In one of yesterday’s HaBOs, Amanda wrote about being grounded from the library for reading romance novels as part of her request to find her lost book – which was found because y’all know pretty much everything, including, I suspect tomorrow’s lottery numbers. Maybe.
After Amanda’s lost book was identified as Silver Fire by Sally Stone, the discussion that evolved afterward was all about your memories of using the library, either the one at school or the one in your town.
Aelily wrote,
…Amanda’s story about being grounded from the library reminded me of a time I got grounded from my books. I wasn’t doing my homework (cause I had books to read that were far more interesting) and my grades were suffering, so as a punishment, my mom took all my books away. It was a rough month;I had to smuggle in reading from the outside,and read ahead in my lit textbook.
LML has an even more chilling memory:
My mom would call the school library and the public library and tell each that I was not allowed to check out any books that week because I had misbehaved. Sooo embarrassing…
Seriously. I just got the shivers thinking about that. YIKES. That’s hard core punishment right there.
I asked the ladies here in Bitchery HQ if they had any library memories, and two of us, who wish to remain nameless because of deep-seated shame, took books out of the library without checking them out (GASP) because we weren’t sure we were allowed to read them and didn’t want anyone to know. I’m not naming names, but I bet that’s true of a few of you, too.
(Please don’t hurt us, wonderful librarians! We are sorry!)
Liz Talley said in the comments yesterday that,
I thought I was the only one who’d ever been punished by taking away a book. My mother was infamous for hiding my books until I did whatever chores she’d set before me. I remember the first time she did it – I had hurried home from school, excited to get to that next chapter, and my damn book was gone! My mother sauntered in, fanned with it and said I’d get it back when she could see the floor in my room. I’d never been so absolutely incensed in my life.
I begrudgingly cleaned up and she finally gave me the book. I learned how to hide my books after that. Probably under all the clothes.
I’m kind of relieved I’m not the only one who had a very messy room with books hiding in the clutter.
Carrie has lovely library memories – I wish my library had had one of these:
I have a lot of library stories but my most visceral library memory, the most physically clear early childhood one, is of being in our old yellow kitchen listing to Dial-A-Story on the white phone that was, brace yourself, actually attached to the wall, and playing with the cord while a recorded librarian read stories to me.
It’s what my mom would do when she was busy and I was bored. “Go call Dial-A-Story!” and you never knew what story you would get. Amazingly, even in the youtube era, the library where I live (same one I grew up with) still has “Dial-A-Story.” Only for kids – you can’t call and hear a random excerpt from Outlander.
Elyse says that her husband had an awesome teacher who changed his life with a book:
She gave him a copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ( A )Â to keep because she believed he was a reader even though he struggled.
It lead to his lifelong love of scifi and books and also his eventual diagnosis of dyslexia –Â and his job in a bookstore where we met and fell in loooove.
All together now:Â Awwwwwwwww!
Elyse also has memories of being scared to look at the romance in her library:
I loved  the library as a kid. When I got to middle school and found romance novels, I was traumatized though because the paperback romances were right in the middle of the main room in full sight of the doors and ANYONE COULD WALK IN AND SEE ME LOOKING AT THEM!
I know that feeling. I KNOW IT WELL. In my library growing up, after I was introduced to romance, the only place I could find them were the spinning metal racks that were directly across from the circulation desk. *shudder*
At least the librarians never said a word to me.
Vicki wrote in the comments to yesterday’s post that she had to sneak past the librarians:
By the time I was eight, I had read my way through the children’s section at the Vancouver Public Library and started on the adult section. It wasn’t my mother who tried to keep me out, though. Mom just dropped us off and went shopping. It was the librarians. I would wait until they weren’t looking and sneak in. Read the early Mary Stewart that way.
I had no idea Canadian librarians were so fearsome! Good gracious, Canada!
RedHeadedGirl says her library habit was formed at a young age:
Libraries were the only way to keep up with my reading habit. It’s where I discovered a lot of the romances that I remember fondly (for better or for worse) and during the summers, dad would either trot me down to various  branches or I would ride my bike when I was old enough.
