Something That Was Better When I Was a Kid

(I started this on Thursday when it was only one day behind the prompt. Then my car pool popped up ahead of schedule. I am still working from McDonald's.) 

In which Long & Short Reviews once again encourages reviewers to reveal our ages...

Something that was better when I was a kid was the town library. 

When I was a kid the town library occupied the building now used by the Historical Society, which is not a large building. It was a ridiculously small library, but then mine is a small town too. All the walls were lined with shelves, in between which there were room for five six-foot-tall freestanding shelves on the right as you walked in, seven on the left. Directly in front of you as you walked in was where a large open fireplace had once been; that fireplace was now filled in with a bookshelf, walled off by two more bookshelves the same size; this was the Children's Room, where the picture books and record albums lived, and where kids were supposed to go in, sit down, and look at picture books until their parents told them it was time to leave. The Children's Room had room for about two children to sit down. This was all right since, if two children were in the library at one time, they were probably siblings anyway.

Read-aloud, sing-along, and even movie hours were aimed at school-age children, held in summer (always at two o'clock on Thursdays), and although at least once every summer all members of the Summer Reading Club packed into the library proper at the same time, traditionally the reading, singing, and movie-watching took place in Sunday School rooms at a large church near the library. After the two hours of entertainment kids were likely to wait for their parents out on the tiny patches of lawn on either side of the steps. The library was twelve or fifteen cement steps above the street.

As children matured they were allowed to explore the big freestanding bookshelves, first on the right where the "chapter books" for children and teenagers were kept, later on the left where books for adults were kept. The librarian may actually have remembered the Victorian Era and was motivated by local community standards to ensure that no books on either side of the building would bring a blush to a maiden's cheek. (I learned how babies are made from the daily newspaper.) "Adult books" were the ones of interest to adults, relatively few boring novels and lots of useful nonfiction books. At the time my parents used to scold me about reading more of those useful nonfiction books and fewer children's stories, and, since I liked children's stories and didn't like being nannied, I used to check out nonfiction books on the most frivolous topics the library offered--party planning, interior decorating, and (the library had at least a dozen serious grown-up books on) the history of clothes and fashion design. 

What occupied the space where the other two bookshelves were, on the grown-up side of the library, was the librarian's office. There was room for just one librarian with a desk, a chair, a typewriter, and a card-punching machine for stamping library card numbers and due dates on cards tucked into little pockets glued inside the back cover of each book. Yellow cards showing only the due dates went home with the books; color-coded white, pink, blue, orange, and green cards stayed in a box on the librarian's desk. Books could be renewed a few times if you called or wrote to request the librarian to move the cards back through this primitive filing system, on the due date. If you failed to call on the due date you could still request more time for the books but you had to pay four cents per book per day.

Food and drink were not allowed in the library. Smoking cigarettes was not encouraged, but enough of it went on that the library smelled of blue mold, which people can learn to like. 

It really was a pathetic little excuse for a library. I had seen libraries the size of a church or even a school building, and wished we had one of those. However, its few books were nearly all chosen and paid for by local people, usually identified by bookplates pasted onto the front page. Very rarely did the library have a book that had been printed during the current year. Someone had to buy a new book, read it, and decide it was worth sharing, often as a memorial tribute to a departed friend. Nobody was yet telling all the public librarians to spend tax money to buy all the same books, most of which would interest nobody in their community and would never circulate. Not every book in the library appealed to me--there was one author-illustrator whose picture books my brother and I used to check out just because we thought we could draw better pictures than that--but each one appealed to somebody. 

Computers had been invented; I think some banks and utility companies even used them, but nobody had ever thought the things would ever intrude into libraries. Computers had to be kept in sterile, climate-controlled offices, and the library didn't even have a vestibule to cushion the transition between heated or air-conditioned air and whatever the weather was doing outside.

In the Carter Administration the library moved into a shiny new county office building. (How much less space the county offices took up, back then!) The number of books in the collection increased by about 500 percent. With eager expectation I fell on these new books and soon discovered that most of them were what publishers call "remainders." Some strange things were being printed in the Carter Administration and, because they didn't sell well in the cities, sold to country libraries by the barrel. I remember a few books (which I didn't discover until I was a college psychology student) about the supposed psychological benefits of LSD, several of the early classics of radical left-wing feminism, and quite a few field guides to British birds, flowers, and butterflies--as opposed to the species local people might actually see in the field. 

Over time the worst of these choices were tactfully discarded and replaced with books the library's patrons were more likely to approve, but the library no longer served as an introduction to the community. Neither librarians nor library patrons chose what went onto its shelves. The expanded library could have only so many "circulating items," including a lot of things that weren't books, notably cheap replicas of famous paintings and sculptures. All the "circulating items" were chosen for us and, if library patrons felt moved to donate books in memory of friends, those books were sold for nickels and dimes, rather than being added to the library's collection. Books that had been literally loved-all-to-pieces were no longer replaced with new copies, but with what some committee in some unknown location had decided every library needed--lots of p.c. propwash. Every year the library had fewer useful nonfiction books and more simple-carbs-for-the-brain. 

