NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday had a story today about a library that uses neither the Dewey Decimal nor Library of Congress cataloging system; instead, it’s modeled on Barnes and Noble. Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt system is one of those rare library systems that uses the Library of Congress shelving codes, which are impossible to memorize. But my elementary school library used the Dewey Decimal system and I immediately rememberd: 398 and 921.
398 was where one found fairy tales. There was a beautiful series of books with fairy tales from different countries — France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Russia, etc. And there was also a beautiful edition of Aesop’s fables. To this day, I can still the picture of the girl who was counting her chickens before they hatched.
921 was biography. At least, I think I got that right. (Write now, check later, that’s the motto of the Memory Project, because the proprietor was profoundly impressed by Nicholson Baker’s U AND I, which he wrote from memory, then corrected via elaborate footnotes.) There, I was drawn to the <a href=”http://www.readingwell.com/z-famous.html “_blank”>Bobbs Merrill</a> biographies of famous people as children. Lou Gehrig, Knute Rockne, Babe Ruth, Juliette Lowe, Jane Addams, Nancy Hanks.
The rest of Dewey is lost to me now, although I could once recite the entire thing. (My mom was a librarian, okay?) But just the mention of Dewey took me back to my elementary school library. Fiction was in the low shelves against the western wall, while 398 was a tall shelf between the windows and 921 was on the southern wall.
Anyone else have memories of libraries? How did you get your card? Do you know the story of how <a href=” http://www.kidspoint.org/columns2.asp?column_id=989&column_type=author “_blank”>Rufus M.</a> got his card? Did you go every week? Did you ever lose a book, like <a href=” http://www.jewishlibraries.org/ajlweb/awards/stba/sydney_taylor_bio.pdf “_blank”>Sarah</a> of All-of-a-Kind Family? Do you remember the “young adult” craze of the 70s, with those oh-so-relevant books? Did you read <a href=” http://www.paulzindel.com/finalpages/BIO/pigmanbio.htm “_blank”>Paul Zindel</a>? Do you remember the first “adult” books you checked out? (Max Shulman for me.) Did you have a strange subgenre of reading? (Boarding school/orphans. How I longed to be an orphan in boarding school.)
I’ll probably udate this entry with links as the day goes on. For now, I need to go to ABE.come and see if anyone has a copy of APPLES EVERY DAY for sale.
Thank you SO MUCH for the link to those Bobbs-Merrill biographies — they were a staple of my elementary school library, and I read every one of them. If I start buying them, I’m going to have to move into a bigger apartment…
Sunday afternoons were library time for my family when Dad was at sea. It was something we could do that didn’t cost any money, and required all five (and later six) of us kids to be quiet for an extended period of time.
The Bayside branch had a summer reading contest that gave kids books and McDonald’s gift certificates for reading a given number of books, creating a slightly counterproductive incentive system for me that persists to this day.
It is, officially, abebooks.com, but ABE.com works, too. Probably for nitwits such as me.
I admit to one-less-than happy memory of a librarian — the one at Rock Glen Jr. High who was very quick to classify books as “boy books” and “girl books.” I remember when she held up a copy of The Outsiders and said, “Now this is a very good book for boys. Has anyone read it?” My friend Lynette raised her hand.
I blame her, perhaps unfairly, over my confusion about S.E. Hinton’s gender.
Back to reorganizing my kitchen while watching FATAL ATTRACTION. (Is there a better way to spend a Saturday afternoon?)
My first job was in the West Hartford Public Library; i had not yet turned 15. i began as a shelf-reader, no joke, and was promoted to “page” which was the “put the books back on the shelves” job. IT was 1968? and I was, get this, the first female page in the WH library. It was a boy’s job until then; girls got to check the books out, boys put them away. I don’t dare ask why but we can guess i bet it had something to do with the concept of pushing a book cart and physical strength, can’t we?