And in Boston we are lucky enough to have this amazing villa of a main library that made studying and writing papers more tolerable.
Smart Bitch Amanda (and wow there are so many awesome Amandas that hang out here- hi guys!) has a really touching library story, too:
My love of the library didn’t happen until into my late teens. After high school. Which was a super rough time for me. I was trying to go to school and my mom sort of left for a while. I won’t get into the details. My dad travels a lot for work and my brother was around 14 or 15. I love my brother, but I was very depressed having to take care of him as a mom would (taking him to school, making dinner, etc) and take a semester off of college.
My solace became the library and GoodReads. I discovered a few groups on GR that did romance reading challenges, like read your way through the month (example: If it was January, the first word in the title or the author name would have to correspond and spell out the month). It gave me a sense of structure, which I know I need in general. I’d make reading lists and put books on hold at the library to pick up. We lived in a rural area then, and I’d make the hour drive to go get them. I’d probably pick up three or four books at a time and be done with them in a week or two. Rinse and repeat. I probably would have lost my mind if it wasn’t for the Alachua County Library.
Thank you to everyone in yesterday’s comments for the suggestion – your stories are lovely to read! So what about you? Do you have a library story you’d like to share?Â
Does anyone remember the “forbidden” National Geographic magazines. Never understood why they had them in my elementary school library but wouldn’t let us look at them.
In the small southern town where I grew up, our library was in a huge old Victorian home. Just gorgeous. I loved the squeaky wood floors. On hot summer afternoons, they opened the windows and you could sit in a window seat and read to your hearts content. I was also fascinated by the librarian’s little date stamp that was attached to the pencil she used to fill out the check out card in the little pocket stuck in the back of the book. However, she was also the ultimate book Nazi…..only age appropriate books allowed and absolute silence while in the library.
I was not a reader as a kid–as a matter of fact, my dad would punish me by telling me I had to read. My mom didn’t like that and would take it away all the time because I would learn to hate reading if it was associated with being punished. When I was in 3rd grade, my school’s librarian was trying to get me to pick out a book to read (at that point, we were required to check out at least one book per week) and when I told her that books were boring, she told me that one day I would find the book that will make me forget to go to bed because it is so good. That conversation has stayed with me for 21 years. She was an awesome librarian, but she died a few weeks later. I heard she died in her sleep and I like to think that she had a book sitting next to her when it happened.
In high school, I spent almost every lunch period in the library. The food in the cafeteria sucked and I would rather stop for a slice of pizza when I got off the train, so the library it was. Sometimes I would wander around the stacks (no romance, unfortunately), others I’d read whatever book I had in my backpack (usually a Nora Roberts), and still others I’d hang out with my friends and talk–the librarian didn’t mind as long as we were quiet.
My neighborhood library wasn’t very welcoming because the librarians were book snobs and looked down on anything that wasn’t literary fiction or non-fiction. That library was the only place that made me feel ashamed of my reading tastes and it was why I started taking the subway into Manhattan to go to the NYPL.
These stories are great.
Mine isn’t overly exciting. My parents were reasonably permissive about letting me read whatever the hell I wanted, but they were also the sort that figured out that grounding me from my books was entirely more effective than grounding me from going outside (pffft).
I grew up on military bases. My housing area was probably about 2 to 2.5 miles from the library. So my routine from about twelve years old on was to let my parents know where I was going, throw on a large tote bag with a couple bottles of water or Coke (Florida be hot), and stroll through the back gate to make the (long) walk to the library. I’d get there, where often I had some books waiting (by age 13 I was happily reading King, Grisham, and Steele, and I would pick from their copy of the NYT bestseller list to tell them which books I wanted to be added to the hold list for), flop down, read for a couple hours in the AC (this was also a great way to read through a bunch of magazines without buying or subscribing), fill the bag, and head on home. I also tagged along in the evenings when my dad wanted to go to the gym, and hung out for an hour and a half while he worked out. I spent a lot of time in that library.
