Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian
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An unexpectedly raucous and illuminating memoir set in a Southern California public library. For most of us, librarians are the quiet people behind the desk, who, apart from the occasional "shush," vanish into the background. But in Quiet, Please, McSweeney's contributor Scott Douglas puts the quirky caretakers of our literature front and center. With a keen eye for the absurd and a Kesey-esque cast of characters (witness the librarian who is sure Thomas Pynchon is Julia Roberts's latest flame), Douglas takes us where few readers have gone before. Punctuated by his own highly subjective research into library history--from Andrew Carnegie's Gilded Age to today's Afghanistan--Douglas gives us a surprising (and sometimes hilarious) look at the lives which make up the social institution that is his library.
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An unexpectedly raucous and illuminating memoir set in a Southern California public library. For most of us, librarians are the quiet people behind the desk, who, apart from the occasional "shush," vanish into the background. But in Quiet, Please, McSweeney's contributor Scott Douglas puts the quirky caretakers of our literature front and center. With a keen eye for the absurd and a Kesey-esque cast of characters (witness the librarian who is sure Thomas Pynchon is Julia Roberts's latest flame), Douglas takes us where few readers have gone before. Punctuated by his own highly subjective research into library history--from Andrew Carnegie's Gilded Age to today's Afghanistan--Douglas gives us a surprising (and sometimes hilarious) look at the lives which make up the social institution that is his library.
Buy a Digital Copy
Buy a Print Copy
Excerpt
“You catch a guy on a computer jacking off, just get a librarian— don’t try and handle it yourself.”
That was the first thing Faren, the library manager, said to me on my first day of work.[1]
I was a library page.
Library page is the lowest place you can be on the library totem pole. Besides putting books back on the shelf, the library page is also responsible for doing the jobs that nobody else feels like doing, which include, but are not limited to, cleaning up vomit, washing the windows, scraping gum off the tables, moving furniture, and keeping a watchful eye out for male patrons who are jacking off on the computer. Being a library page also means you are stupid until you can prove otherwise.
“So tell me why you want to work here?” This was the next thing Faren said to me. She asked the same question to all the new employees as a way of showing politeness. She didn’t care about my answer, but I didn’t know this,[2] so I told her with great passion how I loved books and was even studying literature in college—I told her all of this while she checked her e-mail. When I finished my monologue, she yawned and then asked, “Do you know how to cut paper?”
I looked at her, confused. “Paper?”
She nodded. “We have a bundle of fliers that need to be cut in two—you’d have to use the paper cutter. Do you think you’d be able to do that?”
I got nervous. I imagined that I had said something wrong, and she had marked me out as an idiot. But it wasn’t that at all. Like I said, a page is stupid until proven otherwise, and apparently I hadn’t proven otherwise. I wanted to assure her that I really was smart, but instead I just nodded and assured her I knew how to use a paper cutter.
“Great!” Faren said, adding as I walked out the door of her office, “And make sure you don’t cut off any of your fingers. I hate filling out incident reports for stuff like that—it’s so time consuming.”
& & &
A form of pornography is what lured me to the library. To be more precise, a stripper lured me to the library. It’s not as kinky as it sounds. I was young, in college, and in need of a new job, but not actively seeking one. I was looking for the sports section when the classified section fell to the ground and conveniently opened to the job listings. As I bent down to pick up the section, a large busted, scantily clad woman looked back up at me. I was morally outraged and violated by the ad, and felt I owed it to the poor woman to at least find out what she was advertising. It was a local strip bar looking for new strippers, and they were using the large-busted, scantily clad woman to entice applicants. Seeing no other pictures to be morally outraged and violated by, I went to put the classified section down. But then another job ad caught my eye. It said, in bold letters:
DO YOU LIKE BOOKS?
I liked books. I kept reading. The ad was for a library page in the City of Anaheim. It was dry and simply written—it basically said, “Come shelve books.” Most people probably passed the ad off as too boring, but to me it sounded like a literary haven. I applied, was hired, and thus began my library career.
I was sent to a small branch library built in the sixties. It sat next to a park, off all the main streets of the city. It was hidden, and everyone seemed to like it that way. The furniture was as old as the library itself. The carpet was stained. The paint on the walls was faded. There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos. It was a run-down little library, but no one seemed to notice.