My mother, not a librarian (as in no degree) worked for years at the Hartford Public Library (or, according to the woman who answered the phone there daily, “Hartford Public Liberry” yes she did) and my sister worked there too. I worked at WH public and i think I was somewhere in my 20s before I paid an overdue fine. Heheh. Dewey numbers always stuck in my head as well and I freaked someone out one day when they asked where “326″ was because I told them what bok they were looking for. It stuck, what can I say? (BLACK LIKE ME by John Howard Griffin, if you wanna know.)
I had an adult library card at a ridiculous age because I’d read through the children’s section and my mother approved. The two women at our teensy Blue Hills Branch were Mrs. Lebetkin and Mrs. Busby. Mrs. “B” was a family friend and she and I frequently met for lunch in downtown Hartford when I was but like 10 or 12 and she was a wonderful friend who encouraged and shared some of myinterests, or pretended too but I think it was real. Mrs. Lebetkin – Sonia – lives now in the same apartment building as my mom does.
Pretty much the first thing i ever did in any city I lived in was get alibrary card, even if I was in grad school and unlikely to find time to read. It still stuns me today to meet readers who do not have library cards, but who apparently buy everything. I’m sure that’s great news to authors but it croggles my mind; who has that kind of money?
In my childhood there were “the twin books” which i’m sure are full of racist and ethnic stereotypes but oh I loved “The Dutch Twins” and all that rot. I was an adult in the 70s, past the YA craze. Subgenre? Um, well if I’d known about it, probably but wasn’t aware of how to find subgenre books, though thank you Madeleine L’engle for writing about being a child with divorced parents (CAMILLA DICKINSON) as such things were new then and we weren’t in the reality stage of kids’ books yet. Um, Betsy, Tacy and Tibb? Snipp, Snapp and Snurr? I don’t recall what they were anymore, but the titles stick.
Beverly Cleary?
I don’t recall what we got for reading a certain number of books, but i always did it – it was actually ridiculous beccause I read 5 times what was required but back when I was a kid, there weren’t McDonald’s so happily, I never racked up those prizes as I’m a real hater of McDonald’s *shudder*.
I love how many of us cite friendships with librarians that extended beyond “help with books”. My friendship with Dorothy Busby was an amazing thing – here was this 60 year old woman having lunch with a 12 year old and having real conversations and really enjoying each other. How that worked I don’t know but it did.
My parents came to America from Poland following World War II. They settled in the Roxbury section of Boston. I was about two years old at the time. So, I grew up speakng Polish in our home. This caused me some problems by the time I was ready for school. On the last day of school of the first grade, Miss O’brien was explaining to the class which room to go to when we returned in Septemebr. Then she looked at me and said that she wanted to keep me with her for one more year. I didn’t understand the implications of that, but took it as a very positive thing. My mother had a very difficult time learning English throughout her whole life. My father made good progress because he was out in the English speaking world every day struggling through a long series of jobs. But my mother was isolated at home bringing up two children. We has no television then. And when my parents listened to the radio, it was always some Polish speaking program. However, it was my non-English speaking mother who first took me to the local branch of the Boston Public Library in Egleston Square. I was pretty young, maybe in the second grade. I still remeber walking with my mother to that library. It was a sunny day and warm. It was a long way, and we had to cross many streets. She held my hand the whole way. When we go there I was amazed by the building. It was built in a contemporary style, made of white stone, with huge windows. I thought that it was beautiful. Inside, I found a whole new universe. I don’t know how she did it. But my mother somehow managed to communicate with the librarian and got me my first library card. For that, I will be forever grateful. She showed me the path to what became for me a lifetime of a love of reading.
Scott,
I teared up reading that.
I have a hunch you’d like the stories of Stuart Dybek. Not to mention A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN.
Lots of memories for me here, which is part of why I grew up to be a librarian. I got my first library card shortly after we moved to San Antonio. My mother took me to the San Pedro branch, which seemed a long way from home. But after that my father took me to the bookmobile that came to North Star Mall on a regular basis. Mrs. Harris the librarian got to know our reading habits and would have books tucked away for each of us. I wrote about her in my library school essay, including an incident where she helped with the research on my 9th grade science project. For that she didn’t find the info til after we left the library, and she knew our last name, but not which family (there were 9 with that name in the phone book), so she went down the list calling until she found us and gave me the additional references.