These days I am still an avid library user, and so are my children. I’ve been taking them since they were babies. Although I love buying books and adore my e-reader, free works so well with my budget. My propensity to put what I want on hold remains intact. They recently started putting the books on a hold shelf with our library card number sticking out of it right next to a self check out terminal, but prior to that, I had become enough of a ninja at internet hold that they stopped asking my name when I showed up. They knew who they were dealing with.
I’ve truly enjoyed reading all of these posts!
I moved a great deal throughout my childhood and adolescence attending over a dozen schools. I loved to read though and going to the library was always a given. I continue to love to read, and my husband jokes that he’s grateful that the card I max out is my library card as opposed to a credit card. Only 100 holds allowed; how is that fair? I’m close to maxing out his hold limit, too.
My daughter grew up in the library, too. Her first visit was at four days old, and the librarians (who’d seen me through my pregnancy) were delighted to meet her. She’s in South Korea now and is a member of the public library there.
The only negative I can remember concerning the library took place when I was ten/eleven and doing my homework there after school. A nice (I’m being facetious) man offered me a calculator if I’d be his friend. This was back in the early seventies when calculators were new and cost about a hundred dollars. (And we’re talking basic functions not a scientific calculator.) It’s scary to think how very tempting that offer was.
Oh, and one more story. When we moved to our new city of some 60,000 people, a librarian was the first person to recognize me and call me by name. That made my day.
I shared some of my library experience in the other discussion, about how having depleted the children’s section. mom would check books out of the adult section. This was wonderful because adults could check out a lot of books while I was only allowed five on my children’s card. This was a nuisance because by the time I was 9 I was reading a book a day and mom would only take me to the library every two weeks.
I filled in the gaps as best I could with the school library, but we were only allowed one visit a week and a limit of three books. But on my mother’s card, I could have my one books a day fix.
The fiction section of the old library was divided into three sections: mystery; science fiction; and every other work of fiction, In the new library, all of the fiction was shelved together. The mysteries had a skull and crossbones on the spine while the SF featured an image of an atom.
My very first job the day I turned sixteen, was as a book page. A book page shelved the books, a serious responsibility. We also shelf read, i.e. scanned the shelves to make sure the books were in the right order.
It remains my favorite job.
Growing up, I had amazing librarians who fed me books. When I was going through grad school, the library I worked at at the time had staff at the checkout desk who were rude about romance readers, so I would drive to neighboring libraries to browse and check books out anonymously (thank god for consortiums!). Now I’m a librarian at a library that embraces all reading tastes and, best of all, I’m in charge of the romance collection (BWAHAHA).
My elementary library was the remodeled old lunchroom and had huge windows on one side, letting in a ton of light and making a great storytime corner.
High school library memory is not book-related at all – I was in AP Bio and we’d run out of things to do for the semester, so we collaborated with the “Independent Living” class and learned how to make a fancy Italian supper, how to set a formal table and proper table manners. The final dinner was served in the library, with white table cloths over the tables and reporter from the county newspaper in attendance!
My final two years of college I got a work-study job in the library and loved it. Shelving exposed me to so many subjects I wouldn’t have browsed in the first place and it was always interesting to see what other students were checking in or returning. You bet we abused our power and checked books out to ourselves for whole semesters! And nothing is quite as fun as running around the stacks at 2am on exam week.
Now that my reading habits have grown even more, I’m so thankful to have access to two large library systems (BPL and NYPL) and have learned the pleasures of ebook checkout – it magically appears! Not coincidentally, 5 of my 6 apartments in the city have been within walking distance of a library branch. I always go intending just to return, but someone end up checking out at least as many as I’ve just returned.
My mom has just become a regular library user as well, checking out stacks of book for herself and my dad, and my sister got a library card before she switched her license plate when she moved out of state!
Gloriamarie Amalfitano, my current library has those very stickers — “The mysteries had a skull and crossbones on the spine while the SF featured an image of an atom.” Small world!
when I was in elementary school, the schools did the summer reading program. over the summer, there was a fire in the library (arson). apparently, some people thought they didn’t have to return borrowed books because of the fire. Mrs. Baker was so happy when my brothers and I returned our books to the library. she was usually a gruff woman, but that day she wasn’t. She also taught me the dewey decimal system.
when I was in high school, I worked in the school library. and, I was a member of the library club. such a book girl!
