On libraries
"After three days without reading, talk becomes flavorless". (Chinese proverb)
I was thinking about libraries today. The first place I worked in Sydney was in a very modern high-rise building with polished marble floors and columns, shining metal, mirrors and daunting furnishings. As a junior, I walked through timidly, feeling very intimidated and frightened by my surroundings. As time passed, I barely even noticed the opulence and forgot those feelings of uncertainty and unease.
winterspel mentioned libraries to me today and I suddenly remembered the library at my old work. It was on level 23 and took up one whole side of the floor. The windows were huge and looked out upon Sydney Harbour - providing an absolutely glorious view of not only the harbour, but Sydney itself and the blueness of the sky. There were tables where you could work and almost all of the librarians were as friendly and helpful as they were polite.
I was just remembering that when I was a junior, I used to use the library as a haven of sorts. If things got too much to bear, I would walk up the stairs or catch the lift up to level 23. Sometimes it was just to hide out for a little while - to give myself a few moments to catch a quiet breath in the midst of a stressful and panicked day. Sometimes it was because the librarians were always a good first port of call for research - finding articles, retrieving books ....... The library had hard copy books but also had the CD-ROM collections with databases of material, they were able to borrow books from other firms, from the courts and they were always really nice to me.
A few years later, they scaled the library down - made it one half of its original size. The rationale was that all operatives now had computers that had full access to the Internet, to the catalogues, to the databases. Online research materials on our computer desktops meant that we no longer needed to make the trip to level 23 to go to the library. I thought about it and wondered if this was true. Was it really that we had no more need or simply that we had no more time. Work had become so frantic and stressful that the walk to the library, briefing the librarian and waiting for the results was a luxury that was no longer possible. Deadlines and workload pushed us to remain in our own offices longer and not stray further afield. My research skills weren't a substitute of the expertise and experience possessed by the librarians. Furthermore, sometimes it was far more sensible and efficient for them to be doing the research and chasing down. I confess while it's convenient to be able to click a button on the Intranet to reserve a book, there's something very clinical and anonymous about it. For me it's no substitute to having a chat with the librarian about the day as you're borrowing something or looking for an article.
Then I thought about libraries outside a work context. They tell me that libraries are losing popularity - less people borrow books. Does this mean people are reading less? I thought about things from my own point of view. When I was little, I adored libraries. I still adore them - I loved going into them, browsing, I loved borrowing, reborrowing when I loved a book. I didn't enjoy the late fines, though. I have to say, I was rather amused when I read the Letters of Tolkien in which he complained about a letter he had received from a fan. The fan told him he was an ardent admirer and had borrowed The Lord of the Rings from his local library many times. Rather than being flattered, Tolkien was professed himself irritated at the stinginess of the fan - depriving him of royalties by borrowing the same book many times instead of just buying his own copy :) Poor fan.
When I was little, we were very poor so I didn't own many books. I haunted the library every weekend, after school, during lunch times - devouring whatever I could. It was a cheap childcare centre as well - my parents would drop me off there and I would happily while away many hours.
These days, I tend to buy my own books and occasionally download them. Partly it's because I like to own the books that I loved but used to have to return when I was wee koala. Partly it's because I like to own books when I like them, but I suppose that it is also because of time pressures. With work commitments, these days I cannot guarantee that I'll be able to return the book in time. Late fines and also depriving others of a book aren't ideal so buying a book is often the easy solution. For me, this doesn't in any way mean that my love or even need for a library is lessened. Some of my fondest memories are sitting in one of Canberra's public libraries reading a book, or even in the National Library of Australia. You can't borrow books from the National Library of Australia except in special circumstances but it has all books ever published in Australia and there's something very thrilling about the thought of having all that knowledge at the tips of your fingers - accessible by merely filling in a library slip.
When I was at uni, I enjoyed the Menzies and Chifley libraries on campus which contained a huge array of literature in different languages as well as amazing reference books. The advantage of a library is that if you don't like the book, you return it. You haven't wasted your money buying a book you don't want.
