A Bibliophile’s Second Home
by Alyssa Erichsen
Innumerable ideas meet and reside here. Bits and parts of them sit on shelves, pieces that writers deemed fit to extract from their heads and commit to a page. These ideas, some vastly at odds with each other, are yet comfortable side-by-side upon their perches.
This vast rank and file is not silent. When I walk among them I feel as if I can hear them murmuring, quiet, waiting for a stranger to stop and listen to what they have to say. Their outsides may be plain, and some are downright unassuming, but their insides hold entire worlds.
Thousands of moldering pages hold their own special perfume. I often lift a book to my nose just to sniff the familiar aroma of ink, paper, and glue. It is not a fanciful idea, this book-smell, it is science: lignin, a polymer found in trees, is related to vanillin — vanilla. The lignin breaks down during the paper-making process and produces that characteristic scent. Then again, where the science ends is where my fancy runs wild. The oldest specimens, I think, give off the strongest whiff of wisdom. New books smell like potential, like the freshness of ideas that have not been over-analyzed.
It is not only the smell. Nothing compares to the weight of a book in the hand. The physical heft of the words and the expectation of what they will reveal are visceral. Not only can we carry stories with us in our hearts, we can carry them in our bags, backpacks, or pockets. No matter where you open a book, no matter where you’re going, how old you are, who you have become or what you want to be, the words remain constant. They wait to be read and brought to life.
The weight of a book is a mark of its persistence. Thousands of years after the invention of the codex, books are still here. Even when we read books electronically, we turn virtual pages that mimic the real thing and find content split up and organized via the familiar hallmarks: chapters, tables of contents, and indexes.
It is no wonder, then, that books and stories have evolved to fit into an age that the readers of the past dreamed of only in terms of science fiction. Now not only books are portable, but entire libraries of thousands of books can be taken absolutely anywhere: a plane, a train, a car, even a few steps out your back door to a hammock swinging in a summer breeze. All you need is some shade and a glass of lemonade. No heavy lifting required.
My fellow bibliophiles will nod their heads in sage agreement: books have their own special aura, even beyond the physical or understandable, which draws us in. The library, then, being the sum of its parts, is like a lavish buffet for those who are book-hungry. (Books aren’t the only delicacy on offer, however. Gorge yourself on magazines and newspapers and periodicals and documents and CDs and movies and eBooks and games and –).
When I enter a library, I feel like Lucy stepping through the wardrobe. I move across a sacred threshold, from the cacophony of the city street to the serenity of a hallowed sanctuary. The quiet here is not to be confused with silence; rather, it is a quietness that is alive with activity. The books seem to rustle their pages in anticipation. The atmosphere is hushed but buzzing with the energy of minds at work. This certain kind of quiet is evidence of a reverence of scholarship and study, and, even more than that, the acknowledgment of those who have dived headfirst into worlds beyond this one.
When I journey through the aisles of shelves like columns in a cathedral, I wonder how many other hands held these tomes. I wonder how many other people delved into these pages. I feel a communion with them through the volumes. We, the lovers of stories, pass them one to the other, sharing the words.
If I became lost in this sea of books, I know to whom I would send an S.O.S. They are the keepers of the keys, waiting to guide us patrons in our quests for the right words, the right stories, the right ideas. They’re the lighthouses, we’re the boats. The librarians.
By very nature of their profession, they usher people from a turbid sea of facts and sources to solid land, illuminating the exact spot where the precise information we need is hiding. They protect the stories and the knowledge, but they also dole them out by the hundreds every day. These are entrusted to us. To use them is to sign a metaphorical contract: “I promise to let these words tell me what they have to say, and I promise to return them, to let them speak to many more people.” This give-and-take is the heart and soul of the library.
I have entered this binding agreement hundreds of times. When I was small, my dad would drive me to the library and read a newspaper while I wandered around the children’s section. I would pull books out and read right there on the floor in front of the shelves. Still others I would carefully designate as treasures worth poring over at home. As a teenager and newly licensed driver, the first ride I took on my own was to the library. I did not emerge until at least an hour had elapsed, my arms full of fantasy and fiction novels. As a freshman in college, on my own for the first time and far away from home, I sought out the local library as a haven in a new and scary world. I would write and study at an ancient, scratched table hidden in the depths of the stacks. The friendly volumes that surrounded me were a comfort; a reminder that home was only as far away as a well-loved book.
My travels ever-widen. Now my feet know the way through nonfiction and poetry just as well as my old haunts through fiction or children’s books, yet I see there is still more to discover. I have grown in body and mind. The library no longer seems as cavernous as it once did when I was seven, eight, nine. Despite these things, I still feel the awe of my childhood self when I wander among the shelves, the books teeming with ideas and murmuring at me to peek inside their covers. It is here that I feel strange, inexpressible grief that, because there are so many books in the world, I will never be able to read them all.
Believe it or not, Alyssa Erichsen actually wrote this before she ever knew that she wanted to work in libraries/archives. She is currently an intern for Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law Archives, and will receive her MLIS in December 2014 from San Jose State University. She loves old books and history as well as making and creating in many capacities. You can contact her via email .