TITLE: I Was a Library Kid, Too AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: April 19, 2020 4:10 PM DESC: ----- BODY: Early in this Paris Review interview, Ray Bradbury says, "A conglomerate heap of trash, that's what I am." I smiled, because that's what I feel like sometimes, both culturally and academically. Later he confessed something that sealed my sense of kinship with him:
I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt.
the bookshelf in my home office
I was a library kid, too. I owned a few books, but I looked forward to every chance we had to go to the library. My grade school had books in every classroom, and my teachers shared their personal books with those of us who so clearly loved to read. Eventually my mom took me and my siblings to the Marion County public to get a library card, and the world of books available seemed limitless. When I got to high school, I spent free time before and after classes wandering the stacks, discovering science fiction, Vonnegut and Kafka and Voltaire, science and history. The school librarian got used to finding me in the aisles at times. She became as much a friend as any high school teacher could. So many of my friends have shelves and shelves of books; they talk about their addiction to Amazon and independent bookstores. But almost all of the books I have at home fit in a single bookshelf (at right). One of them is Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, which I discovered in high school. I do have a small chess library on another shelf across the room and a few sports books, most from childhood, piled nearby. I tried to get rid of the sports books once, in a fit of Marie Kondo-esque de-cluttering, but I just couldn't. Even I have an attachment to the books I own. Having so few, perhaps my attraction is even stronger than it might otherwise be, subject to some cosmic inverse square law of bibliophilia. At my office, I do have two walls full of books, mostly textbooks accumulated over my years as a professor. When I retire, though, I'll keep only one bookcase full of those -- a few undergrad CS texts, yes, but mostly books I purchased because they meant something to me. Gödel, Escher, Bach. Metamagical Themas. Models of My Life. A few books about AI. These are books that helped me find me. After high school, I was fortunate to spend a decade in college as an undergraduate and grad student. I would not trade those years for anything; I learned a lot, made friends with whom I remain close, and grew up. Bradbury, though, continued his life as an autodidact, going to the public library three nights a week for a decade, until he got married.
So I graduated from the library, when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.
Even though I spent a decade as a student in college and now am a university prof, the library remains my second home. I rarely buy books to this day; I don't remember my last purchase. The university library is next to my office building, and I make frequent trips over in the afternoons. They give me a break from work and a chance to pick up my next read. I usually spend a lot more time there than necessary, wandering the stacks and exploring. I guess I'm still a library kid. -----