Those who came into the building made it seem like their secret little library. It had been there for nearly fifty years, and most of the city’s residents had never heard of it, let alone been inside. Its parking lot was small, but no one cared, because most patrons walked. People didn’t go there for research—that task was left to the city’s larger library three miles away. They went there for books that would help them escape.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the better you can read, the better you’re going to do in life. But there are statistics to back this as well. Studies from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) put scale on literacy. A person who reads poorly will make about $18,000 a year, while a person who reads at the highest level will make over $40,000 a year. So basically this means you will make $20,000 more if you prefer to read Tolstoy over Grisham.
The United States spends millions every year to come up with stats like the ones above, which, if they’re lucky, will take up a 10-second spot on the evening news. While this money could go to things like literacy programs, we all know it won’t because Americans are suckers for lists and statistics. To find out more useless statistics on literacy, visit the NAAL’s Web site at http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/.
I didn’t want to be known as “the page who might cut his fingers off if you don’t watch him carefully,” so by my second day of work I had set out to prove myself to my new library coworkers. I wanted to give them insight into just how well- read I was, which, in turn, would make them deem me worthy of working in such a literary place or, at the very least, make me appear smart enough not to cut my fingers off on the paper cutter.
I chose my weapon carefully: a tattered and carefully marked up paperback copy of The Crying of Lot 49.[3] At precisely 12:14 (a time I had observed that most librarians took their lunches), I entered the staff room and bravely pulled my paperback novel to my face and began to read. The room was empty, but I knew that someone surely would join me before my fifteen-minute break ended.
As it happened, a librarian entered not even two minutes later. Her name was Edith. She was a short, pale-faced woman with thick black glasses and a mole the size of a dime on the left side of her chin. She appeared to be at least 50, but I later learned she was only 36.
She looked at my book oddly and asked, “What’s that in your hand?”
I set the book down and proudly said, “The Crying of Lot 49.”
Edith studied the cover curiously and then asked, confused, “You’re reading it?”[4]
I took her confusion as intrigue—intrigue that someone my age would read such a challenging book for pleasure. I believed in that moment that she was already marking me in her head as someone of intellect who would definitely go places in the library world. I sat up straight, adjusted my glasses, and looked down at the book as I thoughtfully explained.
“Pynchon writes like a dream[5]—his words, his ideas—they’re so absurd, and yet equally real—symbolic, no doubt, of the pathos of man.”
I had formed my words perfectly in my mind, and I knew they must have deeply impressed her, maybe even moved her. Then I looked up from the book. She wasn’t staring at me impressed; she wasn’t staring at me at all.
She was looking in the refrigerator door behind me. “Is that ham and cheese sandwich yours?” she asked me.
“No.”
“It’s been in the refrigerator for two days now. No one’s claiming it, and I don’t have a lunch. If anyone asks where it went, tell them it was probably someone on the cleaning crew.”[6]
I wasn’t sure what to think as I watched her stand to get the sandwich. How could I not have impressed her? I convinced myself that she was just being stubborn. I was only a library page—a peon in the library field. To someone as high up on the library chain of command as a librarian, the page was only someone who shelved books, not someone who had ideas, and surely not someone who read Pynchon. I convinced myself as she returned to the table with her sandwich that I would just have to work a little bit harder at proving I was someone worthy of indulging in literary conversation with. “I’ve read everything Pynchon’s written at least once, but this book is my favorite.”[7]
With her mouth full of food, Edith asked, “Is Pingkong a new writer?”
I tried not to show surprise. She was messing with me—she had to be messing with me. She had to know who Pynchon was. I decided it was best just to play her game. “He’s been writing books since way before I was born.”
She studied my face and seemed to be sizing up how old I was. Then she announced proudly, “I’m not much of a reader—don’t have time for it.”
“And you’re a librarian?” The question came out as insulting, but I didn’t mean it that way.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked. Before I answered, she took the book from my hand, and looked carefully at the front cover. She handed it back and then asked a question that still echoes in the back of my mind. “I’ve heard the name before— isn’t he the guy that’s going out with Julia Roberts?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m pretty sure he is,” she said, and then she added, “I loved Julia in Hook. Did you see that movie?”
