Libraries Fill a Void
Some say that America’s libraries are an anachronism, and these days financial support for them is often inadequate. With so many books digitized, so much of culture playing out online and so many people interacting virtually, the thinking goes, the public library is becoming obsolete.
Others say not so fast. When Forbes magazine published an article this summer suggesting that Amazon replace libraries with retail outlets, the response was so negative that Forbes deleted the article from its website.
Visits, book circulation and attendance have increased in New York and other cities. But the libraries —where the poor can read quietly and the homeless can stay warm and dry — are being neglected when they are most needed, Eric Klinenberg wrote in The Times.
“Libraries are the kinds of places where people with different backgrounds, passions and interests can take part in a living democratic culture,” Mr. Klinenberg wrote. “Public, private and philanthropic sectors can work together to reach for something higher than the bottom line.”
Taxpayers in southwest Oregon decided to save money by cutting funds for county libraries. But book lovers in small towns in these counties are trying to go into the book-lending business, Kirk Johnson reported in The Times.
And they are finding it isn’t as easy as they thought.
(Maybe they should have taken lessons from Todd Bol, the creator of the Little Free Library box, which spawned a movement that has placed 75,000 boxes in all 50 states and more than 88 countries. Mr. Bol died at 62 on October 18.)
The folks in Drain, population 1,000, had to postpone their reopening party this fall: The library didn’t own any books. In nearby Reedsport, librarians couldn’t get the list of card holders. A new library is set to open in the city of Roseburg, but it does not plan to share materials with other libraries, breaking with tradition.
“It’s every library for themselves, and you don’t know where it’s going to lead,” Robert Leo Heilman, a volunteer at the town library in Myrtle Creek, told Mr. Johnson.
Los Angeles residents found out what life without a library was like 32 years ago when the Central Library caught fire and burned for eight hours, destroying some 400,000 books and damaging 700,000 more.
Susan Orlean tells the story of that fire in “The Library Book.” Like many, she did not remember the story of the fire, which happened on April 29, 1986, the same week as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. She first heard about it on a library tour and was moved to write about it.
“Libraries are places. They’re not merely a website,” Ms. Orlean said on The Times Book Review podcast. “They exist as a gathering place in a community where we encounter each other, and there aren’t that many places that are free and open to everyone.”
Ms. Orlean was struck by the fact that in the age of the search engine, the library is still the place that people often look for answers. Her book tells of the notes librarians have kept on the many questions asked of them:
“Patron call. Wanted to know how to say ‘The necktie is in the bathtub’ in Swedish. He was writing a script.”
One day at the Los Angeles branch, she overheard a librarian: “Why would someone call here and ask, ‘ Which is more evil, grasshoppers or crickets?’ ”