Oh! But I was a tutor in our HOSTS (Helping Other Students to Succeed?) program and helped a couple younger kids with their reading. It was exciting to be special enough to get out of class for an hour and help someone learn to enjoy reading. And I did so love those really thin Scholastic book flyers, and the day the book fair came to school!
Kareni, my libraries in MA used them but the libraries I’ve used in CA don’t. I have to know my authors.
Summer reading lists were wonderful. I read every single book on every single summer reading list I ever received. Learned so really great stuff that way.
Something I really miss in the libraries are the card catalogs. The kind with the three by five cards. I used to make the most serendipitous discoveries.
growing up in small town northern Canada meant that our library had limited number of books but a bus came thru town every few months to change the books – that was the best time! but you had to be fast or your name would be the last one on the list for reading the good books. my brothers & I worked thru the encyclopaedias when we were bored (6 months of winter does that to you!)
My family was strict and religious, but there were never any boundaries set on my reading materials, nor were reading privileges withheld for punishment. But I did get told to quit reading and go outside on occasion in my teen years, or told to put out the light and go to sleep already (which led to me setting my bed on fire by reading with a lamp–not a flashlight!–under the covers).
We moved a lot, so I was always discovering the libraries in our new towns/schools. I have a lot of good, but mostly ordinary, library memories. Two that stand out are not as nice. When I was very young, I was sitting with one of my legs curled up under me and the librarian yelled at me for not sitting like a lady with both feet on the floor–and proceeded to pick me up by one leg and shake me. I was basically upside down with my dress flipped up. I was mortified by being publicly chastised, as well as having my underwear exposed in public (practically the ultimate horror back then). I still went into the library afterwards, but avoided the librarian, and always stood when looking at books. Luckily, we moved again a couple of months later.
In high school, my brother dropped my off at the city’s main library, probably for research for a school project. I was so absorbed with my reading that I got locked in after closing. When I finally got clued in to my predicament, I searched all over the building until I found a maintenance person to let me out. The downtown area was unfamiliar and pitch black by then, and I couldn’t see my brother anywhere. I was terrified that I’d been abandoned. (The front part of the building was all glass, so my returning brother could see me inside, oblivious to all. Of course, he didn’t try to help me, but just laughed his head off in the car and then stayed somewhat hidden until I started frantically running around the outside of the building. Older siblings. SMH.)
I still like libraries, tho!
Oh man, I am loving these stories! And yes, sometimes older siblings are the pits.
In the other post I mentioned that my mom taught me how to use a dictionary. When I was in high school, she bought me the complete (!) Encyclopedia Britannica, which I still own. I’ve never really known why beyond (possibly) my complaints as to the usability of the encyclopedias at school- surprisingly, they were hopelessly outdated.
I remember my brother who, after a horrific breakup and ill with the flu, absconded with half of them to his room where he hid out for two months and read.
Weirdly enough, just reading the encyclopedia had never been a thing for me. I think it had something to do with my OCD tendencies – I couldn’t just read the main article. Oh no, not me. No, I had to pull out every book with corresponding articles and read EVERYTHING to be found on a particular subject. *sigh*
Thankfully, I’m no longer quite as bad (though on a related note, I can still only read series books in order- anything else and my brain shuts down) and can just grab a volume and begin reading anywhere. Hell, I can even skip around inside the book reading articles randomly. The joy I derive from that simple act cannot be overstated.
I, too, went from reading children’s books (loved the fables best) to mythology (Greek, Roman, Norse, Celtic, Chinese, Japanese, Native American & Hindu all were available at my school) to the paranormal (witches, ghosts, aliens, tele-anything, conspiracy theories, etc.) to sci-fi and fantasy, including pulp fiction. After that I moved on to mysteries and eventually romance. I still have my Waldenbooks sci-fi & fantasy membership discount card with a dragon on it.
In high school, I lucked out and got assigned to the library twice a week for two years. Mostly we checked books out to other students and reshelved returns. Thirty years later I still compulsively shelf read and am routinely found correcting the shelves at my local branch.
