I grew up in a house overflowing with a love of reading. What it didn't overflow with was books.
Why would anyone buy books? We had all the books we could possibly read from the Brighton Town Library. My mother, an elementary school teacher, made sure of it. On Wednesday while we were at school, at the spots on the dining room table where my siblings and I each stacked lunchboxes, permission slips, homework folders, etc., my mother would leave a fresh stack of library books that she'd selected for us that day, topped with a candy bar. No wonder I've always considered reading to be so sweet.
Because of Mom's devotion to the library (my dad was and continues to be a one-book-a-year guy, but he never falls short of that goal) my parents didn't own a lot of books and rarely bought them for the kids. That the one bookshelf in our family room held a hard-bound first edition of To Kill A Mockingbird told me more about the social import of that book than any review.
Maybe it felt like an act of rebellion to buy books. All I know is that as I got older, I couldn't stop buying them, getting my new treasures home to slap them with a Holly Hobbie book plate and give them a rating. (Nancy Drew's Moonstone Castle Mystery: 9. Very Good.)
Now I live in a house with so many books that they are found on the ping pong table, on the back of the toilet, and underneath couches. We buy books at our local bookstore, from the Scholastic book sale, at airports and at readings. I have spent serious time thinking about how we could glue books together to make furniture, like this guy does.
It's fair to say that I treasure books as artifacts, especially having written a novel that now lives in a drawer. Every one of them represents the author's triumph over resistance, over doubt, over fear. (Ok, maybe not Snooki's debut novel.) I want to support both the authors who have made it through the fire of creation, and the bookstores who care about the words on the page. Particularly in the perilous world that is modern publishing and small business ownership, I try to put my money where my mouth is. So I spend a lot of money on books.
Then I think about the librarians. I've worked with, for, and around librarians for a huge chunk of my professional life, and hold them in the highest regard. Savvy about finding and using information and invariably interested in all sorts of things I've never even heard of, librarians sometimes seem like the Key Masters of the Universe. Whether it's a corporate librarian who can reel off the names of six different data sources for researching Chinese private company data, or the children's librarian at the Montclair Library who can run an after school art event and recommend YA literature simultaneously, they either have the answers or can tell you where to find them. Libraries are also big buyers of new books.
But of course library budgets, public and private, are always under pressure. How do you show that libraries and their staff matter? By using them, frequently, like my mom. Taking out tons of books to read, every week.
But I don't need to go to the library if I'm buying the book.
Sister! Daughter! Sister! Daughter!
Here are some alternatives I've considered:
1. Buy the book and then borrow it again from the library, just on principle
2. Forgo buying the book in favor of checking it out of the library (also more environmentally friendly) and then send the author a thank you note and a check for 9% of the cover price (which is about what they see)
3. Read Snooki's book and gouge out my eyes so I never have to read again.
I don't know what the answer is. If I start thinking about how Kindles and Nooks figure in I get a twitch in my eye. I never in my life thought I'd have to pit authors against librarians in an existential Celebrity Death Match in my head.
Honestly, hasn't anyone written a book on this subject yet?
Honestly, hasn't anyone written a book on this subject yet?
