The Quiet Use of a Library Card

The library was, for many of us, a building of childhood. The shelves were tall. The carpet was the color of old carpet. There were beanbags in the children's section. There was a librarian who knew which books had just come in. The library, in memory, is a sealed object — a building that belonged to a younger version of life.

The library is still there. The shelves are still tall. The carpet is still the color of carpet. The librarian still knows which books have come in. The books are free. They have always been free. The membership, in most cities, takes one form of ID and ten minutes.

Most adults do not go. Some have not been in fifteen years. The reasons sound practical — busy, easier to buy online, ebooks on the phone. The reasons are real and also slightly wrong. The library is not competing with online retailers. The library is doing something they cannot do. It is, for free, providing a quiet room full of books that other people have already judged worth keeping.

The first visit back is strange. The buildings are the same and you are taller. The catalog system is different. The librarian is not the one from your memory. But after twenty minutes, the original feeling comes back, and the feeling is undervalued. The feeling is the calm of being among books that are available to anyone who wants them, without performance.

Borrow three. Not seven. The temptation, on the first visit, is to fill the bag with books you will not finish. The library will be here next month. Three is enough for two weeks of evenings. Read what you borrowed. Return them on time. Borrow three more.

Over a year, the relationship matures. You learn the library's specific stock. You learn which librarians are good at recommending what kind of thing. You start reading more widely, because the cost is low. The book that, online, you would not have ordered, you take home from the library because it was free, and it changes your year.

You also notice that the library is full of people. The retirees doing the newspaper. The students using the wifi. The parents reading to small children in the corner. The library is one of the few remaining places in a city where you can sit for an hour and not be expected to spend money. The not-spending is a kind of rest.

Get the card. Use it. Some institutions are doing exactly what they always did, and we have stopped showing up. The library is one. Show up.

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The library card is one of the last unmonetized objects in the wallet. Most other cards in the wallet exist to extract a small fee or to record a small purchase. The library card moves in the opposite direction. It is an invitation to remove books from a public building, read them, and bring them back, with no fee and no record. The exchange is older than most of the things in the wallet. It is also stranger.

Use the library for the books you are not sure about. The books you are sure about belong on your bookshelf, bought from the small bookstore down the street if it still exists. The library is for the experiment. The book you would not pay twenty-eight dollars to try. The book whose spine you would not want to live with for a decade. The library specializes in the experiment, and the experiment is most of how new reading happens.

There is also a useful library practice that has nothing to do with reading. Go in, sit at one of the long tables, and do an hour of paper-and-pen work. Not laptop work. Notebook work. The library, as a room, encourages a specific kind of attention that the coffee shop does not. The coffee shop encourages performance. The library encourages thinking. Both rooms have their uses; the library is the cheaper one and often the better one for the harder hour.

Befriend the librarian, slowly. The librarian is the most underrated professional in your neighborhood. They know more about your local reading habits than the algorithm does, in part because they remember you the second time you come in. The recommendation that comes from a quiet person who has watched you take out three books over the course of six months is, by an order of magnitude, better than the recommendation that comes from a homepage.

The library is also one of the few public rooms in a modern city in which you can simply sit, for an hour, without buying anything. The economic significance of this fact has grown quietly over the past few decades as fewer and fewer rooms remain available on those terms. The park bench. The library. A few churches. The list is small and getting smaller. A practice that uses the library two or three afternoons a month is partly a small act of preservation, exercising the room so that the room continues to exist in the city's small ecology of non-commercial spaces. The library appreciates the use. The library is also where you will most often see your neighbors at their most undefended: reading a magazine, looking up a recipe, helping a child find a chapter book, looking up a job listing, looking up a court case. The room records the actual texture of a neighborhood more honestly than almost any other room in it.

Visit the library once this month with no specific book in mind. Walk along a section you have never walked before. Pick up a book whose spine you do not recognize. Read the first page. The exercise is undirected on purpose. The library rewards undirected wandering more than directed searching, and a few of the books you carry home this way will turn out to be the books you remember reading at this age, twenty years from now, long after the planned reading list has been forgotten.