The BCPL system has a 100 item limit which includes up to 6 ebooks each from both vendors. I routinely hit that limit. Now that I reserve so many items electronically, the librarians no longer recognize my voice when I call, though I am known by name and face by everyone that works there. It’s not unusual for my requests to take an entire shelf. I’ll be returning stuff today so that I can checkout my latest batch.
Hurray for bookmobiles! That was my first library experience–every other Wednesday it would come. I’m hyperlexic (I was reading at three and could read adult books by four; my brother is as well and I suspect my mom was too) and I would get frustrated because, being a kid, I wasn’t allowed to check out adult books. Mom would take pity on me and add stuff I wanted to her haul. She did attempt to shield me from racier books, but it didn’t really work because she never hid her own books. One of the funniest events in my childhood was when we were visiting family in Florida. I was eight, and one of my cousins had left a Sidney Sheldon novel on a living room table. Of course, I picked it up and started reading. My cousin saw me and was horrified. “Aunt Kathleen, Patti’s reading my book! She’s too young for it!” My mom came in, took a glance at the cover, and said “it’s okay, she’s read it already.”
DISCLAIMER: REALLY not a good idea to let a kid read old-school Sidney Sheldon novels. A seven-year-old should not know what a snuff film is.
When I was having a really rough go in life in the mid-nineties (basically homeless) libraries were my refuge. Warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and a quiet place where I could read and forget things for a little while. I’ll always be grateful for that.
@Chrissy:
That is so great – congratulations!! I wish you many happy and book-filled years together!
When I was in my teens, we were living in small-town NZ, and the local library charged you to borrow items. The classics were free to borrow (whee, all the Dostoyevsky a thirteen year old could want), the children’s books were free and so were older works, but if you wanted to borrow anything published in the last five years, it cost $1-$2. So basically, I stole books right through high school, pretty shamelessly, and then I smuggled them back in. Every romance I read was $2 to borrow, and my family certainly didn’t have the money to indulge my habit, but I was generally a fairly law-abiding child so just the scent of the library used to make me feel anxious. Whenever people ask me why on earth I left NZ, I remember how ridiculously expensive books were, and how even the library charged for books.
My school librarian was fabulously absent-minded. She ordered all the Jean M. Auel books because somebody told her that they were educational. They were educational, all right.
@Marxamod:
A Tupperware full of books hidden in the woods. Oh my stars. That’s brilliant! I’d never have come home. I’d still be there, reading, not sure what day it was!
Tam, whenever my husband and I go on vacation, I love to visit libraries (and also used book stores) wherever we go. So, I can tell you that new books still carry that charge in several of the libraries we visited in New Zealand.
And, HelenMac, I can tell you that the libraries in South Korea use a system that is similar to but not quite the familiar Dewey Decimal system. My daughter is currently living there, so naturally she took me to visit the library.
Man, these comments bring back so many memories!
I still remember LYING to the school library lady (a volunteer) in the second grade because I wanted to check out “Peter Pan” and she thought it was too old for me. I said of course my mom would let me check it out (which she would have), and that of course I could understand it (no, not really — chequebooks, anyone? It really is a strange book).
My elementary didn’t have a room for the library then. It was upstairs in a wide corner at the top of the stairs. I remember the shelves full of those turquoise kids’ biographies that most of my class was reading. I remember “Clara Barton, girl nurse,” “Molly Pitcher, girl patriot,” and “Dolley Madison, Quaker girl,” but I ran out of steam by the time I got to “James Otis, elevator boy” and “Isaac Putnam, young sleeping car builder” (I am not making that up). Anyway, I have happy memories of slipping upstairs to read -the whole “library” to myself!- on a Saturday morning in winter while my brother was playing basketball in the downstairs gym.
Later, I was allowed to ride my bike to the public library, and I could check out as many books as I could cram in my bike basket. I do remember once when my mom asked me to check out “Gone with the wind” for her, and “the ladies” asked me if I had permission to check that out. They had very traditional ideas about what kids should and shouldn’t be reading. I got my very first Mary Stewart from a school book fair, and I still have some of my Scholastic Book Club books.