Sure, I’ve been known to watch a romantic-comedy or two, but I couldn’t let her know that. In fact, I had even seen and enjoyed Hook, as well as almost every other movie Julia Roberts has starred in. I had come into the break room to create the persona of a page who was sort of smart and even knew how to operate a paper cutter. I just didn’t believe I could pass this off by saying, “Julia’s great, and speaking of Hook, did you know Roberts actually had an assistant whose sole responsibility was making sure her feet were clean? Yes, I know, it’s geeky that I know this fact. But it says so right in the credits—check it out.” So instead I said, “I’m not much of a Julia Roberts fan.”
Edith’s face suddenly became red and the tone of her voice hostile as she asked, “How can you say that? Julia’s one of the most talented actresses that ever lived. Have you even seen Pretty Woman?”
I nodded and then added, “I just prefer foreign films, is all.” This actually is not true, but it seemed like the smart thing to say.
“Like movies from other countries or something?”
I nodded.
“Oh.” She took another bite from her sandwich, and explained. “I know this guy who was all into this British movie, and he was always trying to get me to watch them. It was something with a snake in the title—like Mighty Python. One day I finally agreed to watch it, and I hated it—I hate any movie with subtitles.”
Before I could reply, Gina, another librarian entered the room, and Edith explained pointing at me, “He’s never seen Hook.”
The way she pointed her finger made me wish I had just said that Julia Roberts was a great actress.
“You’ve never seen Hook?” Gina asked, like it was the oddest thing she had ever heard. “Julia Roberts played Tinker Bell in it—she was absolutely amazing. Of course she’s amazing in anything she’s in.”
“Like Pretty Woman?” Edith suggested excitedly.
“Oh, my gosh. That last scene where Richard pulls up in the limo to carry her away was like one of the most beautiful scenes in the history of all cinema.”
As they both proceeded to go into loud giggling and to reminisce of the career of Julia Roberts, I made the assumption that they had each never seen The Seventh Seal. I was tempted to spoil their Pretty Woman fantasy by telling them about the early version of the script, which had Roberts addicted to cocaine and taking the whoring job with Richard Gere, in part, because she wanted to go to Disneyland but didn’t have any money on account of her addiction. The movie ends, in this version, with Roberts and her hooker friend on a bus heading to Disneyland. Richard Gere also tosses Roberts out of his car in this version. (I am not joking about any of this.) I decided not to tell them this because (A) it didn’t seem like an intelligent thing to know, and (B) it would probably seem odd that I know such freakish facts about an actress I had just said I didn’t really like. So instead, I finished my break in the bathroom, where I pretended what had just happened was just part of some cruel and strange library hazing ritual.
I returned to shelving after my bathroom moment and spent the next hour convincing myself that the librarians in the break room were just poseurs—that they could not have actually graduation from an accredited graduate school and come away with Julia Roberts as a conversational topic. They had to have gone to some Internet school where people had only to log in to be eligible for a degree—and if they were too stupid to log in then they had someone log in for them, in which case the fact that they were associated with a person smart enough to log into the computer made them eligible for the degree.
As I shelved my truck of books, I felt like someone was staring at me. I turned, and saw a large black and white photo of the city’s first children’s librarian, the woman the library was named after. I had noticed the photo before, but had not paid attention to it. I stared at her eyes and her face, and I wondered what she had been like. She looked like someone who had read me stories when I came to the library as a child—someone who knew, and had read, every kids’ book the library owned. She looked like everything a librarian should be.
When I returned to shelving, Edith was sitting quietly at her desk studying a copy of Pride and Prejudice that had just arrived at the library the day before.
“I love that book,” I said.
“I couldn’t get past the first sentence. It has really pretty illustrations though.” She held up one of the drawings proudly so I could see.
Later in the day, I saw a patron go up to Edith as she displayed the new copy of Pride and Prejudice and say, “Can I check that out? I hear they’re going to make a new movie out of it.”
Edith handed her the book and said, “You can be the very first person to check it out.”
The patron studied the cover and then looked up at Edith and asked curiously, “Have you read it?
“I’ve never read her, but I like anything by the Brontë sisters.[8] They write like her, right?”
Edith nodded. I wondered if she even knew who the Brontë sisters were.
