love me, love my library

I love libraries. Not the most groundbreaking statement from someone working in publishing, but nonetheless true. I think I can safely say that a large part of my love of books stemmed from my childhood library.

Growing up I was very fortunate to have a library within two blocks of my house, and not just any library, a children’s library that was located in a wonderful historic house complete with its own garden. The library in many ways still felt like a home, and its two stories consisted of cozy rooms filled with wall-to-wall books. There were very few traditional library shelves – most of the books were housed on bookshelves built into the walls, with the middle of the rooms offering comfy seats for reading. It was easy for me to imagine that I was visiting a friend’s house, and my friend had told me that I could look around for as long as I wished, borrow anything I could find, and come back as often as I could.

Since the library was so close to my home, I did visit very often, sometimes 5 times a week. It was an easy stop with my parents on their daily walks, and even if I already had a stack of books checked out at home, I just loved the experience of going to the library and wandering through the rooms filled with books, settling in a corner when I found something new.

In addition to the coziness, the other very special thing about this library was that it felt like it was there just for me. Very few public places are entirely devoted to children, and at my library, I could pick out any book in the entire building to take home – there weren’t any books that I wasn’t allowed to touch or open, and no one got upset if I stacked my books too high and accidentally dropped one on the way to check them out (which happened a lot since I was constantly trying to take home more and more books and eventually succeeded in checking 50 books out at once!).

I don’t think I truly appreciated how much I loved my library until I was 9 years old and my family moved to a new town. This town was smaller and didn’t have its own library. There were two county libraries about twenty minutes away, making our trips less frequent. I liked these libraries as well, but they were different – newer buildings with large rooms, high ceilings, and long aisles filled with books, with the children’s books taking up a few shelves along with the adult titles.

But as much as I loved my first library, really, it wasn’t the building that mattered. For me, libraries took the risk out of reading. I could try anything I wanted, and if I didn’t like it, it didn’t matter – I could give that book back, pick out a new book and start reading something completely different. I was always very careful whenever I picked out books to buy, because I wanted them to be books that I loved – I would often ask for books that I had already read from the library. I could check out as many books as I could carry at once, and even if I didn't fall in love with any of those books I knew that there were many more waiting for me back at the library.

But no matter how many libraries I’ve been to, my first library will always hold a special place in my heart. I remember sitting in one of the comfy chairs reading Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and imagining what the library would look like if it was built upside-down like her house with a chandelier on the floor, or seeing a book on the way out that I just had to add to the stack that was already precariously balanced under my chin, and the anticipation I felt when I unpacked all of the books I had checked out back at home. Recently, my parents gave me a wooden figure of my childhood library. It’s now on the top of one of the bookshelves in our apartment, and I look at it often and think about the happy memories I experienced there.

A few years after we moved away, the town opened up a brand new library next door to the children’s library. Now the home that used to be the children’s library serves as the headquarters of the local historical society, and the children’s books are housed in the new library nearby. My family visited the new library a few years after it was built, and it was fun to see all of the new and improved features they offered and the new building. Of course nothing for me could ever compare to the memories I have of the old building, but I hope that by working in children’s publishing I can share a little bit of the magic I felt there, wedged in a corner with a book on my knees and a world of possibilities around me.