As a child, what I liked about the library was that it was a quieter, more interesting place to hang out than the schoolyard. As an adult, what I liked about it was that it was where I could learn and study things like languages without having to pay tuition or commute to classes. 

I worked for a man who could easily keep up conversations with people who'd gone to Radford or Duke or McGill, but he never mentioned his alma mater. Knowing he was a veteran, I guessed he'd gone to a public school on the GI Bill, like Dad, but he must have chosen a good one! One day I just asked whether he'd gone to Virginia Tech. He said no. "I went to a coal camp school where nobody tried to teach us anything, just check us for lice and diseases. I didn't go there any more than I could help and was able to get a job and quit when I was fourteen--nobody cared exactly how old coal miners' kids were, and I looked sixteen. Then I worked in the mine until I could pass for eighteen and join the Army. I got all my education from library books and on-the-job training." 

My idea of a good library is one that can prepare a coal miner to pass trade certification tests, become a skilled laborer, and socialize on equal terms with "educated" people. I liked one where I could find the books I needed to test out of boring college classes like sociology, too. But I soon learned that those committees deciding what libraries ought to be did not want them to be places where people could educate themselves and save either time or money. If people could read sociology at libraries and pass exams in the subject, how would sociology teachers survive! My answer to that "question" would be that maybe we don't need so many sociology teachers, maybe they should train for a different job. The committees' answer was that libraries should move away from stocking books at all, especially from stocking informative books, primary texts of history, foreign language books that went beyond tourist phrase lists, music books with actual sheet music in them, anything that might have been taught in a high school or college course. If people insisted on checking out real books rather than "items" like movies everyone who wanted to see had already seen, stuff those shelves with genre fiction! And "people" didn't need quiet places, anyway--libraries could be re-purposed into more of those "community centers" that had been opened, and closed, in the mid-twentieth century! Never mind that people had not used the "community centers," while people were still using the libraries.

In the 1990s Virginia had an unpopular Governor who, among other things, cut back funding for libraries. At the time I wanted a T-shirt with "Libraries will get us through times with no Governor better than Governors will get us through times with no libraries" on it. Today, seeing the messes that have been made of my home town library and so many others (I first saw the rot set in at the Takoma DC branch library), I think we'd be better off without what now claim the name of "libraries." It's a sad and disgusting thought, one I usually prefer not to think about, but it's true.

I'm all in favor of children using libraries--being taught to wash their hands, sit down quietly, and read books, which is what libraries are for. I think day-care programs where children are encouraged to run about, eat and drink, scream, make messes with paste and finger paint, and sing off key, are also fine and should take place outdoors, if possible, or in a separate room walled off from libraries. 

I'm in favor of public computer centers, and since libraries' "card catalogues" are now databases rather than actual cabinets full of cards I see no reason why libraries should not have small computer centers where the card catalogues used to be, but anyone who tries doing serious research online will see why libraries must not be allowed to fill shelves with genre fiction "because people can get up-to-date information on the Internet now." No. They can't. They can still get a limited amount of legitimate scientific information on strictly academic topics like butterflies and dead languages, but the information the Internet offers on topics related to profitable businesses is controlled by corporate financial interests and not to be trusted. Libraries need to offer printed books that represent the points of view the corporations want to filter away from Google, Bing, and Yahoo. 

(We all have bias...I'm the one who grew up having things like Velikovsky and The Hollow Earth handed to me and being told, "Well, if you don't know enough to judge, read some more and learn, and then we can talk about what you think of this fellow's point of view." I think my Drill Sergeant Dad's way of presenting that way of thinking was pretty strong meat even for educated adults, but libraries can and should present it in a slower, friendlier way for the general public. By stocking books whose authors believed LSD had potential benefits, or that the Earth's core is hollow and contains an earthly Paradise, or that the Old Testament miracles were produced by the destruction of a planet that became the asteroid belt, libraries were being courteous and inclusive of dissidents as people, sending a message of "You're probably in error but we don't think you're 'weird' or 'non-persons.' Stick around; let's talk and read more." We desperately needed more of that attitude during the COVID panic, and even more desperately need it now that the Biden administration's point of view is what's being proved to have been in error.)

I'm in favor of frivolous fiction...but I don't know that public funding needs to be spent on it. Libraries should invest in the minority of really good novels, in serious nonfiction that people can use not only to pass exams but to learn languages and repair their property and qualify for advanced courses for which they need to pay teachers, and let the frivolous fiction be donated and shared among those who enjoy it.

I think, as a general rule, tax funds should be relied on only to maintain library buildings and reference collections, and library patrons should donate the circulating books and any other "items" the library stocks. I'm in favor of libraries stocking "items" other than books that people want to take home, use, and return--cameras, why not, and lawn mowers, and all those toys children want to play with once or twice!--but I'd like to see more of the spirit of those old bookplates: "This book (or "item") was donated by X in memory of Y. Patrons are requested to use it with the care that such a generous gift deserves."