The woman smiled and quickly went off to check out the book. Edith continued to shelve new books with a certain look of satisfaction on her face. I continued to shelve. That was that. I had gathered the facts and now knew the truth: the librarian of my youth was gone, and Edith[9] had replaced her.
I was in denial at first. I believed Edith to be an isolated case. I would find comfort by staring at the Dewey Decimal numbers and thinking to myself, Poor ol’ Melvil Dewey would be rolling in his grave if he knew about Edith. This helped until I learned that Dewey himself was sort of an elitist racist dick. He was a brilliant dick, no doubt.[10] One would hope that it was librarians fighting for civil liberties, but Dewey ardently approved of segregation and opposed women’s rights.
What I quickly learned was the dark truth about librarians: they simply did not find the time to read. For many, working with books for so long had made them uninterested in having anything to do with them outside of work.
Libraries for me had always been a place of knowledge, a place to see people who had spent their entire lives reading books and were eager to share their knowledge and love with you, a place I went to discover new ideas. Working at the library had shattered my vision of the library. And yet I stayed.
The longer I found myself within the confines of what I once had believed was a storehouse of knowledge and information the more I saw that the information was still there—it had just changed forms. For many years I had a vision in my head of that old reference librarian who used to sit behind a desk reading a book. She had been there when I was a kid; she knew everything, including what book was just right for me. I began to see, however, that this librarian of my youth was probably no different from Edith. To people who didn’t know Edith—who just came to the library to ask her where a book was—Edith was this magical creature who knew all things, and could do no wrong.
Edith didn’t like to read in her free time, but she was a great children’s librarian; she read to kids on a regular basis, and when she did they listened to each line of the book with eyes that begged to hear what came next. I saw in her something that I had never really thought about: it takes more to be librarian than a love of books. Libraries were the place where people of diverse backgrounds and cultures could come together for the common pursuit of discovering something new. Librarians were the people who helped them find this discovery. Librarians weren’t dumb or foolish people. Many librarians simply don’t read. My world had for so long been about books and writing and anything remotely literary. The library—the place in my life that was full of books— began to teach me that books weren’t everything.
I soon began to pay less attention to librarians and everything they weren’t and more attention to the library patrons that visited each day. They were businessmen and women looking for books to get them ahead; they were mothers who didn’t know how to read or speak English who were bringing their children into get books because they knew that literacy could bring them a better life than they ever had; they were widowers who wanted to find books that would help them pass the time. They all shared one thing in common: they wanted to learn—and they fascinated me. I began to see that librarians would change, technologies would change, even patrons would change, but the role of the library as the gateway to something greater would always stay the same.
As the years until I graduated with my literature degree became months, I began to have serious concerns about my future. I would soon have a degree in literature and I had no idea where to go with it. I began to wonder if the library was where my destiny lay.
[1] Faren was short, soft spoken, and had a peaceful disposition. The words didn’t exactly fit her.
[2] Library pages came and went quite frequently, so nobody got too attached for several weeks.
[3] Coincidentally, a first edition of this book can be found at the library where I worked. If you bought this from a used book dealer, it would set you back well over $100.00; if, however, you checked it out at the library and then said it went missing, you would only have to pay $10.00. The book was purchased in 1966 when the price of the book was about $5.00, and since the library doesn’t account for inflation the price has stayed the same. Why $10.00? There’s a $5.00 processing fee. Keep in mind, however, that this is a library copy with mold, crusty pages and a funky smell. Which, as it happens, some people are really into.
[4] There are actually a number of things you can do with a book besides read it, and I’ve witnessed librarians doing several, including, but not limited to, setting it under a table leg to make the table more straight, cutting out the images on the cover to use for the story time craft, pulling out the pages and crumbling them up to use as shipping protection in a box, taking note of how handsome or ugly an author photograph looks and sharing their thoughts with anyone around them, and attaching it to the bottom of their shoes and seeing who can slide the furthest on a tile surface.
[5] A dream I’ve never really wanted to be a part of.
[6] Our cleaning crew, as I later learned, was, historically, blamed for everything—missing books, staplers, tape, and once, even a piece of carpet. The crew did not speak English and probably never knew half of the things they had been blamed for.