After I mulled about it a bit longer, I've decided that even though I haven't conducted any statistical studies or surveys about why people don't use libraries so much anymore, my view is that we have become a little more spoiled and lazy. Information and convenience at our fingertips is what we crave. I think that this is a shame. It was a library that made me discover my love of LM Montgomery books. One weekend, I was looking for a book to read, the librarian pointed out a table with an Anne of Green Gables display - an Anne doll, various Anne books and suggested that I read them.
There was also something fun about hovering around the book trolley where the librarian was trying to reshelve books that had just been borrowed. For some reason those books held a certain allure that the books on the shelves didn't have. I walk through the library these days and they are increasingly automated. You can reserve books by clicking a button on the catalogue. You can check-out your own books with a scanner and bypass the person at the front desk altogether. To be honest, I rather enjoy that process: "Oh that's a good book - if you like this one you might also like a book by so and so".
I'm sentimentally attached to libraries and it makes me rather sad to think of their decline in popularity.
I suppose it's lucky my new workplace doesn't have a library - I'd probably be hiding in a corner somewhere most of the time .... :)
Quotes about books and reading
When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.
- Desiderius Erasmus
To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul (alternative: A room without books is like a body without a soul).
- Cicero (attributed)
I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.
- Alexander Smith
No furniture so charming as books.
- Sydney Smith
Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.
- Lady Bird Johnson
A library is thought in cold storage.
- Herbert Samuel
Libraries are not made; they grow.
- Augustine Birrell
Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.
- Augustine Birrell
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
- Barbara Tuchman
Your library is your portrait.
- Holbrook Jackson
Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me,
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.
- Shakespeare, The Tempest
Life is like a library owned by an author. In it are a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him.
- Harry Emerson Fosdick
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
- Logan Pearsall Smith
What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists.
- Archibald MacLeish, "The Premise of Meaning," American Scholar, 5 June 1972
The best of my education has come from the public library... my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents a day for an overdue book. You don't need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library.
- Lesley Conger
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.
- Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.
- Erma Bombeck
We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.
- John Lubbock
My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
- Cicero
A great library contains the diary of the human race.
- George Mercer Dawson
I love the place; the magnificent books; I require books as I require air.
- Sholem Asch
The richest person in the world - in fact all the riches in the world - couldn't provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library.
- Malcolm Forbes
My books are very few, but then the world is before me - a library open to all - from which poverty of purse cannot exclude me - in which the meanest and most paltry volume is sure to furnish something to amuse, if not to instruct and improve.
- Joseph Howe, 1824
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
- Jorge Luis Borges
A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.
- Jo Godwin
For him that stealeth a Book from this Library, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with Palsy, and all his Members blasted. Let him languish in Pain crying aloud for Mercy and let there be no sur-cease to his Agony till he sink in Dissolution. Let Bookworms gnaw his Entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final Punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever and aye.
- Curse Against Book Stealers, Monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona
A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.
- Shelby Foote
Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.
- Germaine Greer
There are 70 million books in American libraries, but the one I want to read is always out.
- Tom Masson
Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.
- Richard Powers
The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Nutrimentum spiritus (food for the soul).
- Berlin Royal Library, inscription
Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
- Austin Phelps
I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage.
- Charles De Secondat (1689 - 1755)
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.
- Charles W. Eliot (1834 - 1926), The Happy Life, 1896
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
- Christopher Morley (1890 - 1957)
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
- Dorothy Parker (1893 - 1967)
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
- G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)
From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.
- Groucho Marx (1890 - 1977)
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
- Henry Ward Beecher (1813 - 1887)
“A book is a gift you can open again and again.”
- Garrison Keillor
“The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most.”
- Theodore Parker
“Only your friends steal your books”
- Voltaire
“You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.”
- Paul Sweeney
“The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.”
- Oscar Wilde
“My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter.”
- Thomas Helm
“People get nothing out of books but what they bring to them”
- George Bernard Shaw
“Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”
- Heinrich Heine
A book holds a house of gold.
- Chinese Proverb
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
- Chinese Proverb
A book tightly shut is but a block of paper.
- Chinese Proverb
He who can read and does not, is no better than he who cannot read.
