I can't remember a time when I wasn't at home in a library. Although very much a schoolyard urchin, passionate about baseball, trading cards and punchball (or any kind of game played with a spaldeen), I rarely failed my weekly trip to the storefront Avenue J branch of the BPL, where there were cases upon half-height cases of juvenile and later "young adult" books. I read like a hungry larva, without direction or discrimination. A few years later, when I reached Erasmus Hall, my after-school employment was to shelve books at 75 cents an hour at the BPL branch at McDonald Avenue (accumulating the $900 which paid my full first-year tuition at Cornell). I not only mastered the Dewey Decimal System but also absorbed everything that the library had to offer in the 612.6 area of knowledge. At college, I was dazzled by McGraw, my first real library. In my senior year, I was granted a stack pass, and therefore was able to waste many hours not only in aimless browsing, but also lolling in long by-passed and superseded libraries-within-the-library. I doubt that those most pleasant out-of-the-way nineteenth-century nooks and corners survived modernization, more's the pity. Later, in Cambridge, it was first Widener (where genuine incunabula sat unprotected on the shelves), then Houghton, my first experience with rare books, which, I discovered, are to be savored not only with the eyes, but with the fingertips and the nose. Thence to Colorado, where, without the resources of a major library, I dutifully read STC books on microfilm -- which made me queasy, or on microfiche -- which produced genuine nausea. In 1976-77, I spent one day a week at the British Library, studying sometimes in the old circular reading room, where on downpour days buckets were distributed around the room to deal with the leaks, and at other times in the North Library, where I read big hunks of the perpetually exciting Thomason Tracts. In the early 80s, I was able to enjoy the Huntington in San Marino, where the highlight of the day was lunchtime among the exotic cacti and succulents. Later, at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, I found not only an unequalled trove of books and mss., but also camaraderie with similarly-obsessed specialists. There was always someone who could answer the obscurest of questions, and there were even a few times when I was able to return the favor. At a cafeteria lunch, once, I asked (faux-naively) "what do we do with the orts?" and everyone at the table knew exactly what I meant -- orts the word that Shakespeare used in Troilus and Cressida to refer to the uneaten portions of a meal.
Now I've come full circle and the Boulder Public is my three-times-a-week destination. Not great holdings, but through the miracle of an efficient interlibrary loan system, and supplemented by googlebooks and other electronic resources, I can find enough to satisfy my unsteady, dilettante brain.
Library book sales can be disastrous if you are addicted to books and don't have the space to accommodate them.
Posted by: Don Z. Block | March 28, 2021 at 04:17 PM