Fragments From the Library

"The fact that most library books seldom circulate is part of the mystery and power of libraries."

Nicholson Baker, The Size of Thoughts



I have lived long enough to see the two most important libraries of my life, the sites of such intellectual development as I have attained, pretty much destroyed. The first was the Carnegie Library in Ayr, Scotland, where I lived ages 10 through 14. When I returned to Ayr a bit over a decade ago it was still standing, but years of Thatcher had closed the reference room (where I first encountered the old OED, bound issues of Punch &c &c), the beautiful marble alcove with newspapers on standing racks and a melancholy sightless bust of Burns not overlooking old gents in pipe tobacco suits and suedette tams reading the Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee & Dumfries dailies, the little museum upstairs (cigarette cards, stamps, small shows of local art), all gone. The stacks held maybe a quarter of the books they had when I left, mostly bestsellers swollen with damp. The second, luckily not so drastic, is the Malaspina College Library in Nanaimo, which has just undergone a huge ugly expansion, cladding in lego sheets its rough, vaguely pagoda-like wooden exterior (a lovely example of 60's West Coast design) adding a huge amount of computer space, and driving the stacks to crowded cavernous dark upstairs rooms that feel like warehouses. And the whole place now has that Chapters coffee smell. At least the view, as good as any from any library anywhere, is intact, though harder to get to, and it no longer reaches in to the building.






(thanks wood's lot)