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 nonessential. 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.
Librarians provide assistance for self-publish authors in tech support. Bravo for their unselfish help!
I don’t recall libraries being located near most of my childhood suburban homes. But school libraries and school book clubs fed my book habit.
As a parent and then a worker in the homeschool world, I finally fulfilled my dream of immersing myself in libraries.
However, today it is very sad how libraries cull their children’s collections (especially classics and the like) to make room for computer screens, toys, etc.
Your post about libraries brought back wonderful memories for me! When I was only seven, my family moved from a tiny town where all of our friends and relatives lived, to a large city in Massachusetts where we knew no one. I was lost — until my mom found the city’s amazing public library. From then on we went weekly, and a year later I was doing the mile walk twice a week because I couldn’t get enough of their fantastic collections of books!
A half-dozen years later we moved back to a different small town, a safer place for teens than the city projects. I choked when I saw the tiny library … until I stepped inside. It was bursting with great reads! Today each time one of my books is published, I send copies out to the libraries in the various towns where I’ve lived, in hopes that my stories will fill the hearts and minds of young people. I get a lot of great responses to my books, and I know from my own municipal work history that local library book-purchasing funds are very limited!
I too spent many lunch breaks in the librab. Growing up in a small town, our public library was just a small building in an empty lot. But I stopped by there every day on my walk home. I must have read every book written by Grace Livingston Hill and her daughter Ruth. In our school library I read Frank G Slaughter and Lloyd C Douglas and so many unknowns over and over. Like a sponge I soaked them all up till the characters were my best friends. Now I’m intent on making the characters in my own books as warm and personable to readers I hope.
Yes, I left high school each day to visit the library before taking the bus home. During my first job as an associate editor, it was my privilege to check out references at the college library. Now I’m grateful for our local public library who added my husband’s and my books to their collection. The reason: local authors.
Hi Steve!
You probably don’t remember me, but we visited at a Realm Maker’s Conference in 2017. You even invited me to submit my proposal. However, 2 yrs of cancer treatment and an aftermath of chronic illness stopped me in my tracks. (Recently, though, the Lord has been leading me back to writing. Chronic illness actually affords lots of sitting around time.)
It’s funny, my library story has many similarities to yours, only it was my elementary school library that was “my house of wonders.” I discovered many authors there that I love to this day–C.S. Lewis, George McDonald, Rosemary Sutcliff, to name a few. I can still picture where they are shelved in a room that may no longer exist!
In college, I did not work in the library, but took the mandatory Library Sciences course so I could have access to all the stacks in my university’s library system. I still cherish the memory of how the marble staircase of the main library, worn by years of service, cupped my feet as I climbed to the main floor. And the card catalogue room….It was amazing, bigger than a small movie theater! I too, fell in love with Librarianship and considered changing my major to Library Sciences. However, Proposition 13 had just passed in California and librarians were being laid off all over the state. It didn’t seem there was much of a future for newbie librarian.
My Library love was fulfilled however, in volunteering in my children’s school libraries, and volunteering on our church’s Library committee.
In my last teaching job, at a school district’s GED center, I was granted permission to start a school library. What a joy! It grew from a couple of boxes of discarded books to 5 floor to ceiling shelves bursting at the seams.
I love libraries, and I agree with you and Andrew Carnegie, they are vital to our freedom and personal growth!
Debby Zigenis-Lowery
I don’t think I would have become much of a reader without our public library. I fell in love with Nancy Drew mysteries and read several a week until I’d read them all one summer.
But here’s a sad tale. Our county in California is the only one that doesn’t have its own library. When my husband was a county supervisor, he worked with county staff to get complete funding for a new building, and he even got the school district to donate property for that new structure. Architectural plans were created and things were in motion, until my husband lost in the next election. His predecessor thought people here in our rural county that doesn’t even have a single stop light didn’t need or want a library. So the grant money was TURNED BACK.
(That guy, by the way, ended up in state prison for embezzling funds of a nonprofit.)
So, I Googled “how to get your book into public libraries,” and AI provided this:
To get your book into public libraries, the most crucial step is to make your book available through a major book wholesaler like Ingram or Baker & Taylor, which allows libraries to easily purchase your book; additionally, gaining positive reviews from sources like Library Journal or Kirkus can significantly increase your chances of getting your book added to library collections.
Key steps to get your book into public libraries:
Use a wholesaler:
Ensure your book is listed with a major book wholesaler that libraries use to acquire titles.
Get reviews:
Secure positive reviews from library publications like Library Journal and Kirkus to demonstrate your book’s quality to librarians.
Market to librarians:
Reach out to librarians directly, highlighting your book’s features and potential appeal to their patrons.
Consider library events:
Participate in library events or book clubs to promote your book and connect with librarians.
Encourage requests:
Ask friends, family, and readers to request your book at their local libraries.
Professional presentation:
Make sure your book has a polished look with a quality cover and binding.
Back to me . . . does anyone have other advice?
Awesome suggestions. Thanks. Knowing the librarians personally because of your regular visits helps a lot too.
My book life began with a bookmobile. Our county did not have a library but we had a large field where we kids played baseball and a small bus would come every Saturday. We’d all flock to where the Busmobile Lady knew every kid’s name and preference of books. My parents limited my sister and me to two books only per week so that we’d get all our chores and homework done. So we pooled our literary gold and shared each other’s giving us four books a week. Later, when I was old enough to get a legal job (we all worked in farm fields and picking berries long before 16), my first job was as a library page. And yes, I repaired spines, worked with kids programs, dressed up for the library float on 4th of July, and used the card catalogue (even in college). I’ve moved 30 times in my life but everywhere we went, the library was the first thing I sought.
We always had books in our home and I often saw my parents reading. The small library in our small town we lived in while I was in grade school had a reading program every summer. One summer for each book you got a segment for a worm. Another year was a US map and you got a sticker for each state. One of my favorite series of books was a set of orange-colored biographies. I also remember checking out The Hound of the Baskervilles, which got me started on mysteries. I remember Trixie Belden stories. When I was in college, I worked in the library. When people checked out books, you could see their names. (So I knew who the cute boys were. Ha!) It was also nice to meet faculty members when they came to put books on reserve. There’s nothing like a library. Fortunately, here in Flagstaff the branch of the main library is close to where we live.
From the time I was 7,y GF and I walked to the local library every Friday. There we spent several hours looking over the shelves, picking out books to read that week, and sitting at tables and starting our first book in our pile. Afterwards we headed to the drugstore to buy a cherry coke and candy bar before walking home. It’s was one of my favorite memories. We did that for ten years.
Me too! How thankful I am my mom took me into the city to the library. I would not be where I am today without the love of books.
I’ve been an avid reader since I could read, and as a child, going to the library weekly was such a treat! I LOVED picking out my huge stack of books, reading them all week, then going back the next week for another stack.
I read mostly ebooks now, so I don’t visit the physical library much anymore, but I sure do use their Hoopla app monthly!
Thanks for the walk down memory lane.
Lovely post, Steeve! Thanks. As I started reading your post, a flash of Matilda walking to the library…
Blessings.