Laneia, Executive Editor
All of my best library memories are from any time before high school and I’m realizing now that the beauty of grade school libraries had a lot to do with the freedom inside them that you didn’t really get anywhere else. It felt like it belonged to us as much as the playground did. Early on I remember crying when our elementary school librarian, Mrs Page (so fitting), read The Velveteen Rabbit, because I’d never heard it before and I was shattered. She smiled and gave my stupid little heaving shoulders a squeeze when it was over and then suggested I check out something by Shel Silverstein. “Anything but The Giving Tree!” She was right, obviously, and she’d later introduce me to a biography on Louisa May Alcott, which kickstarted a lifetime obsession with biographies, especially the ancient copies we had at our library. I’d camp out in the corner of that section like it was my own room, usually reading the first third of the book before I’d even checked it out. And I could take up that kind of space in the biography section because no one else ever came over there, unless we had a history project.
My mom worked at the courthouse across the street from our local library, so for a couple of years it served as my very quiet, very entertaining weekday afternoon babysitter. I felt so at home at the three libraries I’d grown up in, that I was really shocked and sad when I moved to a much larger city in Florida and ended up terrified of the libraries there. I only went once during my first two years because that place was so intimidating! It had an upstairs, an electronic card catalog that I had no idea how to use, and it was so sprawling that I couldn’t figure out where anything was. I didn’t bring myself to go back until sometime around when Slade was potty trained.
Remember when you had to sign the borrowing card in the back of the book, but not before you’d read all the other names and marveled at the very first date listed? Has everyone else already said this? I miss those cards.
Maddie, Contributing Editor
I’ll have spent hours in the Vassar Library when suddenly I’ll look up and see someone disappear into a staircase and I’ll think to myself holy shit I can’t believe this is a place I get to be. The Vassar Library is one of those places that always makes the Buzzfeed list of “5 Best Libraries You Need to Pretend You’re Harry Potter In Before You Die” or whatever. It’s beautiful. Like really really beautiful. From the outside, it looks like a sort of benevolent gothic castle, and when it’s nice out, you can sit on the lawn in front of it and it just sort of smiles at you, in a you should be doing work inside of me kind of way. But it’s patient. You’ll eventually go inside, and be embraced by its stained glass, secret staircases, creaky chairs, and some pretty epic bathroom graffiti. I love the Vassar library, and as I am about to graduate, I am starting to feel incredibly nostalgic about it. The library here has been a place of solitude, where I’ve sat alone for long weekend days writing out papers left to the last minute, or spent hours pouring over the gender studies section in basement room 49. It’s also been an incredible place of community and love. I have amazing memories of staking out tables and study rooms with friends and spending long dark winter evenings writing back to back to back final papers together, every so often distracting each other with youtube videos and snacks, or adventures into forbidden corridors. There was also that one time we had a seriously epic dance party in a seminar room and probably it disturbed a lot of people even though the door was closed – SORRY. Vassar Library, it’s been real.
Maggie, “Dear Queer Diary”
When I was in college, a girl kissed me in a parking garage. Her hair smelled like Pantene, that most intoxicating of shampoos, and before I knew it, we were dating. Given that I had barely even contemplated the possibility of my own queerness before the few days immediately preceding that fateful parking garage kiss, I had a lot of questions.
The internet, which was the first port of call in my voyage of lesbian self-discovery, was too intimidating. I was terrified by the GIFs of long-haired women in various explicit poses that came up when I searched “lesbian” on Tumblr, and I was still several long and desperate months away from finding Autostraddle.com.
So I turned to the place that had always had answers for me—the place where I felt safe amidst books and shelves and the smell of dust—the place where, as a college senior engrossed in writing a bevy of long papers on English literature, I already spent most of my time anyway.
The stacks of my college library were lovely, dark and deep, so before venturing into their hallowed shelves, I assembled a short list of literary works that I might look for. I wish I could remember the exact string of searches that led me to Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue, but somehow or other, I ended up at the end of a long row somewhere on the third or fourth floor holding a small, black fabric-bound volume. Even before I read beyond the first few pages, I knew this book would not contain all the answers to my questions, but that didn’t mean that I wasn’t happy to have it.
My favorite thing about the stacks was always the stillness—the pervading chill and darkness that lingered no matter how many light switches you flipped on the way to what you were looking for. When you’ve just kissed a girl for the first time, it seems like things are changing about as fast as those lights flip on and off, so it’s nice to have some things that you can count on. If those things include cool quiet corners and four million volumes housed on sixteen floors of bookshelves, I guess you are pretty lucky.
Rachel, Senior Editor
I basically came into the world via being found under a cabbage leaf in a library. Specifically, the East Boxford Library in the tiny town that I grew up in. I rode my bike there with my brother when I was a young kid; I volunteered there stamping due dates when I was 10; I worked there as an employee (“checkout desk assistant,” I believe was my title) when I was in high school. My relationship with that library lasted longer than my relationships with most people. I met incredible people there — my 65-year-old coworker who came to work at the checkout desk every day despite tragic deaths in her family, and even found time to teach me a short-row technique for knitting socks. Bill, the elderly man who biked to the library every day, a rearview mirror clipped to the side of his helmet. Maybe more importantly, though, I got to understand the anatomy of the person that was the library itself.