- Chinese proverb
I was thinking about libraries today. The first place I worked in Sydney was in a very modern high-rise building with polished marble floors and columns, shining metal, mirrors and daunting furnishings. As a junior, I walked through timidly, feeling very intimidated and frightened by my surroundings. As time passed, I barely even noticed the opulence and forgot those feelings of uncertainty and unease.
winterspel mentioned libraries to me today and I suddenly remembered the library at my old work. It was on level 23 and took up one whole side of the floor. The windows were huge and looked out upon Sydney Harbour - providing an absolutely glorious view of not only the harbour, but Sydney itself and the blueness of the sky. There were tables where you could work and almost all of the librarians were as friendly and helpful as they were polite.
I was just remembering that when I was a junior, I used to use the library as a haven of sorts. If things got too much to bear, I would walk up the stairs or catch the lift up to level 23. Sometimes it was just to hide out for a little while - to give myself a few moments to catch a quiet breath in the midst of a stressful and panicked day. Sometimes it was because the librarians were always a good first port of call for research - finding articles, retrieving books ....... The library had hard copy books but also had the CD-ROM collections with databases of material, they were able to borrow books from other firms, from the courts and they were always really nice to me.
A few years later, they scaled the library down - made it one half of its original size. The rationale was that all operatives now had computers that had full access to the Internet, to the catalogues, to the databases. Online research materials on our computer desktops meant that we no longer needed to make the trip to level 23 to go to the library. I thought about it and wondered if this was true. Was it really that we had no more need or simply that we had no more time. Work had become so frantic and stressful that the walk to the library, briefing the librarian and waiting for the results was a luxury that was no longer possible. Deadlines and workload pushed us to remain in our own offices longer and not stray further afield. My research skills weren't a substitute of the expertise and experience possessed by the librarians. Furthermore, sometimes it was far more sensible and efficient for them to be doing the research and chasing down. I confess while it's convenient to be able to click a button on the Intranet to reserve a book, there's something very clinical and anonymous about it. For me it's no substitute to having a chat with the librarian about the day as you're borrowing something or looking for an article.
Then I thought about libraries outside a work context. They tell me that libraries are losing popularity - less people borrow books. Does this mean people are reading less? I thought about things from my own point of view. When I was little, I adored libraries. I still adore them - I loved going into them, browsing, I loved borrowing, reborrowing when I loved a book. I didn't enjoy the late fines, though. I have to say, I was rather amused when I read the Letters of Tolkien in which he complained about a letter he had received from a fan. The fan told him he was an ardent admirer and had borrowed The Lord of the Rings from his local library many times. Rather than being flattered, Tolkien was professed himself irritated at the stinginess of the fan - depriving him of royalties by borrowing the same book many times instead of just buying his own copy :) Poor fan.
When I was little, we were very poor so I didn't own many books. I haunted the library every weekend, after school, during lunch times - devouring whatever I could. It was a cheap childcare centre as well - my parents would drop me off there and I would happily while away many hours.
These days, I tend to buy my own books and occasionally download them. Partly it's because I like to own the books that I loved but used to have to return when I was wee koala. Partly it's because I like to own books when I like them, but I suppose that it is also because of time pressures. With work commitments, these days I cannot guarantee that I'll be able to return the book in time. Late fines and also depriving others of a book aren't ideal so buying a book is often the easy solution. For me, this doesn't in any way mean that my love or even need for a library is lessened. Some of my fondest memories are sitting in one of Canberra's public libraries reading a book, or even in the National Library of Australia. You can't borrow books from the National Library of Australia except in special circumstances but it has all books ever published in Australia and there's something very thrilling about the thought of having all that knowledge at the tips of your fingers - accessible by merely filling in a library slip.
When I was at uni, I enjoyed the Menzies and Chifley libraries on campus which contained a huge array of literature in different languages as well as amazing reference books. The advantage of a library is that if you don't like the book, you return it. You haven't wasted your money buying a book you don't want.
