Overdue Gratitude
At a library, books are free, people are learned, and the reference desk is more pleasant than Google.
By Philip Gulley
This fall, I traveled south to speak at two libraries, one in Tennessee and one in Kentucky. I speak in a number of settings, but I enjoy libraries most of all. People are there because they want to be, not because their bosses made them go to a convention. At libraries, no one critiques my religious views or asks me what I’ve written and then says “Never heard of it” when I tell them. They are there because they like books, or even like my books. Or so they tell me. Book-lovers are notoriously polite, even to the point of lying to make you feel good.
There are, according to the American Library Association, 122,356 libraries in the United States. Of those, 16,604 are municipal public libraries. The rest are of the school, college, law, medical, military, government, corporate, and religious sort. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has 160 school libraries. After annihilating a race of people, it was the least we could do to build them some places to house books. I have visited roughly 200 libraries in the past 13 years and can report that there is a no-nonsense librarian in each of them, shushing unruly patrons so that the rest of us can read in peace and quiet.
The first library in America was established in 1638 in Boston. The first overdue library book was three weeks later. In 1903, the folks in my hometown of Danville got on the stick and built a library at the corner of Marion and Indiana streets, where it still presides, a beacon of literacy. It was funded by a $10,000 grant from Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, who footed the bill for 165 public libraries in Indiana. Of the public library, Andrew Carnegie said, “There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.”
Miss Cox was the children’s librarian at the Danville library during my childhood. She not only didn’t show consideration to those of rank, office, or wealth, she struck the fear of God in us commoners, too. Perched on a stool behind the counter, she would fix patrons with a calculating gaze when they entered, assessing their worthiness, separating the illiterate chaff from the learned wheat.