Back to reading. I also have fond memories of those Bobbs Merrill biographies. I started reading them because they were on the summer reading list after first grade. I enjoyed them so much that when school started in the fall I read all the ones the school owned that I hadn’t managed to read from the public library over the summer.
I’ve thought for a while that some group of your fans should be called Laura’s librarians, partly because I like the alliteration, and partly because you seem such a big supporter of libraries, or at least do more library events than other authors that I follow.
Today was a good day for this post because I just got home from the American Theological Library Association meeting here in Philadelphia, and next week I’m going to the American Library Association meeting in DC. There are others that regularly do both, but this is probably the only time in my career that I will.
Sorry for rambling on, but I figure I could take a little extra space since I’m “quiet” on so many of the questions posed here.
As a child, my family would visit my mother’s parents for three weeks during the summer every year. And every year, we’d use my mom’s library card at the San Mateo library to stock up on new books every week we were there. And, every year from the age of 7 through 15, among those books would always be George MacDonald’s “The Princess and the Goblin” and “The Princess and Curdie” and Elizabeth Speare’s “The Witch of Blackbird Pond.”
About five years ago, I discovered <a href=”http://www.bookfinder.com”>www.bookfinder.com</a>. After all that time, I was over the moon to get an omnibus of three of George MacDonald’s works (including, of course, the two mentioned above) from Australia, of all places. “The Witch of Blackbird Pond” was acquired from the local library book sale about the same time.
Nowadays, I usually hit the semi-annual library book sales with an eye to getting more books for my three year old. However, at the last one, I seem to have ended up with some old Andre Nortons and “Island of the Blue Dolphins” — again, favorites of my own childhood.
Also in the present day, I love that, even though I live up in the mountains, an hour’s drive from the rest of civilization, I can go on the internet and order any book from two counties’ worth of libraries and have it delivered to the local branch up here. Now <em>that’s</em> a good use of technology.
My first library was a bookmobile in Toledo,Ohio. We lived on the outskirts and there wasn’t a library nearby. (Actually at age 6, I didn’t really know what a library was.) My sixth summer a bookmobile came to the corner of the apartment complex every Friday at noon. It was absolutely heaven. You could take out four books. One of my first was “Little Peach” which I’m sure would be politically incorrect today.
I was a big fan of fairy tales. Does anyone remember the “Maida” series – “Maida’s Little House,” “Maida’s Little Shop,” etc. My mom made sure I got Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins. (OK, I’m really old). About two years ago there was biography of the woman who wrote the Nancy Drew books. Turns out she lived a few blocks from our Toledo apartment. I would have died of joy, had I known that as a child.
My first library was in Brooklyn, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. It was great. I used to go there and pretend it was my house. I would sit and read there for hours and hours.
Cannot remember my first adult book. But, Cleveland had an afternoon talk show (it was the ’50′s) and on Wednesday the grande dame of Cleveland would do a 20 minute book review. I used to feign illness on Wed so I could stay home. Especially the day she reviewed “Lady Chatterly’s Lover.” Hot stuff!
Ooh, Rachel, Elizabeth Speare’s “The Witch of Blackbird Pond” was my favorite book in 5th grade. I bought it when my kids were the right age but neither read it. They would also not read A Wrinkle in Time, which was another favorite.
My third grade favorite author was Edward Eager, especially Half Magic, and my older son did enjoy that series.
Wow, I feel like Tim Daly when he succumbed to heroin in Season 5 of THE SOPRANOS. I just tore through abe.com, finding not only Apples Every Day, but another boarding school book, A Sense of Magic, and three books that were missing from my Lenora Mattingly Weber collection, all Katie Rose titles.
Trixie Belden was a favorite and I liked reading about girls who went to boarding school. The irony here is that it was the early 1960s and I was black. My parents were confused by this and for a brief moment considered boarding schools (they did exist for black people). I remember them talking with me in our kitchen solemnly, telling me why it wasn’t going to happen.
One of my mother’s best friends was the librarian at our local branch and she kept steering me towards the classics, often diverting me away from the 600 section (sex?) and the 300 section (don’t remember what was getting my attention there).
