Posts
Last week I
wrote about Carnegie libraries, which started me thinking about the libraries
in my life.
I was an
early reader. In fact, I can't remember
not being able to read. My mother claims
I read street signs to her when she drove me places, not that I remember
that. She too was a reader, so there was
always reading material around the house, including the large-format glossy
magazines of the day—Life, Look, The
Saturday Evening Post. I still miss
those.
My first
library experience did not end well. As
I've said here before, when we moved to a new town, the year I was five, my
mother took me to get a library card, and I took good care of it. However, somewhere along the way there was
some miscommunication: I thought that
once you took the books out of the library, they were yours to keep. Which does not explain why I hid them under
my bed. My mother confiscated my library card, and I still rankle at the
memory.
Later she
relented, and I usually had a library card for whatever town we lived in (we
moved around a lot). Of course, my
mother had to do the driving then. At least she supported my reading addiction
(and probably hers as well). And there were always school libraries, although
as I recall they limited the number of books you could take out at one time,
which was never enough for me. It wasn't until I was in my teens that I lived
close enough to the local library to walk there.
When we
moved to Madison, New Jersey, in the 1960s, there was a delightful old library
in town, which I used regularly (remember when you had to do real live research
for school papers?). However, apart from admiring the architecture now and then
(and marveling at the opaque glass floors in the stacks, which I found
unsettling), I didn't think much about it.
On a whim I looked it up when I was checking out Andrew Carnegie, and I
found something that surprised me.
The James
Library opened in 1900, the gift of D. Willis James, who in addition to funding
the granite and limestone structure also stocked the library with 5,000 books. I never even knew the library had a name—it
was the The Library. And I certainly had
no idea who D. Willis James was. What
kid or teenager thinks about the history of his or her town? (Well, I did know
that Madison was once known as Bottle Hill because of the tavern located there
in the 18th century.)
So I looked
up Mr. James, who turns out to have been Daniel Willis James, age 68, iron
merchant, living on Madison Avenue (as I did, but not exactly in the same
neighborhood) in 1900. He was a corporate mogul with a variety of mining and
railroad interests. When he died in
1907, he was one of the hundred wealthiest men in America. Maps show that he and his wife owned a nice
chunk of land on the north side of town, the site of his summer home, built in
1885. Anyway, this civic-minded
gentleman gave the town a library.
But that's
not the whole story. Mr. James also
built a commercial building across the street (called the James Building, no
surprise) whose purpose was "to provide income for the Library's
maintenance and operation." Funny—I remember the James Building almost as
well as I remember the library. It had a
ballroom upstairs, where I attended a couple of meetings; a music store, where
I had one of my first jobs, bartering for guitar lessons; and downstairs, a
hair salon where I had my hair done for the junior prom. There was a drugstore
with a soda fountain on the corner. In short, it was an important part of the
town.
What is so
lovely is that Mr. James did not just hand a gift to the town and walk
away. He was a smart businessman and
made sure that the library's expenses would be covered in the future. Both
buildings are still standing, although the library building now houses a small
museum; the town built a new library on the other side of town shortly after I
left for college.
Like
Carnegie, James (who attended school in Scotland) believed in contributing to
his community, which he did in many ways.
We were and are lucky that they both thought libraries were important.
And what's more, they both created memorable settings for learning and reading.
