Like most genuine book nerds, I have long loved the library. I feel intimate with antiquated card catalogues and the Dewey Decimal System. My adolescent Saturdays passed in sepia fogs as I'd scroll through microfiche and crouch in grimy stacks at the too-gorgeous downtown branch in London, Ontario (now a condo development site). The immediacy of information and content knotted up my insides, especially that of forbidden Seventeen magazine, glossy photo books about Jimi Hendrix, and novels that combined drug use, apathetic sexuality and New York City with killer insouciance.
The public library is among the last real democratic institutions. The Holds shelf is an exemplar of the social contract. A library applies systemic order to cacophonous wilds of ideas, and the librarians who make it happen are eternal sex symbols. "Quiet" and "books" are intoxicating signifiers, but more than that, the library loves its patrons with Aslan-calibre benevolence. It wants to help you. It wants to enrich you. It will indulge your fiendish relationship with the Gossip Girl novels, and when you need some Joseph Conrad, it's there
for you, too. Such wholesome majesty is rarely found in a governmental, community-oriented kind of place.
Despite these many triumphs, the Toronto Public Library doesn't really get much play at all. The TPL is huge and busy (99 branches, some 11 million books on offer), and occasionally cause for artistic frisson (see: last year's indie-rock concert-series experiments), but mostly the library remains unsung. The overwhelming presence of sticky children and staid folding-chair events de-romanticizes the branches somewhat. And, the library pales beside bookstores in regard to shopping endorphins and financially supporting writers, publishers and booksellers.
Recently, while making a fresh slew of requests on the outrageously inefficient TPL website, I had cause to place a call (how civilized!) and ask the always intrepid help-line librarian to send books from across the city's system to the Palmerston branch, a couple blocks away from my apartment. When I picked my books up a day later, I approached the librarian with a new list of book needs. She helped me out with nary a suggestion of trying the internet (and made no kinds of comment on requests that ranged from the current hotness in beach reads, Chasing Harry Winston, to decades-old, tissue-delicate New Yorker essays), and discussed with seriousness my interest in out-of-print feminist arcana.
Renewed, I stuck around to sneak-read some shitty magazines and cruise the shelves, untethered to pre-determined booklists. With that, I re-embraced my youth, when a diligent representative of democracy pulled down a then-mysterious book by Jack Kerouac, a watershed moment for a Kleenex-sleeved four-footer. I'll use the web to shop on Amazon, but as for the library, I'm all in.