The Power of a Book

 

My young cousin visited the library the other day with her mom and grandpa.  It wasn’t her very first trip, but it was the first time I saw pictures of her introduction to a magical world.  It brought back memories of my early experiences at the library and with books in general.  

I don’t remember the first time I visited the library.  I’m sure I was pretty young, because my mother was a reader, who bought hundreds of books for me and for herself.  My earliest memories of the library were when I was able to visit by myself, in the musty basement of the courthouse.  It was not a huge room, physically, but for those who visited, it held the whole world.

I learned at a young age that words are powerful things, and much of what I learned about those words was in that old basement library, presided over by Mrs. Warren, who welcomed everyone young and old and never told me I was reading books that were “too old” for me.  It was probably there that I had the first stirrings of the idea that I could write words that might entertain or inspire. 

Even before the library, I had access to what seemed like limitless books.  We had two big glass front cases filled with them, old and new.  I had my daddy’s copy of Black Beauty and my grandmother’s copy of Anne of Green Gables and my Aunt Virginia’s battered copy of The Secret Garden, plus every Little Golden Book ever written in the 1950s and a complete set of Charles Dickens that belonged to my great grandmother.  Every Christmas and birthday brought new stacks of books.  I still have those treasures and I still love to read the inscriptions from my aunts, grandparents, parents and great grandparents.  They all knew what I wanted most of all.

 

I read The Secret Garden and wanted to learn about England and the moors.  I wanted to know what the heather actually looked like.  The Secret Garden led me to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights at an age when I probably didn’t understand half of what I read but they led me to a  love of the gothic novel.  Mary Stewart books introduced me to exotic places like Greece and stirred an interest in that country.

I grew to believe that fantasy was real and the myths actually told more truths than all the “non-fiction” on the library shelves.  And the more I read, the more worlds I discovered.

I read a book about an archaeologist working in Egypt and checked out books on ancient history.  For a brief time I thought I might like to be an archaeologist but when I thought more about digging through dirt in the hot sun, I confined myself to reading about it.

I read Elswyth Thane’s Williamsburg historical fiction series, and I checked out practically everything the library had on the American Revolution.  I think when I finally made a trip to Williamsburg, I half expected to see all those characters there, still living their fictional lives.  I think those books lit the spark for my love of history.

I read all the Hardy Boys and every other mystery I could find and was inspired to make up my own mysteries in the barn loft behind the house, or in the gullies that ran through our cow pastures.  And always there were the horse books, whose stories I tried to act out with my irascible pony and later with my long-suffering horse.  I absorbed every book on the care and training of the horse, information that is still with me today.

I cried over the Albert Payson Terhume books about his collies, Where the Red Fern Grows, and The Incredible Journey.  I learned to be more careful about reading books about dogs and horses.  I don’t start them now unless I know that the animal doesn’t die in the end.  I still may cry at the end  – not all tears are unhappy tears. 

I guess it should not be a surprise that I ended up with a career as a librarian, first working with the same Mrs. Warren who introduced me to libraries and later becoming the county library director.  Forty plus years of ordering books, cataloging books, filling out reports, planning programs – some of it plan old boring administrative duties, but much of it filled with the joy of helping people find just the right information, or just the kind of book they wanted to read, or discovering that libraries do actually hold the entire world within their walls if you just look for it.  Libraries changed enormously in those decades, with the advent of audio books, which led to digital downloadable books, computers, wi fi, and who knows what may be just down the road.  But there is still something about the sight of those bright covers, fresh from the publisher, and the smell of ink, and the feel of a book in your hands, and the excitement of losing yourself in another universe, just waiting to be discovered in the written word.  Words have enormous power – may we never run out of writers who create worlds from those words, and the readers who discover them. 

Thanks to Annie Carol Gordon for use of the pictures of Monroe and Brad!