My first trip to the public library

Perhaps we can use this space to tell our stories about libraries and what they mean to us. The public library in my hometown was, when I first visited at abot 6 six years old, in a little corner of the municipal building / fire house/ courthouse. (With a population of 5000, you can kind of put everything in one place.) It had a distinctive smell, of course, of books. It’s a small I love to this day. The librarian gave us all a little talk about how the library works. When she said we could actually take books home, I looked around in wonder at all the books and felt a sense of ownership. I blurted out, “You mean any of them? We can take them home?” So then I had to find one…and there were lots of choices. That was the day I learned the pleasure of browsing… Continue reading