In many ways, my life in books, began in elementary school. I discovered our city’s public library with the help of my mom. I soon began walking there regularly after school. While there, in what seemed to be a massive building, I would explore the rows and rows of books. Plucking one off the shelf here and there and skimming pages. One day, I discovered a complete section of books on medieval knights and their armor. Hours were spent pouring over those illustrations and reading all that could be found about medieval warfare.
Later, in high school, I spent a semester as the librarian’s aide. She and I would race to see who could file things in the card catalog faster. (Yes, back then, we had a card catalog.)
In college, I spent my junior year, one full Summer, and the first semester of my senior year working in the college library. I even explored the idea of getting a Master’s degree in Library Science. There was a certain satisfaction in helping other students find the right material for their research or showing them how to use various pieces of equipment. In addition, many hours were consumed in the back room, repairing broken bindings and cataloging the rare book collection.
It is a sad thing when municipal budgets cut library hours, services, and budgets. It is as if they don’t realize how vital a strong library system is to our society. Instead, they see the library as a luxury…a non-essential. Last year, New York City threatened to cut its annual library budget by $58 million in 2025. The money was restored after a public outcry.
I’ve said it this way: “The public library system is the largest bookstore chain in the country, and few realize it. If a book is sold to only a tiny percent of the branches, your book could sell thousands of copies!” Even with digital initiatives changing the nature of libraries, they still buy books. Lots of books. (The issue of publishers selling ebooks to libraries is complicated.)
One estimate states there are 120,000 libraries in the United States. Of those, 9,000 are public libraries (which also have an additional 7,000 branches = 16,000 buildings). Included in the grand total are 98,000 school libraries, both public and private.
In 1881, Andrew Carnegie began using his wealth to build libraries around the world. He gave $56 million toward the effort (that’s $1.7 billion in 2025 dollars). 1,681 Carnegie libraries were built in the United States and 900 in other countries. At one point, Carnegie stated that a library was the best possible gift for a community since it gave people the opportunity to improve themselves. In his book An American Four-in-Hand in Britain, he wrote:
Whatever agencies for good may rise or fall in the future, it seems certain that the Free Library is destined to stand and become a never-ceasing foundation of good to all the inhabitants.
Please leave your thoughts on your library experience in the comments below.
I’m Australian, so my experience may be different to those in the US. Growing up in the 80’s my memories were of the elementary school library – reading books by Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl; Nancy Drew books were a favourite series. In high school I remember going to the public library near our local shopping centre, as well as our school library. I liked reading Diana Wynne Jones, and the Sweet Valley High series. I never owned a lot of books as a child, so the library was a blessing, as reading was my favourite past time.
Interestingly, at University I studied to become a librarian, and completed part of my training at the same public library I spent time in as a teenager. Working in a library, I obtained a different perspective; libraries were different by then, people coming in to use the computer or borrow cds or dvds. Of course people would borrow a lot of books also, but it didn’t have the same ‘feel’ as when I was growing up. I don’t work in a library anymore, but I did enjoy it.
The library was my escape
from a life I could not stand,
a matador’s swift blood-red cape,
a line sword-drawn in cruel hot sand
a place where I could be transfigured
into the hero of my dream,
a place where fear could not be triggered
by adults who had the means
and intent to make my days
a living aching shame-filled hell,
and so here I offer praise,
for my refuge from childhood’s prison cell
that let me look through bars to see
a world where there was sanity.
Love libraries!! It began as a special place with my grandmother. I fell in love with the smell of old books. I was a slow reader but carrying home a stack of library books made me feel anything was possible. Someday I would be an avid reader. That precious someday finally came!!
I think it was the author, James Michener, who considered libraries to be “the sinews that bind civilized societies…”
Even though I didn’t become a published author until I was over 60, it all started like you, when I could walk to the library myself and spend time there picking out books. My love was the Nancy Drew books, especially because we weren’t in a financial position to buy them, getting them from the library was the way to read them. I think the seeds for writing were planted then. It’s why my fifth novel, Being Nancy (In a world lost in mystery) is based on a Nancy Drew convention with many references to Nancy Drew books and how they came to be…and I have Simon &Schuster’s permission to use the Nancy Drew name. 🙂 Those precious childhood library days started it all.
I read so voraciously that by the time I was 7 my mother asked the local librarian not to restrict me to the children’s section (I would not recommend this as a parenting technique). Unfortunately for Mom, that meant the librarian allowed me to borrow a book that explained the facts of life. She phoned mom but I’d read it on the walk home. By third grade, I’d read through so much of the school’s library, I finally asked if I could just bring my Bible to school for reading time (it was the 60’s). The principal relented as long as I read it in the library. I read through my Bible several times in the public elementary school’s library before moving on to junior high. Coming from a very troubled home, I largely grew up in church and libraries. That’s where I found safe adults who treated me like the child I was but who also were willing to answer questions. (And I’m sure more than one librarian steered me away from some inappropriate books after I came to the lending desk in tears having read a book wrriten by an Auschwitz survivor when I was 8.)
Like you, I always loved books. After school I climbed my tree and decided to become a writer. I worked in libraries all through high school and college. I have boxes of novellas and journals two novels, all unpublished.
I met you, Mr. Laube, in Minneapolis at the Minnesota Christian Writer’s Guild. You liked my novel based on the terrorist kidnapping and bombings my Air Force husband and I experienced while he was stationed in Ankara, Turkey. My book won the contest you judged and you pitched it to your publisher. Unfortunately, they declined to publish it so I put it aside but I never gave up.
Recently, I’ve spent months honing and polishing this action suspense novel, emphasizing the juxtaposition between the Christian and Muslim faiths. I write from both the Christian and Muslim character’s points of view. Where does their hope come from? The Christians escape. The Muslims pray but to what end? They ultimately perish.
I would love to hear from you again, Mr. Laube. Please give my novel another chance.
Libraries are magical as far as I’m concerned. I love them right down to the DNA of them.
My library experiences? Where do I begin?
As a little girl, my grandpa gave me a stern lesson about respecting the library and fellow patrons reading in silence, as well as the responsibility of having my very own library card and the ability to borrow books at such a young age. It reminds me of Ralphie with his decoder pin from “A Christmas Story.” However, the secret messages I found in “James and the Giant Peach” and “Blubber” were not “crummy commercials” but doorways for me to peer into a world with wildly fascinating characters and another similar to my own, which might have something to do with my writing today.
I shared thousands of moments with my mom in that same library. We’d part at the door, and I’d run – I mean I’d walk – to the children’s section to find books waiting for me on shelves I could reach. What a thrill! I could pick up any I wanted, carefully flip through the pages, and return those treasures to their posts. They were like towering castles with unusual and exciting inhabitants waiting to be visited. I played with the cootie collection (sounds strange now!) kept on the bottom shelf, building an army of them before racing, I mean, walking quickly and with stealth-like silence with my chosen book in tow to find Mom hidden away in a corner, sitting on a metal step stool engrossed in either a fantasy novel, WWII historical work, or a book on perennials and herbs. Decades later, after Mom passed away, I’d spot “her” corner and cry. Thankfully, the books never seemed to mind.
The silence of the library and the smell of books still get me. With all our family upheavals, losses, and financial struggles in the past, the library offered me peace and other worlds to explore free of charge. All it asked of me was my time, which seems like a small price to pay in exchange for a lifetime of reflection, quiet spaces to dream and imagine, and “friends” to visit over and over.