LIBRARIES

A few weeks ago I was listening to a Public Radio talk show about libraries. One caller insisted libraries, by allowing people to check out videos, were engaged in socialism. They were depriving  the video stores of revenue. I’m not sure why videos are a bigger issue than books, but there’s no accounting for such things. I passed it off as part of the latest fad of labeling anything that is disliked as socialism until I got a “Printers Row: Lit Links” email update from the Printer’s Row Literary Festival in Chicago. It seems Fox News aired a piece entitled “Are Libraries Necessary, or a Waste of Tax Money?” Here's an excerpt: “They eat up millions of your hard earned tax dollars. It's money that could be used to keep your child's school running.” Shocking to think we are undermining our children’s education by spending money on libraries. Why, children might learn something not on the approved curriculum in the library! They might read a book on the notorious radical Thomas Jefferson.

What really seems to irritate the anti-library crowd is that so many people come to the library to use the Internet. That’s true, but for the poor seeking a job the library may be the only access they have to the Internet. In case no one has noticed, today you have to search for apply for jobs online. The old days of walking into the personnel department of a company and filling out a form are long gone. Even clergy in the ELCA have been compelled to use the new online Mobility Papers. As someone who still uses fountain pens, I resent this reduction to electronic digital code, but what can you do?

I love libraries. I still remember my father taking me to the old Hamlin Park Library in Chicago when I had first learned to read. I think there hasn’t been a month since then that I haven’t used a library. Recently I was treated with uncommon courtesy by the Special Collections librarian at the University of Florida, and I’m not even a Gator.

The Internet is a wonderful research tool, and maybe someday it will replace physical libraries, but not yet. You can find all sorts of things poking around in libraries that just don’t turn up online. You discover these locally produced magazines and pamphlets or maybe the cookbook of the Littleburg Ladies Crocheting Society and Karate Club from 1964.  You can’t find that stuff on the Internet.

The buildings themselves can be fascinating. The wonderful marble stairways and mosaics at the old main library in Chicago made it seem that you were truly entering a temple of knowledge. Maybe that’s what it was like in the great library of Alexandria before it burned.

And think of the role libraries play in literature. The Body in the Library by Agatha Christe. Or the library that is almost a character in Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose. And of course the library that forms the passage between the ordinary world and the magical world in Not All is as You See by–well, modesty prevents me from naming the author. (However it is available at Amazon.)

The old Benedictine monasteries had libraries. The Rule of St. Benedict directs the Abbot to assign each monk a book to read during Lent. I know some people who would think that was a terrible penance.  I can hear certain people: “A book, how strange. Where do you plug it in?” Of course nowadays they do sell books that you plug in in order to recharge their batteries, but I’m not going there or buying one.

Well, it is Friday, my usual day for heading to the Library. I’m still researching old Lutheran churches and want to check the 1842 government survey of Marion County. I could get on line, but the last time I tried to download a section, my computer said it would take 1 day, 2 hours, and 17 minutes. It’s a lot faster to drive to the library.

Good reading.

May the Lord bless you on your journey and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne


The picture of the Chicago Cultural Center, formally the Chicago Public Library.



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