I don’t remember what grade it was, but one of my elementary school classerooms had a couple of shelves of National Geographics in the back, and my desk was right NEXT to them. So I could slide one out of the shelf and quietly and carefully read whenever things got boring.
My mom didn’t really censor what I read, although I do remember her saying “why do you want to read that?” in reference to the stack of Emilie Lorings I was reading, (and why she never said a world about the Frank Yerbys and F. Van Wyck Masons I was reading, I’ll never know), but I think that was mostly because the books came in, got read, and taken back before she could really focus on what I was reading.
When I was 14 “the ladies” at the library said that since I was in there all the time anyway would I like a job?–thank god because it would have taken me at least a couple of years to work up the nerve to ASK for a job When I found out that you could get a degree in being a librarian–heaven!
And when I became a “lady” myself (there were two types of workers in our library–“ladies” and “pages”) I made sure that I never asked a child “are you old enough to read that?”
I have loved reading all these comments!
Like everyone else, I love libraries-so much so that whenever we travel, I drag my family into the town’s library-just so I can see what it looks like.
Growing up, our town library was about 2 miles away, and my parents rarely took us there. I still can vividly recall the route that I walked, even though it was 45 yrs ago. I would set goals for myself-I would make it to “this house” then I could set my books down and rest my arms.
Like so many others, I was reading way above my age level, and had one experience where a librarian grabbed my arm, and forcibly removed me to the children’s section. I was so mad! It was always a constant stress, would they let me take out this book?
My parents didn’t take my books away, but they were constantly on me to go outside and get some fresh air, they did think I read too much. I also got in trouble for reading at a family party, one of my aunts said I was unsociable! Makes me laugh to think about it, I had a huge family-and the adults were drinking and yukking it up, did they really miss my 12 yr old conversational skills that much??
One of my best library related experiences-as a senior some of my guy friends helped an English teacher with some manual labor, and he invited us to his house for dinner-and my high school librarian was also there. It was so wonderful to talk to her outside of school, and I still cherish this comment she made to me-she said “whenever I go to read a book, your name is always on the checkout card-that’s how I know I will like it!”. Can you imagine how special that was to me, that a librarian valued my thoughts on book selections?? I still get a tingle thinking about it.
My mother would kick me out of the house to get fresh air too. So I’d take my books with me and sit in the backyard and read.
The one and only time I was ever punished at school was over a library book. I was in third grade at St. Paul’s School, a private Roman Catholic elementary school in my hometown of Princeton, NJ.
Sr. Stella Maria had told us the day before that we were going to have a free reading period the next day and to bring a book from home. I brought Peter Pan and Wendy and was lost in it. My ability to concentrate on what I was reading and block out the rest of the world was an endless frustration to my mother but to Sr. Stella Maria, it was blatant disobedience. I was so absorbed, I never heard her say that it was time to stop and put the books away until she grabbed the book out of my hand.
She made me out the book on the windowsill and stand in the corner. I might have been mortified except I was terrified for the book. It was spring and the window was open and we are talking huge windows. There were no screens and the whole time I was in the corner I worried about the book falling out the window to the ground three stories below.
You see, it was a ***************library************** book and if anything happened to it, I was afraid that I would not be allowed to check out any books again.
Geekily, as a child I would often play “Library.” I now have worked in libraries for over 10 years, and really can not think of a job that I would enjoy more. It is very satisfying to see so many people who enjoy reading.
Regarding borrowing certain books from the library – please do not ever be ashamed of what you are checking out! You never know about the personal reading preferences of the people helping you. Librarians should not be judgmental regarding reading preferences. Many librarians read romance, but more importantly, we want to find more books that you actually would enjoy.
I grew up in the last Kentucky county to get a library. They finally got a library, but I was in college by then. Luckily, my mom was willing to drive to the neighboring county every other week. The rule was 30 books per card and we shared one card between, me my mom, and my sister.
