The Argentine, Canadian scholar Alberto Manguel has a personal library of 30,000 volumes. Manguel ". . . conveys a sense that posthumous voices and literary characters converse among themselves under his roof." He is also the author of Library at Night. *
From a sitting position on the floor I reached up, seized and pulled a book toward me - half a dozen others fell with it. A memory from the Dunham Public Library in Whitesboro, N.Y. Regularly my parents took my brother and I there on Saturdays to refresh our reading supply. "Remember" my mother would harp, "never go any where without a book."
My grammar school had no library and the high school had a large room with a few books - The Lives of the Saints - many trophies and two office desks. I was not a quality or even an adequate student. In the third year of high school my mother contemplated sending me off to barber school. Toward the end of my sophomore year in college I found myself in the Utica Public Library, a neo Greco-Roman construct from 1903. My reason for being there is lost but on the second floor rear were stacks. There I happened upon Samuel Eliot Morison's History of US Naval Operations World War II, or at least 12 of the 15 volumes. I read them all with pleasure sitting in those stacks over the next few months. Then following a surprising surge in study habits I received a BA from Utica College of Syracuse University.
1959 - I arrived at New York University. The NYU library was quite user friendly for graduate students. But the New York City Public Library was overwhelming - its immense card catalog required concentration and saintly patience - on every subject there was always more ! Home eventually became the sub-basement of the NYU Law School Library. There below the street, in a silent, sealed, artificial environment I reviewed the transcripts of the World War II war crimes Tribunals, IMT Far East and Nuremberg. My happy view of the value of the species homo sapien was scorched and human activities since then have reinforced the pessimism.
I would utilize the Hartwick College Library for 34 years. Because of earlier efforts by Professors Boris Schzockov and Dan Allen, Hartwick had a fine, modest, yet intense Russian/Slavic collection. (It had much Russian Orthodox material but then the splendid RO Holy Trinity Monastery was just 25 miles north in Jordanville, N.Y.) I tried to enhance the collection and remember being quite pleased in the early 1990s, that as the USSR imploded Russian students were already studying at Hartwick. I could also go into the Library and right next to the New York Times and Times of London, peruse the latest copy of Izvestia. This was a time of hope.
During this period I spent a summer at Harvard researching Soviet nationalities. My first visit to Widener Library - I followed a bright line on the floor through different rooms, floors until I arrived at the "Slavic Section". It was quiet, cool, with the aroma of leather and musty paper. I wandered among the stacks - every volume touched required reading. Few things in life satisfy anticipation. Widener Library exceeded mine - and I had yet to visit the Russian Research Center.
2016 - It is the future - now and then I visit the Fruitville Branch of the Sarasota Public Library. It is a bright, spacious, multi-purpose place (meetings, lectures, books for sale) with much technology as well as stacks with CDs and books. It has a children's section where youngsters can sit on the floor and pull down books.
*See Robert Harrison, NYRB October 22, 2015.
Mom certainly had the right idea, always keep a book on hand. It is dismaying today to see the demise of the paperback and with it the casual reader of paperbacks, their studious presence in parks and on buses replaced by the digital generation with their phones and tablets.
ReplyDeleteThe small library in Whitesboro I remember well as it had a large, standing clock that chimed on the hour as well as a voluminous collection of L. Bemelmans “Madeline” in France series. Why I was interested in the “Madeline” series, tales of a young French girl who lived in a Catholic boarding school and was paraded around Paris by serious but friendly nuns is still a mystery to me.
My public grade school, as your Catholic grade school, was also sans library (or gym, cafeteria, or music room for that matter). Thankfully, we didn’t have the Lives of the Saints or any books forbidding us to touch ourselves; those would come later when I went to a Catholic High School. But we did have a rich selection of fairy tales and Greek mythology in the back of our classrooms, magical stuff that inspired the imagination and made you want to read more. There were also the didactic nature stories of Thornton Burgess, tales of the Old West Wind, skunks, otters, and famously little Tommy Trout, who to my horror got eaten by a pickerel because he failed to listen to his parents – “and his parents never saw him again.” Jesus!! But anyways, all of this helped me to overcome my “Madeline” obsession.
The Utica library was indeed a grand and cavernous structure, crisscrossed with spiraling staircases that disappeared into the dusty stacks. And it also served as a handy place to check out girls from Utica Free Academy. I remember in high school picking up a volume on the Bandung Conference (1955) and discovering that some non-white countries didn’t like the U.S. and were trying to pool their resources against us. I was shocked! Insulted!
I miss the old libraries. And sadly many books in these older libraries sit undisturbed on the shelf, their pages not having seen the light of day in decades, their ideas and characters locked up in print. They await a new generation of inquisitive readers, people like our Mother.