The New Orleans Times-Picayune
Reviewed April 16, 2008 by Susan Larson
This memoir by an Anaheim, Calif., librarian is a real keeper, a gently funny chronicle of his days in the public library. In "Quiet, Please," Scott Douglas renders the eccentricities of the staff and the foibles of the patrons (teenagers blocked from MySpace, old guys looking at porn). So what do we learn about in the library? Human nature, of course.
When Douglas finds himself having to read aloud to young patrons, as "the storyteller to the rejects -- the classes no one else liked reading to," he discovers "two very important lessons about life: One, if you can read to the classes that no one else likes and still have kids walking away happy, then you're really prepared for anything life throws at you; two, if I ever have kids, I'm going to be extra picky about finding out about their teachers before I let them be in the class."
As he moves from library page to library school, he sees his small branch library metamorphose into a new modern one, he teaches us about library history and library humor, even offering corny library pickup lines and how librarians effectively shoot them down. He even contemplates a tattoo of a book on his elbow, then realizes he'd probably pick a title like "Little Women," then goes on a rant about his own profession: Why was I such a geek? Why were librarians such geeks? I did a search for some of the famous ones: John Cotton Dana, John J. Beckley, Melvil Dewey, Charles Ammi Cutter. They all had the same thing in common: They were all elitist wimps."
And yet, this is a sweetly hopeful book. Douglas is just the librarian you'd like to meet -- helpful, with a sense of public responsibility and a sense of humor that ranges from the juvenile to the divinely sophisticated: "I was a servant to people who had absolutely no money and did things that were flat-out bizarre. It was humbling and rewarding."
This memoir by an Anaheim, Calif., librarian is a real keeper, a gently funny chronicle of his days in the public library. In "Quiet, Please," Scott Douglas renders the eccentricities of the staff and the foibles of the patrons (teenagers blocked from MySpace, old guys looking at porn). So what do we learn about in the library? Human nature, of course.
When Douglas finds himself having to read aloud to young patrons, as "the storyteller to the rejects -- the classes no one else liked reading to," he discovers "two very important lessons about life: One, if you can read to the classes that no one else likes and still have kids walking away happy, then you're really prepared for anything life throws at you; two, if I ever have kids, I'm going to be extra picky about finding out about their teachers before I let them be in the class."
As he moves from library page to library school, he sees his small branch library metamorphose into a new modern one, he teaches us about library history and library humor, even offering corny library pickup lines and how librarians effectively shoot them down. He even contemplates a tattoo of a book on his elbow, then realizes he'd probably pick a title like "Little Women," then goes on a rant about his own profession: Why was I such a geek? Why were librarians such geeks? I did a search for some of the famous ones: John Cotton Dana, John J. Beckley, Melvil Dewey, Charles Ammi Cutter. They all had the same thing in common: They were all elitist wimps."
And yet, this is a sweetly hopeful book. Douglas is just the librarian you'd like to meet -- helpful, with a sense of public responsibility and a sense of humor that ranges from the juvenile to the divinely sophisticated: "I was a servant to people who had absolutely no money and did things that were flat-out bizarre. It was humbling and rewarding."