How books flowed in and out like blood in the arms of people I knew; how it formed a sort of cerebral cortex when it housed readings, book signings, educational events for kids. How in a lot of ways, the library was the heart of the town itself — especially for people who were poor or otherwise marginalized. I watched people use our computers to search for jobs, or find information about the homes they had emigrated away from. We provided information on taxes, voting, and more to people who didn’t know how to figure them out any other way.
Today, I still feel like a small-town public library was one of the most important things I’ve ever been a part of — and when I hear news from my hometown about funding cuts or referendums to divert funding, I get worried. It’s easy for people who have internet access and Spotify and Amazon Prime and disposable income to feel uninvested in public libraries, because they don’t need them. But knowledge (and culture, in the form of books and music and films), especially basic knowledge about the world we live in, shouldn’t be accessible only to those who can afford it, and I’m proud that my public library was a force for good in keeping that from happening.
Intern Liz
I’ve always loved libraries, and I’ve always had very fond memories of my local library growing up. When I saw Arthur and friends get library cards, I was super excited to get my one of my own. I think my favorite library experience was definitely Battle of the Books. I’d like to think that every library has this wonderful program, but for the unfamiliar, BOTB is basically like Jeopardy for young adult books. We read 12 books over the summer, practiced with trivia questions every week, and duked it out with other libraries in a county-wide battle. It was intense. There were costumes, ridiculous team names (my favorite was the year we were Yoda’s Army of Undead Ninja Pirates), and tons of fun. As I got older, I did the Battle of the Books Advanced Division, and coached the littler kids’ team. It was the most wonderful way to combine my loves of books and trivia and friendship. Plus, I will never forget that Trudy wore Heavenly Heliotrope eyeshadow in Gordon Korman’s No More Dead Dogs.
Audrey, Contributing Editor
The Montessori School where I attended from pre-k through 8th grade was my source of knowledge and joy as a kid. I would sit for hours in the St. Alcuin Montessori School Library and read random entries in the World Books and finding answers to life’s greatest mysteries in the unabridged dictionary. It was Montessori, so we could do those sorts of things. The librarians always pushed me to stretch my mind and imagination, and they were equally happy giving me recommendations related to A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and Matt Christopher’s sports chapter books. In my dream universe, every kid has this kind of library at their elementary school.
Riese, Editor-in-Chief
I. I grew up in the library. I liked the Ann Arbor Public Library the best, the big one downtown with four floors and an enormous children’s and YA section. There was another branch closer to home that we usually visited, in the Westgate Mall right by Barry’s Bagels, but it was smaller than the Main Branch on 5th Avenue. Going to the main branch was an extra-special treat, is what I’m telling you. I always picked out too many books. I really wanted to read all of them, like every book in the universe, before I knew how big the universe was. Then my Mom would take me to Afternoon Delight around the corner, and I’d stack my books on the table so I could fantasize about them while enjoying my Bonanza Bagel (peanut butter and bananas on a raisin bagel, drizzled with honey). It was my favorite place in the world, the library. They had these Summer Reading Club Challenges. We signed up and got our stamps. That was a contest I could win.
II. In boarding school upstate our own library was lacking, but sometimes we could talk a teacher into taking us to the Traverse Area Library, which was big and so peaceful in the middle of the school day. During the one semester I attended Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville, I spent most of my time in the Sarah Lawrence Library, working. I was dazzled by their resources and their bean-bag chairs, and by the stories my gay best friend told me about having sex in the study rooms. At Michigan, the library (called the UGLI) was such a scene sometimes, it was hard to concentrate, but I found pockets where I could escape. In New York I tried to check books out at the Bryant Park branch but it turns out you can’t do that. There was the summer I was too agoraphobic to really go anywhere, ever, except the Harlem Branch. Now I go to the library in Berkeley, because it reminds me of Ann Arbor.
III. In 2006, my then-sorta-girlfriend was performing on an R-Family Cruise to Alaska that left out of Seattle, and brought me along. It was a big deal, this cruise, because it was the first homonormative environment I’d ever been in and the first place I felt like I could wear a dress and still be read as queer. Returning to earth was a punch in the gut, really. But before flying back to New York I had an entire day in Seattle, so I went to the library. I’m telling you this story because somebody needs to talk about how wonderful the Seattle Library is, but also because it was the first time I went to a place that had a queer section and didn’t feel strangely ashamed to be standing in it. See, I’d always felt weird standing in front of the lesbian movies at Kim’s, or the lesbian books at Barnes & Noble, or the LGBTQ section of the library. But not anymore. I’d shuffle quickly to the side, where the Feminist books were, because that seemed like a better place to be seen. But after feeling so free and open on the cruise, it wasn’t an issue. In the Seattle Public Library, I finally felt free, and at home.
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