[7] This is a lie. I had in fact read only The Crying of Lot 49.
[8] All three sisters died way too young. Emily died of tuberculosis, which she caught from being out in the cold at her brother’s funeral; Ann also died of tuberculosis; some believe Charlotte’s death was caused by excessive vomiting during her first pregnancy; their father lived longer than his wife and all of his six kids. (Not one of his kids lived past the age of 40.)
[9] I am told I should change identifying characteristics about characters who might seem to be portrayed a bit negatively, so as not to receive a lawsuit. That said, Edith had “Dukakis for President” tattooed to her forehead.
[10] He began working on one of the most widely known classification systems (the Dewey Decimal System) at the age of 23 and started a magazine (Library Journal) and cofounded a professional organization (the American Library Association) at the age of 25.
That was the first thing Faren, the library manager, said to me on my first day of work.[1]
I was a library page.
Library page is the lowest place you can be on the library totem pole. Besides putting books back on the shelf, the library page is also responsible for doing the jobs that nobody else feels like doing, which include, but are not limited to, cleaning up vomit, washing the windows, scraping gum off the tables, moving furniture, and keeping a watchful eye out for male patrons who are jacking off on the computer. Being a library page also means you are stupid until you can prove otherwise.
“So tell me why you want to work here?” This was the next thing Faren said to me. She asked the same question to all the new employees as a way of showing politeness. She didn’t care about my answer, but I didn’t know this,[2] so I told her with great passion how I loved books and was even studying literature in college—I told her all of this while she checked her e-mail. When I finished my monologue, she yawned and then asked, “Do you know how to cut paper?”
I looked at her, confused. “Paper?”
She nodded. “We have a bundle of fliers that need to be cut in two—you’d have to use the paper cutter. Do you think you’d be able to do that?”
I got nervous. I imagined that I had said something wrong, and she had marked me out as an idiot. But it wasn’t that at all. Like I said, a page is stupid until proven otherwise, and apparently I hadn’t proven otherwise. I wanted to assure her that I really was smart, but instead I just nodded and assured her I knew how to use a paper cutter.
“Great!” Faren said, adding as I walked out the door of her office, “And make sure you don’t cut off any of your fingers. I hate filling out incident reports for stuff like that—it’s so time consuming.”
& & &
A form of pornography is what lured me to the library. To be more precise, a stripper lured me to the library. It’s not as kinky as it sounds. I was young, in college, and in need of a new job, but not actively seeking one. I was looking for the sports section when the classified section fell to the ground and conveniently opened to the job listings. As I bent down to pick up the section, a large busted, scantily clad woman looked back up at me. I was morally outraged and violated by the ad, and felt I owed it to the poor woman to at least find out what she was advertising. It was a local strip bar looking for new strippers, and they were using the large-busted, scantily clad woman to entice applicants. Seeing no other pictures to be morally outraged and violated by, I went to put the classified section down. But then another job ad caught my eye. It said, in bold letters:
DO YOU LIKE BOOKS?
I liked books. I kept reading. The ad was for a library page in the City of Anaheim. It was dry and simply written—it basically said, “Come shelve books.” Most people probably passed the ad off as too boring, but to me it sounded like a literary haven. I applied, was hired, and thus began my library career.
I was sent to a small branch library built in the sixties. It sat next to a park, off all the main streets of the city. It was hidden, and everyone seemed to like it that way. The furniture was as old as the library itself. The carpet was stained. The paint on the walls was faded. There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos. It was a run-down little library, but no one seemed to notice.
Those who came into the building made it seem like their secret little library. It had been there for nearly fifty years, and most of the city’s residents had never heard of it, let alone been inside. Its parking lot was small, but no one cared, because most patrons walked. People didn’t go there for research—that task was left to the city’s larger library three miles away. They went there for books that would help them escape.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the better you can read, the better you’re going to do in life. But there are statistics to back this as well. Studies from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) put scale on literacy. A person who reads poorly will make about $18,000 a year, while a person who reads at the highest level will make over $40,000 a year. So basically this means you will make $20,000 more if you prefer to read Tolstoy over Grisham.