My first library book didn’t come until the 5th grade when we were all required to get a library card. This same librarian selected The Borrowers for me and I loved it. I was amazed that there was a building that had just books in it and that you could take them home with you. Before the library, I just read my brother’s text books (he was two grades ahead of me in school).
I never memorized the Dewey Decimal System and I never learned the names of all the books of the bible either.
Isn’t it abebooks.com?
But back to the subject at hand. The librarian of the small (7,000 residents) Iowa town where I grew up had serious mental difficulties. Encountering her on the street was rather frightening, especially for a kid. Hair wildly unkempt, makeup smeared over her lips and cheeks, and a frantic sort of searching expression on her face.
In the library, however, she was calm and confident. Always a smile and never a nosy comment about my reading choices. At age 11 or 12, I discovered Frank Yerby, who was pretty racy stuff for that time and for my age. Neither she nor my parents were ever inclined to censor my reading. In fact, they (parents) paid almost no attention to what I chose. Looking back, I don’t think I would like to have had censorship, exactly, but I often found myself in VERY unfamiliar waters and being able to discuss what I was reading with one of my parents might have been a relief at times.
But back to Mrs. T***. I like to think that her position at the library, surrounded by books and encountering other readers was a grounding experience for her. That whatever demons pursued her could be kept at bay in the library. And her willingness to grant the freedom to read whatever caught my eye was a very valuable gift, which some 50 years later I still enjoy daily.
Though the story of my first public library card is lost to the mists of memory, I’ll never forget my first school librarian who, I think, did more than perhaps anyone else to feed my addiction to books.
She taught a once-per-semester “library class” dealing with such wonders as the Dewey Decimal System and the proper use of a card catalog. She was a quiet, gentle woman, but she remembered all her students and what they liked, and was quick to recommend new books — as such became available — to the students she knew would enjoy them. She also bent the weekly checkout limit for students like me who read quickly and could be trusted to return books promptly once completed.
Mrs. Mason died of a stroke when I was in 5th or 6th grade, my first real experience with profound loss. New librarians were hired, and in turn I moved on to other school libraries, the public library system and college libraries. I even worked for a time in a college library as a systems analyst, and met — and became friends with a lot of librarians.
But nobody will ever share that special spot in my memory. Now that I’m making an increasing portion of my living writing, I think of her often. Wherever she is, I hope she’s proud.
From the time I could string words together I was a voracious reader. The library in the small town of 17,000 where we lived during my elementary school days played a major role in my life.
This was the war and post-war days of the ’40′s. For several years, children in North Carolina were not allowed in public places during the summer because of the polio scares. Mother would bring the allowed number of books to my sister and me. Even if we were re-reading, it made the summers bearable. There were books by contemporary authors— such as whomever was writing Nancy Drew at the time, as well as Laura Ingalls Wilder, but also an unremembered title/author of a book on the internment of the Japanese as seen through the eyes of a young girl.
The school had a small library, but I don’t remember it as being very interesting. Those books would have been from the 20′s and 30′s as I recall some illustrations being art deco, which I loved.
I grew up going to the Jonesville, Mi public library with Mrs. Pogats as the librarian. My idea of the best way to spend an afternoon was to ride my bike to the library, check out enough books to fill the basket and then stop at the Tastee Freeze on the way home. The library was in a converted house, the children’s books and the reference collection were in the front. I still remember the thrill of walking through the big doorway into the adult fiction section, turning left and finding the “A’s”. Did anyone else ever decided to start with A and read everything? I tried but didn’t make it. When I was 14 we moved and the first thing we did after getting settled was get library cards. Unfortunately the old fuddy duddy who manned the desk was a stickler for rules and would only let me check out books from the teen section.
My elementary school librarian was Mrs. Walker and she was a joy and delight. One year I was really, bored with my classes and would go to the library before school started and check out something, often The Velvet Room by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, read it under my desk during the day, finish it by afternoon recess and go and get something new to read at home that night. I loved Trixie Beldon and Nancy Drew. I thought that high school would be just like in the Rosamond DuJardin books (I was in for a big shock) and met Betsy-Tacy and Beany Malone who became life long friends. I’m another one who grew up to become a librarian.
