I was under the librarians’ protection.
Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back.
I approached the opening of the new Darien Library in Darien, Connecticut, not as an outsider who lived forty-five minutes away but as a welcome guest. Here was a public library that flung open its doors to people from beyond the town limits. A banner quote emblazoned its home page for a while—“I live in California, but I keep Darien Library’s number in my phone for good answers to my questions.” Imagine that!
It’s true that without a Darien library card, I couldn’t actually check out the laptops and GPS devices and Kindles available to local patrons. I couldn’t take BlackBerry boot camp (what a shame). Nor could I read the Wall Street Journal online (database access is restricted by the providers)—though I could become a friend of their library for $300 and enjoy any and all of these privileges. Even as a mere piker and carpetbagger, I was invited to register on their website and help myself to resources like podcast interviews with authors and staff-written reviews. And, most important, I was invited to consult their librarians. About anything! Their librarians would be happy to work for me. Any person in the universe can consult Darien’s Ask a Librarian using the instant-messaging service, Meebo, on the library’s website. It told you if the library was online, and warned you it might take a little while; but the weekend it opened, when the library was packed with hundreds of people, I tried this after I returned home and a librarian sent me the text of an article from the Darien paper in fifteen minutes. “We’re always thinking SERVICE,” the website proclaimed. Reader, I was serviced.
This friendly embrace of anyone who walked through the door—or called, or used the instant-message service—was the mark of an evolved library. “The time soon will come when the idea of defining the clientele a library serves in very narrow, often geographically constrained terms will seem very quaint and old-fashioned,” librarian Tom Peters wrote in a blog for the American Library Association. “Usage of information and information services has been going global since global information networks became widely used.” His modest suggestion: “Perhaps a few forward-thinking library staffers, with the full support of their boards and their currently defined clientele, should openly declare that they serve the entire world, at least in theory.” At least in theory. Is there any harm in that? In practice, we already see that all over the Web. And public libraries do, after all, hang signs that say “public.”
The library blogs had been buzzing about Darien’s opening for months. The Darien site itself had a countdown clock keeping track of the hours, minutes, even seconds till the new library opened. Michael Stephens and others had been beating the drum about the library’s innovations and generosity in sharing them. John Blyberg, assistant director for innovation and user experience for the library, had been posting time-lapse videos of the construction, bragging about the new surface-mounted computer they were installing in the children’s room that fit into a tabletop and had a touch screen. He also unveiled on the webpage a sweet, simple interface with their catalog, one that allowed patrons to add their own tags to the catalog (book club possibility, for instance, or social studies extra credit). The next time the patrons used the catalog, they could log in, type in book club possibility, and everything they marked with that tag would pop up.
I’d caught the anticipation and wanted to be there for the opening, but because of a glitch on their website, the old address floated on the bottom of the page with a MapQuest link to the old library. Fortunately, I found the new site on Post Road, a few blocks away, in time. I recognized the new building: red brick and glass, standing between life, in the form of a greenhouse, on one side, and death, a veterans’ cemetery, on the other—rows of headstones standing guard from the Civil War, the Spanish American War, and the World War, as the headstones read, meaning the first.
Minutes before ten, according to the big clock on the tower that rose in the middle of the building, a janitor swept the sidewalk under a blue ribbon stretched across the entrance. The 130 parking places in the back of the new library had been filled. Two policemen in knit caps and reflective gloves and vests stood by the entrance, prepared to direct the overflow. The place still had a raw construction feeling, with a pile of stones under tarp and visible edges on the squares of sod. Thirty degrees; the threat of snow was in the air this Saturday morning, January 10, 2009; nothing but bleak news from the front page to the weather forecast and the business news, especially in Darien, which BusinessWeek predicted would be the U.S. town hardest hit by the economic downturn.
And here were babies, children, teens, adults, seniors, some carrying stacks of books, crowded close and chattering and stamping their feet to keep warm in the plaza, though a few walked around to the front and, although the library hadn’t yet officially opened, stepped inside to warm up (as it turned out, part of Darien Library’s “extreme service” policy was letting people walk in anytime staff was on the premises, even when the staff was off-duty). “I was here with the senior men of Darien on Wednesday night,” the man next to me confided. “There were thirty or forty of us who came to help dust and test the automatic checkout machines—and there were still carpenters working, and shrink wrap around all the furniture. It’s really kind of miraculous.”