In Kentucky you could get a library card for free in any county, as long as you live in a county with a library. Yeah. So we had to pay something like $30 a card. So getting my own library card was a huge deal. I mean, this was a family where clothes from kmart were fancy and we ate no meat that cost more than $1 a pound. When I got my own card it was like the heavens opening. I always maxed out my card, I read all of childrens, all of the young readers, read all the YA section, and reread. Finally (age 12 perhaps) I was let loose on the science fiction section (because apparently my mom didn’t realize there was sex in there?) and read all of that too.
I will never take having a library for granted.
I was born at the end of my dad’s senior year of college and my earliest memories are while he was in grad school. He would take me to the library with him and get me stack of children’s books and I would sit under the table while he studied. Maybe that’s why I find the smell of old books so soothing.
Just last year, one of the library aides (she’s maybe 25) at my local branch, whom I hadn’t seen in months, after pleasantly asking how I was, said to me “so, are you still reading those romances?” This was asked loudly, in the main lobby in front of the new fiction shelves and other patrons. I answered just as loudly, “yes, I am.” Oddly, she walked away after and I haven’t seen her since. Prior to that we’d always been quite friendly. I have no idea what happened that day.
Every time I go to the hold shelves I find them stuffed with books- manga, mysteries, children’s, comics, King, popular fiction, etc. Do you know what the overwhelming majority of books being held are? Funnily enough, it’s romance.
Some of my favorite mysteries were printed in the 80’s & early 90’s. They were kept on a double-sided three-tiered rack in the middle of the floor surrounded by seating. The ppbks had different symbols printed on the spine: dagger, pistol, possibly a (bleeding) rose and (maybe) a noose or loop of rope.
I used to go through the racks in alphabetical order, grabbing whichever ones I hadn’t yet read. Many happy hours were spent reading my stash while waiting to be picked up before I had my license. Many even happier conversations took place between myself and various other patrons discussing those and other books. If memory serves, they were Poisoned Pen Press books and their other imprints.
I live in South Africa and I discovered libraries when we moved to Bloemfontein. At around age ten I discovered romances and there was no stopping me after that. I started out with Afrikaans romances which is a lot like harlequin presents. I used to haunt the library for new romances. We moved to Cape Town when I was fourteen and there in the library I discovered harlequins. I instantly became a Violet Winspear fan. I used to hide these shocking books I was reading. I used to read at night with a torch under the bedcovers and put my books inside my schoolbooks and pretended to study.
My mother never tried to stop me reading romance and the librarians were always impressed with me for wrapping the books in my raincoat and getting all wet.
Marie Dry was talking about Harlequins, and it brought back this memory-my first boyfriend back in 1976, he was the only child living at home, and we spent a lot of time in his basement ;)I had 4 siblings, so we never had any privacy. But here is where it gets good-his mom had a WHOLE WALL of shelves filled with Harlequin romances! I am talking an absolutely huge selection! I almost fell over when I first saw it. It drove my boyfriend nuts because I would not be paying attention to him, but instead that glorious wall of books.
His mom would give me a huge shopping bag, and I would fill it up with books and take them home. When we broke up, I think I mourned the loss of those books more than I did him!
My mother was a reader, so in the early 90s I spent quite a bit of time at the library. The building it’s housed in is an old post-office, and the requested books are (to this day) kept inside the walk-in safe behind the rather gorgeous carved wood desk.
Anywho, I literally went through the kid’s section of the library and read the back of every book until one took my fancy. At around the age of ten I ran out of books and ended up moving to the adult section, which is where I discovered Anne McCaffrey’s Dragons of Pern series (we won’t speak of how those weren’t exactly the most age-appropriate). But I have incredibly fond memories of that library, as it always felt like my own little door into another world.
When you read as many books as I did as a kid, the library is a must! I was fortunate to meet so many wonderful librarians, but my favorite was my elementary school librarian who actually moved over to our high school when I did. By then she knew me well, and she always had great book suggestions. I swear that she and my grandmother, who introduced me to Anne of Green Gables and The Shell Seekers, shaped my reading tastes, along with an aunt who loved romance novels. Thankfully my mom was not ever too concerned with what I was reading! I was also punished by being forced to go outside without books, but I was usually able to squirrel some away and keep reading. Now that I have read so much, I long for that feeling I had in the library, where it seemed like something wonderful was around the corner and I just had to find it. Amazon doesn’t give the same thrill.