The United States spends millions every year to come up with stats like the ones above, which, if they’re lucky, will take up a 10-second spot on the evening news. While this money could go to things like literacy programs, we all know it won’t because Americans are suckers for lists and statistics. To find out more useless statistics on literacy, visit the NAAL’s Web site at http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/.
I didn’t want to be known as “the page who might cut his fingers off if you don’t watch him carefully,” so by my second day of work I had set out to prove myself to my new library coworkers. I wanted to give them insight into just how well- read I was, which, in turn, would make them deem me worthy of working in such a literary place or, at the very least, make me appear smart enough not to cut my fingers off on the paper cutter.
I chose my weapon carefully: a tattered and carefully marked up paperback copy of The Crying of Lot 49.[3] At precisely 12:14 (a time I had observed that most librarians took their lunches), I entered the staff room and bravely pulled my paperback novel to my face and began to read. The room was empty, but I knew that someone surely would join me before my fifteen-minute break ended.
As it happened, a librarian entered not even two minutes later. Her name was Edith. She was a short, pale-faced woman with thick black glasses and a mole the size of a dime on the left side of her chin. She appeared to be at least 50, but I later learned she was only 36.
She looked at my book oddly and asked, “What’s that in your hand?”
I set the book down and proudly said, “The Crying of Lot 49.”
Edith studied the cover curiously and then asked, confused, “You’re reading it?”[4]
I took her confusion as intrigue—intrigue that someone my age would read such a challenging book for pleasure. I believed in that moment that she was already marking me in her head as someone of intellect who would definitely go places in the library world. I sat up straight, adjusted my glasses, and looked down at the book as I thoughtfully explained.
“Pynchon writes like a dream[5]—his words, his ideas—they’re so absurd, and yet equally real—symbolic, no doubt, of the pathos of man.”
I had formed my words perfectly in my mind, and I knew they must have deeply impressed her, maybe even moved her. Then I looked up from the book. She wasn’t staring at me impressed; she wasn’t staring at me at all.
She was looking in the refrigerator door behind me. “Is that ham and cheese sandwich yours?” she asked me.
“No.”
“It’s been in the refrigerator for two days now. No one’s claiming it, and I don’t have a lunch. If anyone asks where it went, tell them it was probably someone on the cleaning crew.”[6]
I wasn’t sure what to think as I watched her stand to get the sandwich. How could I not have impressed her? I convinced myself that she was just being stubborn. I was only a library page—a peon in the library field. To someone as high up on the library chain of command as a librarian, the page was only someone who shelved books, not someone who had ideas, and surely not someone who read Pynchon. I convinced myself as she returned to the table with her sandwich that I would just have to work a little bit harder at proving I was someone worthy of indulging in literary conversation with. “I’ve read everything Pynchon’s written at least once, but this book is my favorite.”[7]
With her mouth full of food, Edith asked, “Is Pingkong a new writer?”
I tried not to show surprise. She was messing with me—she had to be messing with me. She had to know who Pynchon was. I decided it was best just to play her game. “He’s been writing books since way before I was born.”
She studied my face and seemed to be sizing up how old I was. Then she announced proudly, “I’m not much of a reader—don’t have time for it.”
“And you’re a librarian?” The question came out as insulting, but I didn’t mean it that way.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked. Before I answered, she took the book from my hand, and looked carefully at the front cover. She handed it back and then asked a question that still echoes in the back of my mind. “I’ve heard the name before— isn’t he the guy that’s going out with Julia Roberts?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m pretty sure he is,” she said, and then she added, “I loved Julia in Hook. Did you see that movie?”
Sure, I’ve been known to watch a romantic-comedy or two, but I couldn’t let her know that. In fact, I had even seen and enjoyed Hook, as well as almost every other movie Julia Roberts has starred in. I had come into the break room to create the persona of a page who was sort of smart and even knew how to operate a paper cutter. I just didn’t believe I could pass this off by saying, “Julia’s great, and speaking of Hook, did you know Roberts actually had an assistant whose sole responsibility was making sure her feet were clean? Yes, I know, it’s geeky that I know this fact. But it says so right in the credits—check it out.” So instead I said, “I’m not much of a Julia Roberts fan.”
Edith’s face suddenly became red and the tone of her voice hostile as she asked, “How can you say that? Julia’s one of the most talented actresses that ever lived. Have you even seen Pretty Woman?”
