appreciate and celebrate the fact "that libraries would change, technologies would change, even patrons would change, but the role of libraries as the gateway to something greater would always stay the same."