October 27, 2007

PUBLISHER'S COLUMN: The hidden secrets of the library

By STEPHEN TROSLEY

The Lena Public Library presents itself as a functional if modest facility, parked inconspicuously in a quiet residential neighborhood.

But that makes it like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates: You never know what you're going to get but you always know that chocolate rarely disappoints.

There's an entire generation of young Americans who don't realize that browsing doesn't necessarily require gigabytes and broadband. I usually have something in mind when I visit a library but I usually leave with something else - even if I find the something I had in mind.

The joy of a library is in the discovery. You search for something by an author and find any number of his or her works, many of which you knew nothing about. Or you search for something by topic and find numerous works on that topic by any number of different authors.

My first visit to a university library offered a life experience akin to my first visit to a California winery. Where to start? What is this? What is that? Of course, the winery doesn't let you borrow a bottle for a few weeks to see if you like it or not - unenlightened, wouldn't you agree?

The library in my hometown was designed by a classmate's architect-father and was our refuge from the thick, polluted summertime atmosphere of our American Bottoms city. It was air conditioned and full of books to read about our favorite pastimes of the period: baseball, fighter airplanes and baseball.

This is where I discovered that C.S. Forrester had authored more than just the "Horatio Hornblower" series. Also, it's where I discovered the sportswriting of Heywood Hale Broun and the humor of Art Buchwald and Jimmy Breslin. You could fill the entire 7th and 8th grade reading lists there and in those days, those lists were long.

Freeport's library boasts a fascinating collection and pleasant, comfortable surroundings, not to mention a caf/. I would have been happy with clean restrooms alone. I've already read through its collection on the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, which should get a workout in the coming sesquicentennial year.

We've lived in a lot of towns and cities and all of them have libraries. We often get a library card even before we get a new state driver's license. Well, the test is easier, don't you know.

The great pleasure of a library like the one in a village like Lena - where Linda and I spent a couple of hours on a recent Saturday - is that they don't turn their collection over as often as the bigger libraries. You can find a lot of old books from the time when bindings were as much a work of art as the writing inside. It's sort of like comparing the cover art on a CD to the cover art on the old LP stereo record albums. The difference is spectacular. I guess those things don't matter to the younger set but they really don't know what they're missing. One of my students at Cal State Fullerton told me she only went to Barnes and Noble (which is what a library would look like if it was a commercial enterprise) for the mocha latte.

Libraries can also be sad. Linda used to go to a hair stylist in the Los Angeles County community of Rowland Heights when we lived in Upland, California. I would brave the rigors of driving the freeway toward central L.A. so she could visit one particular stylist. This is not a criticism as it is simply a gender imperative, although I eventually used the same stylist to cut my wiry Southern Mediterranean hair, which was still black in those days. While she was being coifed, I would hit the nearby doughnut shop and then head to the L.A. County branch library. The place was always so full you had to step over bodies of kids everywhere pouring over books.

What was sad - and not for them - was that they were all Asians. They valued the materials available to them while their so-called All-American counterparts were involved in other activities - or more likely, other inactivities.