Question: What is the biggest building in the world? Answer: The library. It has so many stories.
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Around age seven, I climbed up the steps of a bookmobile (repurposed school bus). Compliments of the New York Public Library, the bookmobile regularly stopped in my neighborhood. That day, I glanced around at its half-dozen brimming bookcases, and, after assessing the situation, figured I could indeed read all the books in the library.
A few years later, when my family moved to a brownstone close enough to walk to a neighborhood public library branch, I pushed open the heavy wood doors of a graceful former mansion and gulped, taking in rooms full of tall bookcases under high ceilings and tall, paned windows with deep sills where one could sit in the sun and watch the dust dance. I reasoned that reading all the books in this library would take time, and I was up to the challenge.
Bowled over
When one day my father marched my sister and me as children from Manhattan's Grand Central Station to the 42nd Street's Main Branch of the New York Public Library at Bryant Park, and we strode past the stone lions and through the enormous entry, I had to sit down at a study hall table to take in the rows of catalog cabinets, stuffed as they were with Dewey Decimal System cards noting the location of the books. My ability to multiply did not extend into the millions. Chastened, I accepted my limitations. I could never read all the books in my world. That didn't mean I wouldn't try.
How to Tackle the Task
While my approach to selecting books in the bookmobile had been haphazard, I attacked the job in an organized manner in my neighborhood branch. First, biographies of artists, explorers, historic leaders, inventors, musicians, scientists and sports people. I learned how outstanding men and women overcame circumstances of birth and history. I gobbled up the biographies and considered well the notion of what a human could do. What one could be. It was something to contemplate while sitting on a window sill, watching the dancing dust.
Moving from biographies into fiction, I discovered authors on the shelves - A to Z - with mixed results. Quickly, I realized a novel - even a teen novel - is a commitment, one I felt obliged to meet once I checked out a book. So, I introduced myself to writers through their short stories, more quickly determining my interest level for the worlds and characters they conceived. Though Look, Life and Time magazines and Reader's Digest condensed books were all the rage in my house, few in the family seemed drawn to full books. It was a matter of personal discovery, one that raised eyebrows at the dinner table for my seemingly wide-ranging taste in books.
How Tall the Tower of Books
In those days, the heavy stack of books I carried four city blocks from the library to home rose up to tuck under my chin - sometimes perilously to my nose. I learned I best keep track of their pricey due dates and whereabouts in the house, warding off the fines from a librarian that could cut into my ice cream fund and the exasperation of my tidy parents.
Still, I heartily agree with Marcel Proust that, "There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book." I had so many favorite books. As author Neil Gaiman wrote, "A book is a dream that you hold in your hand." Thanks to the New York Public Library, I held countless dreams - for free.
Being Dazzled
Through college and graduate school, I would continue to savor time spent in an academic library, each year growing clearer on how little I knew beyond required readings. Rather than depress, the thought spurred me on to be precise in my leisure-reading choices.
True, I read my way in adulthood through a detective phase, an espionage phase, a legal thriller phase, a medical thriller phase and forays into The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby that still give me chills. Mostly, I sought out great writers to enjoy. The piercing works of a dozen writers, including Pearl S. Buck, Robert Graves and William Styron, proved unforgettable. Then, too, nonfiction held its sway for decades. It would be fair to say I shared the sentiment expressed by Jorge Luis Borges, "I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books."
Looking up
Freelance assignments led to the discovery of ever-expanding library research options, another great awakening. Working in Los Angeles in 1984 on the pre-production phase for the acclaimed Timothy Ferris television special, Creation of the Universe, I cut hours of the physical toil finding individual books in the library of the University of California to instead spin away the available microfilm and microfiche spools on topics as diverse as world creation mythology and particle physics.
Another project - this time in New York researching for a book on a 100-year history of child health care in America - brought me to the databases of Fordham University School of Social Work at Lincoln Center where I saved days of work in gathering the footnotes needed. So astonished was I by the speed of searching databases I could tap there that once again I just had to sit down - this time outside on the plaza steps at Lincoln Center as the crowd whizzed by. To think, I had come from a bookmobile to a vast reservoir of knowledge, and this only one of thousands in the world.
Like my first visit to the 42nd Street library, it proved to be a pivotal day, turning my attention more firmly toward modern information technology and all it could accomplish. I would seize this method of research again and again for articles, as readily as I had poured over handwritten colonial-era diaries and listened as a captive audience of one to recorded oral histories about the Civil War.
Addicted to Speed
I still frequent my local library - after searching its online databases and logging electronic requests. I also secure audio biographies and fiction online to hear on my phone. Face it: I am addicted to speed; though I still experience satisfaction following the Dewey snail trail to a particular book on a particular shelf - like embarking on my personal Lewis and Clark expedition.
Fast-forward to today's Internet and, well, you know how extraordinary it is to have so much information at our disposal. I do not begrudge my grandchildren the ease with which they can and will learn what they must. Hip-hip Hooray! Good for them. Go forth daily to be amazed.
End of Part I
New York Public Library, Bryant Park