Then the public-address system crackled to life, and we learned how the library was founded in 1894, moving from one rented space to another for more than fifty years before it found a home on Leroy Avenue. There it had stayed for more than fifty years, until now. New libraries don’t just get built, especially during a recession. Many people toiled to make it happen, raising $24 million in the process. We cheered the leader of the capital campaign, the environmental guru who took a toxic-waste dump and turned it into an eco-friendly building site, the state official who helped cut through red tape, the architects of this quintessential New England space, impressive yet modest—just right for the times.
It was a birthday party, it turned out. An elder of the town who broke the ground for the new library, and almost single-handedly (according to Darien Library’s website) built the first library, was celebrating his ninety-first birthday. That was the entire reason, we learned, that the grand opening was scheduled for early January instead of, say, mid-June. So hundreds of us shivered and sang “Happy Birthday” to Harold W. McGraw, Jr., chairman emeritus of McGraw-Hill publishing, beaming in his wheelchair. Once in a lifetime a community builds a library, we were told. McGraw, though—he helped build two.
I was swept forward with the crush when the doors finally opened. “I think those are the architects over there by the door,” a woman next to me said, excitement in her voice, and when she finally reached them, she clasped the young men’s hands and exclaimed over the building’s beauty. They seemed almost embarrassed. “Go on in,” they told her. “It’s yours now.” In the vestibule, you could return books into a machine with a conveyer belt that pitched down into the basement and was visible through the glass: the inner workings of the library revealed, a neat touch. There was a welcoming line of librarians, some of whom I recognized from the photos on the library’s website (Erica is starting Library School this fall! She’s also a fig addict and notary. Pat is a dog lover and haunter of book shops everywhere. Ask her about the best in books on CD or Playaways). I met Louise Berry, the visionary director, and the bloggers John Blyberg and Kate Sheehan, whom I’d been following from a distance.
I’d see the library in my own time that morning: the computer center in the basement, the teen room with kids drawing on the windows with markers, the art show, and the café. Upstairs, I’d see the self-checkout machines, the open, airy reading room, the sleek auditorium and screening room, the galleys overlooking the clean, spacious, orderly stacks. Information here doesn’t seem to be exploding and out-of-control, but manageable and easy to find.
The librarians were friendly and helpful. This is your place, was the message. A child on his way to the treasure hunt in the children’s room asked if he, too, could have one of those yellow hardhats the little people seem to be wearing and the librarian reached over and handed him one. “Help yourself!” And everywhere there were nooks and crannies, café tables to sit at or lounge chairs clustered by a window; a small meeting room under the eaves; chairs by the gas fireplace. Even in that crowd, it was possible to find a quiet spot to sit down.
I was overwhelmed by all this library business. I had been stuffing more and more information into my head, some of it digested, some not. The cataloging business, for instance—oh, the cataloging books that littered my house…! That part of librarianship seemed so bloodless, but an awful lot of metaphoric blood was being shed. I just couldn’t take it in. I regretted my human form briefly; it would be so much easier to drag and drop information into the brain as neatly as one dragged and dropped information on the computer. Perhaps I was suffering from a touch of information sickness? If I could weed out my thoughts…
There was one reliable cure I’ve found, a bit of the hair of the dog—the release in reading. Not a manual: something with a narrative. A chute built by a writer and waxed until the reader fell into it and skittered right to the end without stopping. The relief of being in someone else’s hands. Yes, exactly: I needed to be under a spell.
I wandered across the austerely elegant stone floor down an aisle of newer books, and dropped onto a wood bench by a big window lit by winter light. I pulled the book closest to me off the shelf, Wild Nights! by Joyce Carol Oates, its subtitle a magnet for someone who loved old books: Stories about the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway. And I fell down that chute, while the happy crowd buzzed just beyond the stacks. “EDickinsonRepliLuxe” is as strange a story as the strange writer tells. It’s the future, perhaps the same future as in Easy Travel to Other Planets. A childless couple purchase an animatronic Emily Dickinson to live with them in their home. The creature spends most of her time hiding in her room, scribbling poems and reading, and slowly, steadily, the creepiness mounts, until the line between what we read and who we are blurs completely.
It didn’t matter who I was, or what I did, or where I paid taxes, or how long I stayed. I’m sure it didn’t matter if the book had RFID tags or a checkout card with a ladder of scrawled names, though tags were neat. I knew the librarians would help me figure out anything I needed to know later—This town is hurting economically, right? How many parking spaces in your lot? What do you call sign-making skills (wayfinding)? And which of your librarians likes figs?
I was under the librarians’ protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.
They were the authors of this opportunity—diversion from the economy and distraction from snow, protectors of the bubble of concentration I’d found in the maddening world. And I knew they wouldn’t disturb me until closing time.