@MaryHeather, you wrote, “Now that I have read so much, I long for that feeling I had in the library, where it seemed like something wonderful was around the corner and I just had to find it. Amazon doesn’t give the same thrill.”
Oh yes. I know. Libraries just no longer have the same flavor. Maybe because we are “adults” now and theoretically able to find books for ourselves, librarians no longer give us reading lists.
The SBTB comes the closest to recreating that role of the librarian or teacher who knew me when and would recommend books and this group of readers the people I can bounce ideas off of as I used to of those long ago librarians and teachers.
For instance, I purchased a boxed set that was advertised on sale here this week, Wicked After Dark, and I am reading the second story, Her Dragon to Slay by Julia Mills. Have to say, my impression of Ms. Millis is that she is a giggly fourteen-year-old with a penchant for too many italics. “He was going to be the best mate ever,” Rayne thought to himself, with “ever” in italics. Regrettably all too many sentences are littered with words in italics as if the author didn’t have the proper vocabulary to convey the sentiment she wished to otherwise.
Another thing that makes me think Ms Mills is fairly young is that she seems to have an incorrect sense of male anatomy. At one point Our Hero, Rayne, has our Heroine, Kyndel, bent over a picnic table and he is doing her from behind. Ms. Mills writes that Rayne can feel his balls slapping Kyndel’s ass. Now, unless dragon shifter males keep their testicles above their penises, I can’t imagine how this would be possible.
Thing is, I have no one else in my life I could ever say such a thin g to.
Oh, man, good library memories. My hometown library had been built in the 1960s with a gift from local philanthropists, so it was unusually large for a relatively small New England town (I didn’t realize this until I grew up and moved to some other communities with much smaller libraries.) Looking back, I think part of the funding must have been used to stock the shelves when the bigger library opened, because although new materials were added regularly, there was an especially large amount of materials from the period around the opening. I remember getting my first chapter book at the library–one of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. (Thanks, Mom!) I didn’t know it was OK for little kids to go into the chapter book section. (I was maybe 5 at that point?) Sometime around middle school I moved upstairs to the grown-up books (that may have involved an intervention by Mom, now that I think about it). I don’t remember a lot of romance reading (I sneaked Mom’s books for that!) but I reveled in the science fiction. Since they had done all that book buying in the 1960s, they had a huge “golden age” SF collection, including a ton of short-story collections. They also had a big drama collection and I read a bunch of plays.
I don’t have real, specific memories about my childhood librarians but I know I spent a lot of time at the library – especially in the summer. Pretty sure mom would drop me and my sister off on Saturdays, pretty regularly, to amuse ourselves while she did errands. There was an adjacent park, and we’d go in and out. It was heaven going from the steamy-hot South Georgia park to the air-conditioned library.
I read a lot of dog and horse stories back in the day – Jim Kjelgaard, and the Black Stallion series, at least twice through each book – and a lot of mysteries. Which started with Nancy Drew of course. My parents read mysteries and I picked up theirs pretty often. Didn’t really discover SF until high school (at the HS library!).
Discovered romance courtesy of my maternal grandma, who had a stash of Harlequins and some other, racier things (woo-hoo!) in her basement in Fargo. I spent most of a summer up there one year, and yee-ha. I remember eating Honeycomb cereal and reading romance. 🙂
When I was in about 5th grade, I requested a biography of Elizabeth Barrett & Robert Browning, THE SILVER ANSWER, from our Main Library; such requests cost a quarter. I said to my mother, “Well, I won’t be able to get my TARZAN book this week; I was buying the series for 50¢ a volume. The librarian looked at my mother and said, “She certainly has catholic tastes, ” and I wanted to be a woman who knew how to use words like that!
@Janine:
Isn’t reading plays fun? My college library had a bunch, and I loved reading them.
[…] For all you library nerds out there: the editors of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books share their library memories. […]