My mother was a librarian. She was a private librarian.
Our book collection grew during my life and she would always know something around the house that I hadn’t read. I grew up browsing shelves in our back hallway—science fiction, mysteries, old college textbooks my older siblings abandoned at home. Odd bestsellers. Funny children’s books. Comics.
We kept our comics on a special shelf and we also kept MAD magazine. When I was very small, the minister's son came down with measles, so we loaned him stacks of comics. I could always tell the ones we’d loaned out—my mother had written our last initial on them in purple magic marker.
My mother deferred to the town librarian, then a very dignified woman named Virginia Hamilton, with a deep vibrato voice and a refined drawl she'd brought from out East. Our town had a brick Carnegie Library—one of those all-American Temples of Learning. You climbed up cement steps to the big glass front door. Inside, you climbed steeper wooden stairs to the Main Floor or went down to the basement rooms, where the Girl Scouts and AA had their meetings.
You entered the Main Floor through another glass doorway. The Library Proper was one room with tall ceilings and windows over the tops of the wooden bookshelves. It was never sunny and never dark. I’m sure that lamps hung from the ceiling. A few narrow windows were set in the outside wall between bookcases, over over radiators that hissed and rattled in the winter. You would glimpse the outside world as you moved around the collection.
Mrs. Hamilton sat at a wide built-in oak desk in front of her glassed-in office. Over the door to the office was a portrait of Carnegie, Saint of American Libraries. On one side was the card catalog, a rather petite set of drawers.
The Librarian Office was wonderful, square with a daybed and black afghan for the middle of the day nap that her job afforded her. There was a chair or two and another oak desk. A coatrack was provided. There was a sink with a mirror over it. Books lay around in sorted piles.
The Library Desk was a wonder. This oak structure was deep and wide. The Librarian sat behind its compartments built into the top and wide flat wings for books to sit as they were checked in or out. Slots in the top held library cards and the cards for checked-out books. There were the rubber date stamps to stamp each book’s due date on a card.
Each library card stayed at the library and you gave your number to check out books. Your library card would be filed with cards from the books. Each checked out book had a card in the pocket with a date due slip.
Thunk, thunk.
That was the sound of books being checked out--the rubber stamps hitting the cards on the desk.
There were only books. A few magazines were for library reading. My mother and her friends rented bestsellers from a high shelf in the adult half.
I was happy to check out picture books from the wide u-shaped children’s shelves. Behind and on the walls around it were the juvenile books. Most of the books were old and a little shabby.
In those days, bookstores sold a few children’s books. They were special gifts at Christmas and birthdays and usually only for well-off families. Just kids had comic books from drugstores, grocery stores, gas stations. There were Little Golden Books all over.
Children's books relied on libraries.
You could talk to the librarian about the book. If you liked it. If she liked it.
I used to argue for purchasing the Oz books for the library. Apparently, some librarians felt that they were trashy series books. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were purchased and grew shabby. Mrs. Hamilton told me that the old folks home residents loved reading Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, since they remembered the books. My poor mother was forced to buy me the Oz books in their wonderful hardback Reilly & Lee bindings.
National Library Week meant brightly colored bookmarks.
Summer Reading Program meant that you had a sheet on which to record your books. If you read ten books, you would receive the dime that the Chamber of Commerce had donated to reward your efforts. The dime was to be spent at the Dairy Queen on an ice cream cone. There was a law, I guess, that you had to spend the dime at the Dairy Queen.
There were occasionally new books on the wide oaken library tables. I remember our school class visiting the library and Mrs. Hamilton explaining how library cards worked and that children could borrow books from the library and she showed off some new books.
I was surprised that the other kids didn’t get wildly excited about borrowing books from the library.
Fines were five or ten cents a day. They were a mark of shame. Renewing a book was also slightly questionable—since you had had two weeks to read it. It was better to turn in the book and then check it out again a week later.
There were times when my mother was out of town and I would be sent to the library to stay until someone retrieved me. This didn’t happen that often. When I was six or seven my ideas of polite conversation were very primitive, "Do you want to hear me sing?" No. "Do you want to see me dance?"
Eventually I was able to visit the adult side without my mother being present as chaperone. This side seemed unbelieveably dull. In high school, I read Thomas Wolfe books that had been considered racy by the librarian before Mrs. Hamilton. And those librarians believed in banning books.
The AngelYou Can’t Go Home Again and Look Homeward Angel seem to have vanished back into the earth. Novels that had arrived at the publisher in crates and been relentlessly hacked and edited into literary esteem by a legendary editor.
The lights of New York City and Paris. Affairs. Souls. Culture.
the home he couldn't go back to How slow life was.
How sweet to read a book from that library that had been set in cold type, printed on acidy paper, sewn into a binding and lovingly covered in a paper jacket. Books selected from printed catalogs and newspaper book reviews.
cold typebookbinding
Authors who taught college courses and lived in New England or England wearing jackets with leather patches (male) or black dresses with pearls around their necks (female).
Librarians in girdles and stockings and sensible shoes with costume jewelry covering their massive bosoms and creaking in oak desk chairs already a generation old.
Dim, silent high school girls who worked/volunteered as pages in the library, shelving books in Dewey Decimal order and straightening the magazines.
The lights in the library shining out the windows in the early evening.
The sound of the feet on the stairs. The thud thud thud of mothers and the think think think of small children’s feet. The solid mass of the square newel at the top of the stair—where you put your hand because you were slightly out of breath from the climb.
Eager to enter the Library.
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Comments
This post was like a hug from my childhood. I have such deep rooted, wonderful memories of countless days lost in the stacks of our little town library. Each Saturday morning my friend and I would ride our bikes to the library and check out as many books as would fit in the tassled baskets on our bicycles. Thanks for taking me down memory lane....
I forgot about the thunk of the rubber stamp. And I still am nostalgic for anything that resembles a card catalog. Librarians are awesome people.
This is wonderful.
... the think think think of small children's feet ...
Beautifully observed and a joy to read - thank you.
... the think think think of small children's feet ...
Beautifully observed and a joy to read - thank you.
It was the place where dreams began.
Thanks for coming by.
In my case it wasn't the "Truth" that set me free but the library card that to a lonely and fearful child held the promise of the possibility of "Truth".
(R)ated for recalliung the smell of musty racks of books to my mind.
(R)ated for recalliung the smell of musty racks of books to my mind.
I love the way you evoked the Carnegie buildings and typesetting (can you explain the distinction between hot and cold type?), and all that can seem so magical to a bookish child. Rated.
An evocative post, nolalibrarian. Much of what you write strikes a chord with me: the boringness of the adult side of the library, the shame of library fines, and the sense of awe some children have about the front desk. Thanks.
Cold type is the Gutenberg method. There are ready-made type blocks for each letter or space, uppercase letter, punctuation mark, symbol, etc. These are placed in racks and the racks connected and the paper and ink are applied and the sheet of paper receives the ink in the form of the words. One of the great tricks is that it is all done backwards!!!!!! Hot type was an improvement, in which typesetters typed the page into a machine and the hot lead was molded into the form of the letters and sheet. I guess the lead could then be melted down and used again. Nowadays lasers and silicon chips take care of all this. That $79 color printer next to your computer is a magical thing!
I grew up with a library similar to this, except mine wouldn't let me donate my Nancy Drews when I was done with them. And after I read the 10 books for the summer I got stickers. If the summer theme was the globe, I got a sticker on a world map in each country for which I read a book. If the theme was time, I got stickers in centuries on a time line. I loved my librarian because she could find books on almost any topic I asked for. I spent one summer fascinated with deep sea pearl diving.
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