Loving the Library
I am writing a short post this week because it is deep in the winter season and, while I am doing more writing than usual, it is fun to step away from any sense of obligation and just focus on the projects and tasks that appeal to me. But, part of the reason that I can come to a small town straight north 14 hours from my home in Texas is because this small town has a public library that is connected to the internet via a fiber connection. So, I am going to focus on loving the library for this post because, without the library, our winter retreat really would just be “camping”. What sounds more fun than “Camping with a library”?
Small town America is blessed with so many little libraries in part because of the generosity of the industrial magnate Andrew Carnegie. I frankly can’t remember what his industry was, but like many people we know him from his name above the entry of the iconically designed red brick libraries he built around the world in the early 20th century, over 2000 in American towns alone. I just asked the librarian about this and she is looking at the list of Carnegie libraries in Nebraska. Each county seat for the wide swath of our region has or had a Carnegie library, so Geneva, 10 miles down the road still has original library built by Carnegie with an addition on the back. While the Art Deco font carved in stone over the door proclaims “Public Library” it is the huge Capital “C” above the words that marks this building part of Carnegie’s gift.
But, while the small town library has my undying love, the university library also holds a special place in my heart. For my first solo trip down to the “big city” of Lincoln, the capital of the state and home to the University of Nebraska, I made a trip to the library my top priority. Visiting the Love Library on the University of Nebraska main campus was a little bit surreal. I haven’t been back there since I graduated from college more than, well, let’s say 23 years ago. The last time I was there, it was definitely before the trend of turning university libraries into information hubs, as opposed to places to store books. I went in through a door that never used to be open and wandered through the freshly painted and remodeled ground floor, looking for anything familiar. I eventually found and chatted with the librarian, sitting at a computer console in the “ask us area” (gone is the imposing circulation desk), and found out from her that the best I could do for looking at very old books would be in the basement of the north side. Because all of the rest of the books are in the repository, and can be accessed by request, but are not available to be browsed.
It makes sense. The library is prime real estate on campus, and it used to be that students looked for information in books. Now, they can look for information in their Perplexity browsers. And so, I went down to the basement on the north side, and found some wonderful collections of old magazines, which were full of beautiful pictures, and I used my Adobe Capture tool to gather some 1915, 1916 color trends, which was a lot of fun. After an hour with the oldest books I could find, a stop by Gomez Art Supply and a couple of hours internet at The Mill in Lincoln’s Haymarket, I headed back to the interstate, driving the hour back to Fairmont in time to greet the librarian as she closed up shop for the day, promising to stop by the next time she was open.
The public library here in the little town of Fairmont, where I spend most of the time during my vacation, is a tiny but classic small town library, with a great assortment of romances, and mysteries, and kids movies, and all of the magazines you can imagine related to quilting, woodworking, homesteading, home decor, and baking. Speaking of baking, you can even actually check out molded cake pans that can be used to make character cakes in the most popular of the latest characters. That’s the kind of thing that, I think, does make a library very useful.
When I stopped by the first day that we arrived, the librarian was busy assembling the woodcut snowmen that were going to be the focus of the adult craft evening that they have once a week. She does a book related craft with children on Saturdays during the school year, but during the winter break, they didn’t have one planned. And, of course, in my library in San Marcos, they have a maker space, and they have sewing machines in the maker space.
My aunt, Holly, was a state librarian for the State of Nevada. The summer that I spent with her I joined her on a tour of almost all the small town libraries in the state. Her job was to visit each library, check on resources and training needs and be the friendly face of the taxpayer support for this vital rural lifeline. That particular summer, she was back on the road after suffering a serious accident due to falling asleep at the wheel and everyone seemed to think that having me in the front seat, “chattering like a monkey” and keeping an eye on her would ease the burden of long days on the road. I got to see lots of libraries and talk lots of books with my favorite people at that age…adults. I know that in a just parallel, not even another version of my life, I also would have been, or may still yet be a librarian.
The “camping” experience that we have in our little 100-year-old cottage, that doesn’t get internet, and is really pretty much just the way that it was left when the widow who owned it died in the ‘50s, it would not be the same experience if I wasn’t just a short, two block walk from a small town library.
I have to say that, of all of the different amenities that are required to make a community livable, a library is tops. I get it, sidewalks are important. It is a bit frustrating to stumble over broken sidewalks or have to walk out into the street because a new home reno has decided to dispense with the sidewalk altogether. And having a walkable town is all the rage. But I think that the absolute first metric, for me, of a livable community will be whether or not there is a public library.
Thank you for reading what emerges from my process.
Gwendolyn