After I mulled about it a bit longer, I've decided that even though I haven't conducted any statistical studies or surveys about why people don't use libraries so much anymore, my view is that we have become a little more spoiled and lazy. Information and convenience at our fingertips is what we crave. I think that this is a shame. It was a library that made me discover my love of LM Montgomery books. One weekend, I was looking for a book to read, the librarian pointed out a table with an Anne of Green Gables display - an Anne doll, various Anne books and suggested that I read them.
There was also something fun about hovering around the book trolley where the librarian was trying to reshelve books that had just been borrowed. For some reason those books held a certain allure that the books on the shelves didn't have. I walk through the library these days and they are increasingly automated. You can reserve books by clicking a button on the catalogue. You can check-out your own books with a scanner and bypass the person at the front desk altogether. To be honest, I rather enjoy that process: "Oh that's a good book - if you like this one you might also like a book by so and so".
I'm sentimentally attached to libraries and it makes me rather sad to think of their decline in popularity.
I suppose it's lucky my new workplace doesn't have a library - I'd probably be hiding in a corner somewhere most of the time .... :)
Quotes about books and reading
When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.
- Desiderius Erasmus
To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul (alternative: A room without books is like a body without a soul).
- Cicero (attributed)
I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.
- Alexander Smith
No furniture so charming as books.
- Sydney Smith
Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.
- Lady Bird Johnson
A library is thought in cold storage.
- Herbert Samuel
Libraries are not made; they grow.
- Augustine Birrell
Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.
- Augustine Birrell
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
- Barbara Tuchman
Your library is your portrait.
- Holbrook Jackson
Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me,
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.
- Shakespeare, The Tempest
Life is like a library owned by an author. In it are a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him.
- Harry Emerson Fosdick
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
- Logan Pearsall Smith
What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists.
- Archibald MacLeish, "The Premise of Meaning," American Scholar, 5 June 1972
The best of my education has come from the public library... my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents a day for an overdue book. You don't need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library.
- Lesley Conger
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.
- Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.
- Erma Bombeck
We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.
- John Lubbock
My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
- Cicero
A great library contains the diary of the human race.
- George Mercer Dawson
I love the place; the magnificent books; I require books as I require air.
- Sholem Asch
The richest person in the world - in fact all the riches in the world - couldn't provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library.
- Malcolm Forbes
My books are very few, but then the world is before me - a library open to all - from which poverty of purse cannot exclude me - in which the meanest and most paltry volume is sure to furnish something to amuse, if not to instruct and improve.
- Joseph Howe, 1824
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
- Jorge Luis Borges
A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.
- Jo Godwin
For him that stealeth a Book from this Library, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with Palsy, and all his Members blasted. Let him languish in Pain crying aloud for Mercy and let there be no sur-cease to his Agony till he sink in Dissolution. Let Bookworms gnaw his Entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final Punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever and aye.
- Curse Against Book Stealers, Monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona
A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.
- Shelby Foote
Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.
- Germaine Greer
There are 70 million books in American libraries, but the one I want to read is always out.
- Tom Masson
Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.
- Richard Powers
The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Nutrimentum spiritus (food for the soul).
- Berlin Royal Library, inscription
Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
- Austin Phelps
I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage.
- Charles De Secondat (1689 - 1755)
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.
- Charles W. Eliot (1834 - 1926), The Happy Life, 1896
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
- Christopher Morley (1890 - 1957)
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
- Dorothy Parker (1893 - 1967)
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
- G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)
From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.
- Groucho Marx (1890 - 1977)
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
- Henry Ward Beecher (1813 - 1887)
“A book is a gift you can open again and again.”
- Garrison Keillor
“The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most.”
- Theodore Parker
“Only your friends steal your books”
- Voltaire
“You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.”
- Paul Sweeney
“The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.”
- Oscar Wilde
“My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter.”
- Thomas Helm
“People get nothing out of books but what they bring to them”
- George Bernard Shaw
“Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”
- Heinrich Heine
A book holds a house of gold.
- Chinese Proverb
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
- Chinese Proverb
A book tightly shut is but a block of paper.
- Chinese Proverb
He who can read and does not, is no better than he who cannot read.
- Chinese proverb