I’m impressed by the devoted readers on this blog. I never learned the Dewey Decimal System and didn’t have a library card until later in my adult years..and even then, I tend not to use it. It’s just too disappointing to walk through rows and rows of books and not find what I’m looking for. I loathe the reading on deadline feeling, as well.
I must have picked up the reading jones purely by osmosis. Both parents were reading every night and had a library of their own (limited to book-of-the-month club selections and other less-than-literary selections).
No one ever seemed to really notice what I was reading, which is how I got scarred for life by reading “In Cold Blood” at 10 years of age. Capote’s prose was a little too vivid at that age.
Irresistable topic! Please pardon the long post.
I’m working as a librarian now (and loving it) and am currently in library school in order to keep my wonderful job (but loving it too). In school, we were just reintroduced to Rufus M. last semester:
http://courses.lis.uiuc.edu/file.php/102/rufus1.pdf
And of course I loved Half Magic, Beany Malone, etc. Really, I think that the luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that when I was in 1st grade a spanking new branch of the Baltimore County Public Library was built within walking distance of my house! (It was the Northpoint Branch, in Dundalk, where we do indeed say ‘liberry’).
I have a question that has been puzzling me lately but is fairly on topic so I’m going to ask: Does anyone remember a series of books that were historical fiction and always had a girl protagonist who had lots of adventures (usually having to disguise her gender because girls weren’t allowed to do anything in the various time periods depicted)? Some had one word or name titles like Lark or Jade. I remember absolutely loving them as a kid but they never come up in discussions like this (of which there are many in library school) and so now I”m terribly afraid either that I imagined them or they were absolute tripe and destined for obscurity and I just didn’t realize it. In any event, I’m definitely afraid to look them up for fear of having my very fond memories shattered. (It was bad enough that Babar was discussed as classist and imperialist, etc. in a one of my recent library school courses; I LOVED Babar but went back and looked 40 years later and, sadly, my classmates and professor had a point.)
Good grief, you all lived my life too! I remember that exact detail also from the Nancy Hanks bio. I only went to the school library until we moved to a different neighborhood when I was nine. Then, all the community buildings were located in the middle of our square-mile community, and I could walk/ride my bike to the library ANY TIME I WANTED TO!!! Anyone read the camp book about Tent 5–the title and the author are totally escaping me now, but the girl/hero had an older sister who had been to camp before, but was pretty nasty to her younger sister, who was a new camper that summer.
I loved Caddie Woodlawn, Betsy-Tacy, Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Happy Hollisters, Trixie Belden, The (something) Flight to the Mushroom Planet (?),Madeleine L’Engle (I so wanted to be Vicky!), biographies, and I was another one who was shocked that high school was not like the DuJardin books
.
I became a page two weeks after I turned 16, moved on to be a circulation clerk, two jobs that took me through college, took 3 years away from libraries to try teaching, then back to a medical library while I attended library school. I love being a librarian, and shared many of the titles mentioned with kids when I was a children’s librarian.
Awesome topic, Laura!
Take care!
Patti
Wow. I’d forgotten Caddie Woodlawn. We actually managed to get an audiobook of it (there weren’t that many audiobooks back then) that we’d listen to in the car on long trips (along with the audio portions of <em>Star Wars </em>and <em>The Empire Strikes Back </em>that my dad taped off the drive-in speaker….)
Re: the historicals: Sally . . . Watson? I LOVED those books. There was the one about the headstrong young woman who went to see Elizabeth I’s coronation and fell in with a Fagin-like gang, (Linnet?) and the Scottish one, with the brother and sister who believed in Bonnie Prince Charlie. I can see the exact spot where these books were lined up on the shelf at the Catonsville branch of the Baltimore County system. Great fun, but I can’t vouch for the history.
Update — I confused two titles –Highland Rebel is the one about Bonnie Prince Charlie, while The Hornet’s Nest is the one about the siblings, sent to the colonies because they’ve gotten in trouble in Scotland. But it was Sally Watson.