I nodded and then added, “I just prefer foreign films, is all.” This actually is not true, but it seemed like the smart thing to say.
“Like movies from other countries or something?”
I nodded.
“Oh.” She took another bite from her sandwich, and explained. “I know this guy who was all into this British movie, and he was always trying to get me to watch them. It was something with a snake in the title—like Mighty Python. One day I finally agreed to watch it, and I hated it—I hate any movie with subtitles.”
Before I could reply, Gina, another librarian entered the room, and Edith explained pointing at me, “He’s never seen Hook.”
The way she pointed her finger made me wish I had just said that Julia Roberts was a great actress.
“You’ve never seen Hook?” Gina asked, like it was the oddest thing she had ever heard. “Julia Roberts played Tinker Bell in it—she was absolutely amazing. Of course she’s amazing in anything she’s in.”
“Like Pretty Woman?” Edith suggested excitedly.
“Oh, my gosh. That last scene where Richard pulls up in the limo to carry her away was like one of the most beautiful scenes in the history of all cinema.”
As they both proceeded to go into loud giggling and to reminisce of the career of Julia Roberts, I made the assumption that they had each never seen The Seventh Seal. I was tempted to spoil their Pretty Woman fantasy by telling them about the early version of the script, which had Roberts addicted to cocaine and taking the whoring job with Richard Gere, in part, because she wanted to go to Disneyland but didn’t have any money on account of her addiction. The movie ends, in this version, with Roberts and her hooker friend on a bus heading to Disneyland. Richard Gere also tosses Roberts out of his car in this version. (I am not joking about any of this.) I decided not to tell them this because (A) it didn’t seem like an intelligent thing to know, and (B) it would probably seem odd that I know such freakish facts about an actress I had just said I didn’t really like. So instead, I finished my break in the bathroom, where I pretended what had just happened was just part of some cruel and strange library hazing ritual.
I returned to shelving after my bathroom moment and spent the next hour convincing myself that the librarians in the break room were just poseurs—that they could not have actually graduation from an accredited graduate school and come away with Julia Roberts as a conversational topic. They had to have gone to some Internet school where people had only to log in to be eligible for a degree—and if they were too stupid to log in then they had someone log in for them, in which case the fact that they were associated with a person smart enough to log into the computer made them eligible for the degree.
As I shelved my truck of books, I felt like someone was staring at me. I turned, and saw a large black and white photo of the city’s first children’s librarian, the woman the library was named after. I had noticed the photo before, but had not paid attention to it. I stared at her eyes and her face, and I wondered what she had been like. She looked like someone who had read me stories when I came to the library as a child—someone who knew, and had read, every kids’ book the library owned. She looked like everything a librarian should be.
When I returned to shelving, Edith was sitting quietly at her desk studying a copy of Pride and Prejudice that had just arrived at the library the day before.
“I love that book,” I said.
“I couldn’t get past the first sentence. It has really pretty illustrations though.” She held up one of the drawings proudly so I could see.
Later in the day, I saw a patron go up to Edith as she displayed the new copy of Pride and Prejudice and say, “Can I check that out? I hear they’re going to make a new movie out of it.”
Edith handed her the book and said, “You can be the very first person to check it out.”
The patron studied the cover and then looked up at Edith and asked curiously, “Have you read it?
“I’ve never read her, but I like anything by the Brontë sisters.[8] They write like her, right?”
Edith nodded. I wondered if she even knew who the Brontë sisters were.
The woman smiled and quickly went off to check out the book. Edith continued to shelve new books with a certain look of satisfaction on her face. I continued to shelve. That was that. I had gathered the facts and now knew the truth: the librarian of my youth was gone, and Edith[9] had replaced her.
I was in denial at first. I believed Edith to be an isolated case. I would find comfort by staring at the Dewey Decimal numbers and thinking to myself, Poor ol’ Melvil Dewey would be rolling in his grave if he knew about Edith. This helped until I learned that Dewey himself was sort of an elitist racist dick. He was a brilliant dick, no doubt.[10] One would hope that it was librarians fighting for civil liberties, but Dewey ardently approved of segregation and opposed women’s rights.
