I fell in love in first or second grade visiting our local library. On 145th Street in Manhattan, it was a gorgeous, imposing building designed by McKim, Mead and White, but I didn't know its history until recently.
What I did know was that I felt excited, privileged and awed every time I passed through its portals, and believe me, it did not have doors, it had portals. It was, after all, designed to look like an Italian palazzo. Nobody told me that, but I felt as far away as Venice every time I wandered along its endless shelves as the light streamed in through massive windows. I felt a similar sense of awe seeing Venice itself for the first time, decades later.
The library was a place of peace and complete freedom for a boy living in an angry home. No librarian ever told me a book was too adult for me, and neither did my parents. Which meant I could browse the shelves with no restrictions.
Each week I brought home a small pile of books I subsequently devoured, and I was especially fond of biographies and history, two genres that fascinate me even more now that I'm middle aged and have my own biography and see myself in history.
All those books nourished me and inspired me. I wanted to write, too, and I wanted to have a book on those shelves some day. Here again, I was very lucky. Starting in grade school, my teachers and my parents encouraged my writing.
Yet with all that reading of library books, I still watched plenty of television. It was actually reading that interfered with my school work, not TV. Whatever I brought back from that amazing library was almost always more interesting than what we were reading in school, where I was often bored and too talkative. Nowadays, of course, they would probably give me Ritalin.
I got another gift from that library: being read to at story hour. It was the pleasures I derived from that and from having my mother read to me at home that partly fuel my own joy when I do a reading today, one of the best parts of being an author on the road.
Samuel Johnson wrote that "No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library." I can't agree, at least on a day when I'm feeling good about my career, because my own public library filled me with hope, knowledge, and dreams.
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I am inspired by books as well as you.The building connected with your lovely memory was imposing,i can't say that for mine,but it doesn't change our common joy while remembering first real entry into magic world.
I love comments left here as well.Thank you.
I started going to the library before I was allowed to cross the street. It was the place where I first found out that everything adults told me, had to be fact checked. I learned critical thinking because of the wealth of information available.
The library (Enoch Pratt in Baltimore) was my first love, and you can't ever forget your first.
wonderful article.
Wasn't your own library card a powerful thing? A passport, a talisman, a treasure all its own.
Summers as a kid in Jersey City in the 60's were rendered bearable---even blissful by the local library.
Later, as an adult I moved briefly to PA. While I loved the state, they don't have local libraries like the ones I knew as a child. The town we lived in had a volunteer staff, and "donated" books...usually Reader's Digest condensed books lining their shelves. That was it for me...I headed back to my home state...because my need to read is up there with my need to breathe!
Thanks for taking me back to some of the most fond memories of my youth.