For the love of libraries

My apologies for the silence the last couple of weeks … we’re in the midst of an illness in our family and have spent a lot of time dealing with doctors and hospitals and such. I don’t want to share too much more right now for privacy reasons, but we would all appreciate any good vibes you could send our way.

In the meantime, I thought I might share the speech I gave recently at Opus and Olives, the big fundraising event for the Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library. It’s a beautiful city and I had a blast at the event. They asked me and the other three author guests to talk about libraries, which I could talk about pretty much forever. Here’s what I said. Hope to be back next week with my usual thoughts and links and such.

—TT

Thank you so much for welcoming me and the other authors here tonight. Writing and reading are solitary things, and I’m always grateful to meet people who read my books, or just read books, period. And I’m especially grateful to meet people who love libraries. They asked us to talk about libraries tonight. I think this is my favorite assignment since the time the Charlotte Observer sent me to play all the putt-putt courses in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in one day. I did it! And it took all. damn. day.

If my wife were here, she’d tell you about the library in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, where she grew up. She read so much when she was a kid that her mom and dad had to set a rule: She could only take home as many books as she could carry. So every Friday she’d walk up to the counter with her hands cupped down low and books stacked all the way to her chin. Her personal record was 22.

I wasn’t quite that creative. I took home only two or three books at a time. Then again, I was at the library just about every day.

This was on St. Simons Island, down on the Georgia coast, a town of about 3 or 4,000 people. My mom and dad were big readers themselves. My dad had two sacred texts: the Bible and the Bass Pro Shops catalog. My mom read romance novels by the boxload from the used book store. But they had grown up in the cotton fields. They had never even heard of a library when they were kids, much less been in one. I was the lucky one. The St. Simons public library was less than a mile from my house. It’s still in the same spot today.

It’s an old library and I can still smell it, the faint must of the books mixed with the breeze coming off the ocean. There was a retired TV news anchor from Jacksonville, a celebrity in our part of the world, who had taken up semi-permanent residence in the easy chair near the front door. He read the paper and accepted visitors like the pope. But I didn’t care about him. What interested me was back in the stacks. What I wanted was mysteries.

The Nancy Drew series, with those yellow spines. The Hardy Boys books, dressed in blue. Encyclopedia Brown, who solved cases for 25 cents a day plus expenses–no case too small. Jupiter Jones and his sidekicks, whose headquarters was a trailer hidden in a junkyard. For years I begged my dad to fill our backyard with junk so I could hide a trailer and start my own detective agency.

I was 8, 9, 10 years old when I was reading these books, and life was full of mysteries. Girls were weird but somehow also intriguing. Grown-ups were, by and large, baffling. I had so many questions and so few clues to work with. But here were these books, in my library, telling me to watch closely and use common sense. And by the end, you could probably figure it out.

And so I trusted the library to help me figure things out. I checked out books about shells to help me identify the things that washed up on the beach. I read the old Childcraft encyclopedia to learn just about everything. I read those so much that one year my folks bought me a used set, which is still the best gift anyone’s ever given me.

As I got older, and my world expanded, I haunted other libraries. In high school, on the debate team, I dug through copies of the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, which was an amazing volume–it indexed pretty much every magazine story written in a given year. In college, where I fell in love with working at the newspaper, I pored over old bound volumes of papers from all over the world to see how the masters did it.

And now, as a professional journalist and writer for almost 40 years, I still count on libraries and librarians all the time. They’re essential to my work. And let me tell you, when you do what I do, there’s nothing more fun than getting a reference librarian on the phone who is just as jacked about finding something out as I am.

For my book DOGLAND, I spent many pleasant hours at the library belonging to the Museum of the Dog in New York City. Next time you’re in New York, you should go–it’s only a couple blocks from Grand Central Station. The folks there have a love and reverence for dogs, but also a sense of humor; one year they hosted an exhibit of needlework featuring dogs, called “Bitches in Stitches.”

That’s a private library, and I’ve done a good bit of research in some of those places over the years. But I’ve spent most of my library time in public libraries, all over this country, either looking up stuff or finding a spot to write or just burning an hour or two between appointments. To me, the two greatest public resources in America are our national parks and our libraries. I also think they’re pretty similar. Libraries are national parks for our minds.

They are also time machines, where the thoughts and ideas of those long gone can still live in the hands of anyone who pulls a book off a shelf. Newspapers, where I worked most of my career, keep their own libraries–most of them are digitized now, but at some papers you can still dig through envelopes of old clips. Traditionally, we called that part of the newsroom the morgue. But I always thought that was backwards. The library is the place where the writers and their words are immortal. Our stories live forever.

Libraries also provide a crucial civic service: They provide a place to learn things other people don’t want you to learn. My brain is full of treasure from banned books. “To Kill a Mockingbird.” “The Bluest Eye.” All those Judy Blume books I read as a kid although I often was not completely sure what was going on. Libraries are meant to shape young minds, and we should treat that as a compliment rather than a confession. Fear is a powerful tool. But fear’s greatest enemy is knowledge. The library is a place where you can come to know things.

In Charlotte, where I live, we are building a new main library scheduled to open in 2026. It’s going to cost upwards of 135 million dollars. That’s a big bet, in a digital age, that a physical library still matters. Of course this new library will have meeting spaces, and a technology hub, and probably a coffeeshop. But it’s also designed to have traditional stacks, reading rooms, those quiet sacred spaces that drew so many of us to libraries in the first place.

Libraries don’t turn a profit. They take up huge amounts of space. Almost everything in every library in the world can now be found in the phone in your pocket. That’s the way some people think. They are the people who see the world as entries in a ledger. It reminds me of the old saying: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

(A lot of people attribute that saying to Albert Einstein, by the way, but there’s no evidence he really said it. I found that out in a library.)

As an author, there are some things you can’t help but count. The first couple of weeks that DOGLAND came out, I spent far too much time looking at my Amazon sales ranking and the numbers coming in from the publisher. But after a while, chasing the numbers gets tiring. And it’s not why I do all this anyway.

But there is one number I check fairly often. 

As of this morning, 20 people currently have my book checked out from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Library.

When I check that number, I always like to imagine who picked my book, out of all the books available, and decided to take it home. Some are dog lovers, I assume. Maybe a few folks who know my other work. Maybe a couple of people just liked the cover.

But I always wonder if one of those readers is a kid, somebody who wanders the shelves the way I used to, somebody trying to solve the mysteries of their world, and counting on the library to grant them the answers, and along the way, a little magic. 

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Have a great week, everybody.

—TT