The detail I remember was from the Virginia Dare biography, which speculated that she grew up as a member of the Algonquin tribe on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Virginia learned all the skills a native child learned, including “mud-walking” across the swamp to pick up fallen birds.
The idea behind mud-walking was that a child could walk across mud or quicksand without sinking, as long as her feet kept moving. I spent all of third grade trying to do this literally, and the metaphor’s stuck with me ever since.
Laura,
Thanks!! It was Sally Watson. I loved them too–my favorite was Jade, the one about a headstrong young woman who ran away and joined a group of pirates. Linnet was another favorite (that’s the one I was thinking of when I said Lark).
I’m so glad that you remember them and loved them too. In a recent conversation at work about our favorite childhood books, no one else here remembered them and they never come up in conversations w/fellow library students about favorite childhood books either. I was beginning to worry that I had imagined them (but I can remember exactly where they were on the shelf at the North Point Branch of the BCPL).
Diane
Edwards, CO
There, I was drawn to the Bobbs Merrill biographies of famous people as children. Lou Gehrig, Knute Rockne, Babe Ruth, Juliette Lowe, Jane Addams, Nancy Hanks.
Laura:
Was that the little blue books with the black profile cut outs as pictures? I LOVED those books! There was always ONE short chapter at the end, that told the young reader what this person did as an adult
. I read every single one I could get my hands on…and volunteered to work in the library after school (my mom was a teacher, so we always were there till about 4:30 or so), so I could be the one who got the books ready for shelving. You know, easing open the pages, drawing in that brand new book smell….sigh…memories…
Lois — I <em>loved</em> “Half-Magic”! It was at my grandma’s house, and I found it again a couple of years ago.
And, after reading through these comments, I’ve been tempted to dig out my old Nancy Drews again….
On my website, I wrote about Half Magic Edward Eager author <a href=” http://www.lauralippman.com/september05.html“_blank”>here</a>. (There’s a small glitch, where the title of Half Magic is dropped.)
The Bobbs Merrill books had several cover treatments; the ones I remember were beige, with blue and orange design elements. I do remember thinking the female choices were a bit thin (Nancy Hanks!), but I think that improved over time.
I also will never forget the detail from the Hanks bio, about how they prepared for a trip where they thought they might be in danger of attack by dangerous “Indians.” Mothers held their hands over babies’ mouths when they cried, to teach them not to make any sound. That struck me as far more terrifying than the “Indians.”
Speaking of which . . . remember Caddie Woodlawn?
Paul Zindel. I haven’t thought about him in years. I loved THE PIGMAN. I didn’t realize that he died, though. How sad.
As for the first adult book I checked out of the Bucksport Memorial Library: SALEM’S LOT when I was in the fourth grade.
The South Clairemont library in San Diego. It sits on a bluff up above Mission Bay and the kids section was right at the front. They had those old crank windows with slats and the slats were almost always open, the ocean breeze coming up the hill and into the building.
Bottom shelf, far left hand corner of the wall beneath those slatted windows – I found Matt Christopher’s books. It was like he wrote them specifically for me and put them right there in that corner so that only I could find them.
I just signed up my three year old for the local library’s Summer Reading (or read to, in this case) program. We usually go every Tuesday, but I thought it would be fun for him to participate.
And so the tradition continues….
Wow! Reading these posts has brought back so many memories of my childhood reading: ALL of the Nancy Drew series, most of the Childhood Series of Famous Americans, Caddie Woodlawn, and the girls of the ALL OF A KIND FAMILY!
I don’t remember my first adult book from the library, but I do remember checking out a stack of books from the Willingboro, NJ, Public Library when I was about 8 years old, and having the librarian smile at me at say, “I thought you had already read all the books in this library!” I was thrilled that she had noticed me.
If anybody’s in the Baltimore area, I had the most entertaining conversation about books with a middle-aged male librarian at the White Marsh branch of the Baltimore County Library–he was charming and extremely knowledgeable.
How can people say they don’t like to read? That always amazes me, because I know that I couldn’t get along without it.