Biblio tech

I’ve been spending most of my time this past week reading; I tore through an entire book yesterday, stopping only to go to Fercott and play games for an hour and a half (Lamb by Christopher Moore, which was very good), and this weekend I read both collected volumes of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, 800+ pages of manga that completely entranced me the whole way through.  I currently have a pair of teetering stacks on my sofa, waiting to be read.

And they’re all from the library.

I think that, at least here in the US, there is a common… not disrespect, necessarily, but intentional devaluing of the services that libraries provide, particularly among those that consider themselves “middle class.”  Even I have gone in and out of heavy usage periods with local libraries, and the general not-really-logic over the years has often been something like:

• I have a job that makes pretty decent money.
• Books are really nice objects.
• I know the library has most of the books I want, but not all of them…
• …and I can afford to buy books.
• And then they’re mine.  Mine!  For all eternity.
• So I should buy my books.

Up until that last point, there’s really nothing particularly flawed with that reasoning.  But that last step is not all that far removed from the old “then a miracle occurs” comic strip.  While it’s absolutely true that any reasonable rate of book collection is unlikely to bankrupt someone of even modest means, it’s also almost always unnecessary.

The big reason is utility: if you buy a book, read it once, then put it on a shelf, what exactly is that book doing for you the other 99.995% of its lifetime?  Nothing, really.  And don’t get me wrong, a lot of the books on the shelves of a modern library don’t get checked out very often… but that’s still a lot more utility than the ones sitting dusty in the far corner of your bedroom.

There are others, too; inter-library loan, or things like the Cardinal system here in North Carolina, can get you the books that your local library doesn’t have.  And libraries have a ton of other things besides, DVDs and CDs and paintings and public computers and sometimes even board games and video games.  But I think that libraries also often have a whiff of the desperate, the needy, the plebeian, that a certain middle class mentality frowns upon.  “That’s nice,” it proposes, “but not for me.  It’s for other, less well-to-do people, and students.”

Well… no.  You pay for your local library with taxes.  You should use the hell out of your local library.

I’ve made it an intentional habit that, whenever I put a book on hold (which is often) and go into the library to pick it up, I also browse the New Book shelf and the science fiction section.  Librarians will almost always have some books on those little display rack things, and I end up picking up one or two or five of those because they look interesting; the last time I went to the library I picked up my one on-hold book and nine others I had never even heard of.  And you know what?  Some of my best recent reads came from that sort of random browsing.  I just finished a book called The Comedown that was a solid bit of modern literary fiction… and a book I would have never read “on my own,” because it’s in a genre I pay basically no attention to.  But it was on the New Book rack, I took a chance on it, and that chance paid off.

That’s not to say that I never buy books any more.  There are a couple of authors (Scalzi, Stross) whose books I still preorder as sort of a vestigial “I really like them and want to support them” thing.  And sometimes someone recommends a book to me, I poke around on Cardinal and see no live copies, and so I pick up one used on Amazon for $5.  But I try to keep that all to a minimum; my house is already way too cluttered with board games to make a whole bunch of room for more books, and the vast majority of what I want can be found at the library anyhow.  I was the first person to get Stephen King’s most recent book (The Outsider, which was quite a delightful read) at the local library, and I got it maybe a week after it came out.  Not exactly long-delayed gratification.

Now, I know I’m a partisan.  I was on the Board for the local library until politics drove me off, after all!  But even if you’re not as passionate about libraries as I am, the next time you think about placing an order on Amazon for a book you’re likely to only read once, think: couldn’t I just pick this up from the library?

And maybe you’ll find some other life-changing book waiting for you on one of those little racks when you do.