13 ways of looking at a library plus some French

La langue française

C’est très difficile d’écrire de la langue français. Mais je veux essayer beaucoup de jours. Il va m’assister d’apprendre cette langue difficile.

Aujourd’hui je fais le lavage. Il y a beaucoup de vêtements dans mon panier de lavage qui sont très sal.

Trouvez ici une pièce d’écrire sur le sujet de les bibliothèques.

Thirteen Ways of looking at a library. Part I.

Way #1: Libraries and Children.

Some public libraries are not that kid friendly, which is unfortunate. Some kids never go into a library until they reach school, when they are escorted in and out for specific library times. This is sad, but perhaps not surprising.

How have libraries been represented in the past by the media?

In all the old fifties movies, libraries shushed children. Now libraries are rarely shown in movies and seldom represented in books. What does this mean? Why the neglect?


There are two different ideologies working here:

One is romantic(think Wordsworth). Children in a library should be discovering and developing. Sound familiar? We all pay lip service to this romantic ideal, but do our institutions really do this?

Then there’s the older ideology of childhood that hearkens back to the eighteenth-century and further back still. Children were seen as little adults. Little immoral adults to be more accurate. They had to be trained and frightened into growing up into adults who would fit perfectly into a shush/be quiet kind of library.

So what should we do? What kinds of libraries should we be building?

What does your local library do for its kids?


2) The French word for library is bibliotheque, biblio referring to books, presumably, and interestingly related etymologically to the word “bible.” A friend once told me that the bible contained all other books; all stories were within it; I wonder. The bible does contain many stories, and it is arguable that there are only 12 stories in the world (with variations), but I still can’t believe that bible contains all. This is a rather Northrop Frye mythic outlook.


3) I’ve been in a number of different libraries; I spent the most time in Robarts library, on the corner of St. George and Bloor in Toronto. It is a massive concrete building, which is an example of the brutalesque style. In other words, it is as ugly as hell, inside and out. The building is supposed to be the same shape as a bird of some kind, I can’t remember which. Inside it is a busy place most days, with rows and rows of computer terminals, with anxious students staring into them. Upstairs are many floors of stacks, an extraordinary collection of books that you can easily get lost in.

One of my favourite areas to go to was the section with old periodicals from the Victorian period. You could read “The Strand” there, and see the original illustrations for Sherlock Holmes. You could also read Dickens’ and George Eliot’s works in their original chapter by chapter publications. I loved the old advertisements in these periodicals and even more, I liked the editorials that made fun of authors and poets that are now turned into untouchable and hallowed “great writers.” The Queen’s library I spent less time in, for I was young and less interested in libraries. But I did recall hearing about a couple that bought a pizza and slept the night together in the underground stacks as a kind of erotic entertainment.


4) Many people have large home collections of books that really deserve the name of library. Some have fantastic science fiction and fantasy collections, all organized alphabetically. One such famous library is in Toronto and called the Merrell collection. Unfortunately, you can’t visit it without supervision, and you can’t take a book out. But these books were all donated by a collector. Some people collect only certain authors; others certain genres. Some people just hoard all the books they c can find. Book collecting can easily move from a hobby into an obsession, and I’m sure that there are all kinds of conventions for people who want to talk about their home libraries and make lucrative deals to buy and sell different words.


5) Very, very special libraries cannot be seen at all by the ordinary plebe. If you travel to the bibliography section of Robarts, you will find all kinds of little slim volumes about such special libraries. For instance, there are many special collections of Byron’s poetry, early editions etc. There is a very specific way to write about such collections, and it requires a master of codes to understand what one might find in these holdings. Code words refer to sizes of books, types of print, types of paper, different ways that papers are folded etc. etc. I knew professors who were in love with bibliographic studies and fascinated by such details. I had a hard time understanding them and believed them to be unimaginative bores. Why is the outside of a book more important than the inside. Now, I am a little more respectful of their work. A great deal of information can be had from studying the original form of a work. From that stand point, it might be worth all the travel and red tape required to actually visit these special library collections.


6) The dreaded Dewey Decimal System. I wish I knew it better. As a child, and even as an adult, I have never got my head around the the dewey decimal system. I liked university libraries better because they are organized an a system that I became familiar with. I always know, for instance, that Byron, Bronte and Dickens could always be found in the PR section, and that the American novelists were further ahead, in the PN section, and that PS always held very modern British things. It all made sense to me, perhaps because I was so familiar with it. The history books, if you needed them, were to be found two floors down, a quick walk down two flights, or a long wait on a busy elevator.


7) My home library, the library I grew up with probably shaped my life and way of thinking. My father had all kinds of German books, which I was interested in, but couldn’t read. My favourite book of his was the Washington Gallery pictures, a volume full of pictures and right-ups that I pored over many times, loving the Dutch painters most of all, probably because of their simplicity. My Mum had old books by Somerset Maugham, like “Of Human Bondage,” that I read and only partly understood.

My parents’ basement library was my private area. The books that they had long since lost interest in became my playtoys, and I read, read, all day long most days. I organized the books alphabetically in grade 7, and then I vowed that I would read them all, cover to cover, going right from A down to Z. I made it through all the Austens pretty well, read all of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (11 years old), But I really was slowed down by Dickens. I must have read five or six of his novels before I lost patience with my plan. But Dickens really influenced me. I look back at a short story I did in grade 9, and it is full of names like “Bumble” that are very Dickensian.


8) Any discussion of libraries must include some comment on librarians. I've met lots of librarians, most of them very helpful. A big thank-you to those who help people navigate!

9) Library behaviour. What do people do in libraries? In public libraries, you avoid any kind of interaction, perhaps occasionally bumping into another browser accidently. In student libraries, it is a different matter. I’ve seen an uncanny amount of flirting, fighting, sexual encounters even. Typically, grad students flirt with each other in the stacks. They find each other’s carrels and hang about them, discussing ideas and making a substantial lot of eye contact.


10) Every old English house had what was called a library, just as many had private chapels. In many Victorian novels I’ve read, the heroine, staying as a guest at such a house, sneaks off to the library and reads either very educational books appropriate for her station, or finds access to a different racier kind of book, like French novels. How many Victorian ladies are corrupted by such racy reading! In novels, a person’s character is often indicated by the kinds of books he or she keeps in the library. In Charlotte Bronte’s first novel, the devilish Hunsden keeps all kinds of French novels and republican texts. When this is mentioned, we know that he is a dangerous radical, an unpredictable libertine perhaps, or one who believes in Rousseau’s freedom. I like one of Trollope’s novels, in which an extremely indecisive man hides a lost will in a book in his library, and then stays in the library for weeks and months because he is too frightened to leave the room in case the document might be discovered. In the past, men retreated into these libraries, and I always wonder where women retreated; nowhere, I think. Like Jane Austen, they permanently were faced with the company of others and never had a private library of their own. Hence Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.”


11) I am forgetting one excellent library, the one in one’s head. We all have whole collections of books and ideas in our heads, many of which we unfortunately can’t access a lot of the time. If all the books I’ve read are really in my head, and they are, somewhere, the details are not readily available as they would be on a screen or text.


12) The Library of Congress? I'd love to visit it one day.


13) It makes sense to conclude with the computer library. The internet can be seen as one, extremely large library. And it is a lucky thing that you can’t see all the books contained in it at once. The mind can only handle so much.