What I quickly learned was the dark truth about librarians: they simply did not find the time to read. For many, working with books for so long had made them uninterested in having anything to do with them outside of work.
Libraries for me had always been a place of knowledge, a place to see people who had spent their entire lives reading books and were eager to share their knowledge and love with you, a place I went to discover new ideas. Working at the library had shattered my vision of the library. And yet I stayed.
The longer I found myself within the confines of what I once had believed was a storehouse of knowledge and information the more I saw that the information was still there—it had just changed forms. For many years I had a vision in my head of that old reference librarian who used to sit behind a desk reading a book. She had been there when I was a kid; she knew everything, including what book was just right for me. I began to see, however, that this librarian of my youth was probably no different from Edith. To people who didn’t know Edith—who just came to the library to ask her where a book was—Edith was this magical creature who knew all things, and could do no wrong.
Edith didn’t like to read in her free time, but she was a great children’s librarian; she read to kids on a regular basis, and when she did they listened to each line of the book with eyes that begged to hear what came next. I saw in her something that I had never really thought about: it takes more to be librarian than a love of books. Libraries were the place where people of diverse backgrounds and cultures could come together for the common pursuit of discovering something new. Librarians were the people who helped them find this discovery. Librarians weren’t dumb or foolish people. Many librarians simply don’t read. My world had for so long been about books and writing and anything remotely literary. The library—the place in my life that was full of books— began to teach me that books weren’t everything.
I soon began to pay less attention to librarians and everything they weren’t and more attention to the library patrons that visited each day. They were businessmen and women looking for books to get them ahead; they were mothers who didn’t know how to read or speak English who were bringing their children into get books because they knew that literacy could bring them a better life than they ever had; they were widowers who wanted to find books that would help them pass the time. They all shared one thing in common: they wanted to learn—and they fascinated me. I began to see that librarians would change, technologies would change, even patrons would change, but the role of the library as the gateway to something greater would always stay the same.
As the years until I graduated with my literature degree became months, I began to have serious concerns about my future. I would soon have a degree in literature and I had no idea where to go with it. I began to wonder if the library was where my destiny lay.
[1] Faren was short, soft spoken, and had a peaceful disposition. The words didn’t exactly fit her.
[2] Library pages came and went quite frequently, so nobody got too attached for several weeks.
[3] Coincidentally, a first edition of this book can be found at the library where I worked. If you bought this from a used book dealer, it would set you back well over $100.00; if, however, you checked it out at the library and then said it went missing, you would only have to pay $10.00. The book was purchased in 1966 when the price of the book was about $5.00, and since the library doesn’t account for inflation the price has stayed the same. Why $10.00? There’s a $5.00 processing fee. Keep in mind, however, that this is a library copy with mold, crusty pages and a funky smell. Which, as it happens, some people are really into.
[4] There are actually a number of things you can do with a book besides read it, and I’ve witnessed librarians doing several, including, but not limited to, setting it under a table leg to make the table more straight, cutting out the images on the cover to use for the story time craft, pulling out the pages and crumbling them up to use as shipping protection in a box, taking note of how handsome or ugly an author photograph looks and sharing their thoughts with anyone around them, and attaching it to the bottom of their shoes and seeing who can slide the furthest on a tile surface.
[5] A dream I’ve never really wanted to be a part of.
[6] Our cleaning crew, as I later learned, was, historically, blamed for everything—missing books, staplers, tape, and once, even a piece of carpet. The crew did not speak English and probably never knew half of the things they had been blamed for.
[7] This is a lie. I had in fact read only The Crying of Lot 49.
[8] All three sisters died way too young. Emily died of tuberculosis, which she caught from being out in the cold at her brother’s funeral; Ann also died of tuberculosis; some believe Charlotte’s death was caused by excessive vomiting during her first pregnancy; their father lived longer than his wife and all of his six kids. (Not one of his kids lived past the age of 40.)
[9] I am told I should change identifying characteristics about characters who might seem to be portrayed a bit negatively, so as not to receive a lawsuit. That said, Edith had “Dukakis for President” tattooed to her forehead.
[10] He began working on one of the most widely known classification systems (the Dewey Decimal System) at the age of 23 and started a magazine (Library Journal) and cofounded a professional organization (the American Library Association) at the age of 25.
