Rural Reading

A friend wrote to me today about the closing of the Brentwood Dutton’s bookstore, probably the last great independent bookstore in greater Los Angeles. We used to live just down the street from Dutton’s when we lived in L.A., and it was a truly great bookstore, the kind they’re always talking about having on every street corner in New York, Paris and London. You knew the owner, you knew the clerks, they knew all the books, they liked to talk about them, and they had interesting things to say. Its loss is enormous, I know, to all those who were continuing to buy and look there, but it was probably inevitable given the times.

When we moved to the Northwest, I decided to shed my book purchasing habits. In moving, we left behind walls of books for the patrons of the Salvation Army and the Good Will. It almost killed Ed, but I felt it was part of a new life to stop acquiring books. From now on, I said, I’ll depend upon libraries.

But then I washed up first in Roberts Creek, B.C., and a few years later in Point Roberts, WA, and both places had libraries smaller than most of the houses I’d lived in over the past 40 years. Furthermore, their tiny spaces, even though lovingly maintained, were not hosting a wonderful collection of The Great Books, which I had intended to re-read during the up-coming quiet time of retirement. The Roberts Creek (B.C.) library had some interesting possibilities for me because it stocked Canadian writers, of course, and like any American reader, I knew nothing about them. Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen were pretty much the extent of my Canadian literary experience. Discovering any number of other Canadian writers was made possible by that little library: Jane Urquhart, Alice Munroe, Rohinton Mistry, Barbara Gowdy, Michael Ondaatje, Wayson Choy, Jann Martell, the novels of Michael Ignatieff, Rona Murray, Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Sharon Butala, and Allison Wearing are but a few of those authors that charmed and educated me.

In Point Roberts, the library was somewhat larger but much narrower in scope as I had already read many of the books they kept. Despite my commitment to no more book buying, I found myself acquiring via second hand book stores all the works of Anthony Trollope (40+ books, many of them in the 600-800 page range). If I was going to buy books to read, at least it wouldn’t be random and they’d supply a lot of reading. I started that collection at Dutton’s bookstore, because at that time I was still flying back and forth to Los Angeles on a fairly regular basis. Later, I discovered used book stores in Vancouver and even in the next town up the coast from Roberts Creek in B.C. When visiting our children, I’d try their used bookstores and slowly I acquired them all, with the final ten or so titles being supplied by my oldest daughter who sells books on the Internet and who had come by--from some sister soul’s library--a complete set of Trollope. I don’t really have to depend on libraries now because, having read all the Trollope novels, I can simply read them again. From my perspective, to be tired of Trollope is to be tired of trees, and of life itself.

But the Internet rescued me from that potentially too steady diet of Trollope, because now the Point Roberts library will get me anything I want via the net. It’s as good as Dutton’s ever was: it’s a lot cheaper, the books don’t forever occupy space in my house (just in my head), and, except to pick up the books, I don’t even have to leave home. I just log on at my convenience, look up the books I want and put them on a list by Sunday, and by Wednesday at noon, they are in my local library and thence in my hand. Similarly, in B.C., I’ve been upgraded to internet access to all the books in the Metropolitan Vancouver region. And there, I can even get books from one library and return them to another.

What an amazing resource a library is. My guess is that it is little used by most people in urban areas. They just order books up from Amazon or Chapters or whatever is still selling retail at the mall. Of course, if people don’t buy books, the Dutton’s of this world aren’t going to last. Yet, there are still plenty of people who really can’t afford books and for them the public library is everything. I seriously doubt that, if Carnegie had not convinced the public a century+ ago that every community ought to have a public library, libraries would have been independently brought into existence. Can you imagine the electorate voting on whether it would be a good idea to spend a bunch of money to put books in a building so people can read them? I don’t hear a ‘yes!’ vote coming out of that election. Indeed, the counties are continually paring down hours and services just because libraries aren’t much of a priority anymore.

I’m profoundly grateful they are there though. And I’m especially grateful to the Point Roberts library and to the Gibson’s, B.C., library. Here’s a pitch coming. Most libraries have some kind of group loosely attached to them, usually called ‘Friends of the Library.’ They help to raise extra funds for the library to do a little more than the government funds them for. Next time you are feeling in a charitable mood, give something to them. You’ll be pleased that you did on that day when you give up buying books and throw yourself on the kind and generous mercy of the library near you.