Love of the Library

As you can probably tell by the title I’m going to write yet another “I love” post. Yes, I do write a lot of those, don’t I? But it’s so much fun writing about things you love and enjoy. It’s so lovely looking at the world and bits of your life and picking out things you love especially well as your topic for a post or two. It’s like counting your blessings and then writing about them, which I love. So many times we overlook our little blessings, the little happiness’ that make life such a beautiful thing, and writing blog posts on them helps you focus in on them I think. It helps you appreciate them and realize how blessed we really are. If you’re looking around at daily happenings in your life as possible blog post topics you are suddenly aware of how much you love these things that you are writing about. I write numberless blog posts in my head. Much more than I actually sit down and write. I’ll look at something and in my head start writing the beginning of a blog post about that thing, and they are lovely posts, but you see I always forget to actually write out those blog posts so they go bouncing and spinning away from me across the horizon. I am much too distractible you know. For when I sit down at my laptop, as I am now, I forget all about those lovely already-written-in-my-head blog posts and my fingers go pattering along on some other previously unthought-of strain of thought.

Now, I will be wandering altogether too far away from the point of discussion if I continue much longer on this stain, much as I would like to. One of my “in my head blog posts” was a blog post I often think of when I’m working. I work at the library, did you know that? Well, as I go around with my cart of books, lovingly putting the dear things in their proper places on the shelves I often think of a blog post just on how much I love the library. This blog post has many beginnings, many different turns and twists as I rethink it in my different moods in the different days. Most often it begins just as I’m beginning work for the afternoon and I’m feeling quite chipper and so happy with my little duties. I love starting work in the afternoon, I love putting those books down on my cart and alphabetizing them and that warm happy feeling of perfect happiness for no real reason at all. Just being happy.

A lot of people don’t like working in the children’s room, that’s because out of all the library (of course) it gets the most disorderly and messy. All of the children coming in and pulling out picture books and shoving them back in with grubby little paws. I used to not like that room quite as well because of that, but recently I’ve been falling more and more in love with the children’s room. Maybe it’s because all of my old friends are in there. All of those books I remember pulling out and sitting on the floor browsing through. I love watching the kids come in and browse around in the books. You can always tell the ones who love the books. There are a few who irritate me, these children always go instantly to the computers, yes, these ones are the trouble makers, but the book lovers, oh I love those little dears! The go quietly through the shelves with small fingers touching each spine. They get out great stacks, books of all different sorts and shapes, picture books, fiction, nonfiction, comics, but always great stacks of them and they sit down at the tables and rifle through them. Yes, they leave rather a mess for me to tidy up but it makes me happy to put away the books that they were looking through and reading at those tables.

I love looking up from my cart of book and hearing the little girl in the corner break out into a happy giggle at some funny part in her book. I love listening to the Mother sitting on the couch reading a picture book to her little boy cuddled into her side. I love the little boy who comes and tugs on my sleeve and asks “where are the books on dragons?” I love the sisters browsing through the books, the older poking the younger and saying “get this one! This one’s good!” and I love that I get to set out my favorites on display. I get to pick out the books that I remember loving and setting them up so that they gleam alluringly from the top of the shelves, saying “read me! Read me!”

I love people who read.

Read for real, you know. Not the people who say they read, but the people who are so busy with their nose in a book to even speak up and say they love to read. I love the rustling of many pages of the books as you pass the chairs set up in comfy hidden nooks of the library. I get rather excited when I see a person with a book I love in their hand. I was to cry out “THE EMERALD CITY OF OZ! YES! YES! READ!” and start bouncing up and down as I hug that beloved book. Or say “*gentle cough* I would go to the Jane Austen section if I were you. Oh and ignore that random zombie one that’s stuffed in there. *voice drops to a whisper* that one’s a phony. Trust me. It’s not hers. You’ll see the difference.” The impulse to kneel down by the young reader in the learn to read books and say “I always loved Amelia Bedelia. She’s over here,” grows almost irresistible.

I love the quiet atmosphere of the library as I work. Now I don’t even have to think about alphabetizing the books, it just comes naturally. I can get lost in my thoughts and look down and find out that all those picture books are sorted neatly from A to Z. I also just like the feel of the books themselves, because I love books. Someone was saying the other day how they didn’t really like touching the books, but I rather like thinking of all the different hands turning the pages to those books you know. Not that because of that I don’t wash my hand regularly while handling those books, I do, but the thought of the hands holding the books rather makes me happy than disturbs me like it does some.

I think my very favorite thing to do though is pulling off the hold requests from the shelves. Especially the ones that are being sent inter-library-loan to another library somewhere. I love thinking that the book I’m holding in my hands will soon be traveling across country, on a long journey with a little yellow slip saying it’s from my library, and that pretty soon some person will be coming to take that book home with them. I love imagining what sort of person is going to be getting that book. Imagining their appearance to go along with their personality, as I get rather a glimpse of that from the books they are requesting. The sort of book a person gets says a lot about them *nods* you get just a hint of what they are like and a glimpse of their personality. Yes, I love thinking about all these things as I hold the picture book with golden leaves covering the cover. Where will that book end up before it travels back to me? I wonder.

That’s all for now. I do believe I have said “I love” rather more even than I expected to when I began this post, but it’s true. I do love all of those things, and I’m quite happy thinking about all of them now.