I love reading and I love books. My collection of books from my childhood was tiny, but I was proud of it, nonetheless. Every few days I’d rearrange my small stack so it always felt like a new library – usually the books were arranged by title, but when the mood took me I’d arrange them by theme , size or even the colour of the spine colour, but oddly never by author. Even now I refuse to arrange books by author.
Every Wednesday my neighbourhood was visited by a Mobile library – a converted grey bus whose sole purpose was to encourage reading. The mobile library was driven by an often sour looking woman who hated children to linger and didn’t allow more than four kids at once inside. But when it came time to check a book out she always had a smile for the book. I completely understood where she was coming from. When I returned a book she’d ask me if I liked it. I was a shy kid and not yet prone to book reviews so I’d always say yes.
But it was the big library I hankered for. From a young age my mother would take my sister and I to the public library once every two weeks on a Thursday night. Once inside she would abandon us to the stacks with instructions not to leave the building and to return to a designated meeting area by 8 pm. She’d hand us our library cards and would quickly disappear into the adult fiction section. I’d watch my sister depart for her chosen section and wait until they were both out of sight so I could make for the lift which would take me upstairs to where the “real” books were kept. To me, real books were old, often large and filled not just with words, but colours, impressions and sensations. The first time I attempted to enter the climate controlled sanctuary of the upper floor I was turned away - children must be accompanied by an adults - but my persistance paid off and I was granted (minimal) access to the special books. These were atlas’, encyclopedia’s, manuscripts and antiquarian natural history books that usually only historians and college students bothered with. For me it was heaven. At 7:30 I’d leave the upper sanctuary and rush down stairs to collect half a dozen books more appropriate for my age. Being a fairly fussy reader I often ended up disappointed with my hasty choice and desperate to return to the great library.
My obsession was with the atmosphere of the library as much as for the books themselves. In fact, so deep was my obsession for the library that when I was thirteen my best friend and I wagged school and spent the day in there pretending we were university students. Instead of getting up to mischief like most other teenagers, we hid at a corner table reading up on everything from Egyptian and Greek Mythology to poetry and literature and telling each other stories.
Today I have my own library, small but very personal and filled with books that satisfy my obsession.
I’ve started this blog to share my obsession with other bibliophiles and improve my competence with reviewing.
