Free the Books!

No healthcare. No abortions. No help to anyone but the bonus class. And now no books?!

The entire Free Library system of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is closing as of October 2. No more books will be lent; no more after-school, ESL or myriad other programs will be held. Budget cuts are leading to the end of books for all those who are dependent on this noble free service. I have probably never used the word “noble” before (at least, not clean of irony), but for me libraries are key to democracy.

I grew up in a Pittsburgh home with few if any books. Once I discovered the free library, weekly visits were integrated into my family’s weekend rituals. We’d get a bit dressed up – not Saturday best, like when I flew on an airplane for the first time on my way to college – but go-out-and-be-seen clothes. My show-off mother, full of airs and graces, would come out on the porch and yell towards the house, loud enough to penetrate all the attached row houses next to and across from us, “Let’s get Susie to the library,” and out would come my dad and maybe my brother. The three of them would go have a kosher hotdog at the famous Original Hotdogs, around the corner from the library, while I piled up Marjorie Morningstar and Exodus.

Many years later, while living in an Absorption Center in a then-small town (now bloated) in Israel, I spoke to the librarian about their lack of books in English. “Would you be willing to stock it?” she asked. She gave me carte blanche at the two Tel Aviv used bookstores with English books and I began to visit weekly. All I had to do was select and pile my choices. The store boxed and shipped them to the library.

I started with my beloved 19th Century literature – Dickens, Thackeray, Austen, Gaskell, Alcott, Twain, Bronte, Elliot – okay, I’ll stop. Then I began filling in around that – non-fiction, academic, literature from other centuries. I loved feeling so personally invested in a local library.

In Britain, throughout the 1990s, my genteel crumbling local library was in walking distance and I loved the way they organized sections for activists – a women’s aisle, a queer section, another of literature by authors of color, and the way they stocked all the radical publications.

Right now I have an amazing library just five minutes away with a reading room that gives off that handsome, musty feeling of the old British Library’s reading room.

Without libraries, there is little chance for class mobility. With all its bullshit about America being a meritocracy, that all you need is to work hard (at least in the days when there were jobs), that the cream rises to the top, that you just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, in fact we sit with France, Italy and the UK at the bottom of the class mobility list. (Denmark, Norway, Finland and Canada are at the top.)

Of course the Internet, you are saying, is the great leveler. That’s assuming that every kid has a computer. Those who don’t? They can use them at the library. In fact, they can learn to use a computer at the library. Librarians can help folks who don’t know where to start or how to continue. Let’s not forget that librarians were the one professional group who absolutely refused to go along with the Patriot Act demands to reveal info about their patrons.

The Philadelphia libraries that are closing do a lot more than lend books. They take books to groups in the community who can’t drop by the library very easily, like to senior centers and homebound individuals; there are programs for children and for job-seekers; they have the world's largest lending library of orchestral performance material; they have books in Braille, large print and recorded books.

A lot of people will be bitterly disappointed if Philadelphia goes through with this unthinkable deprivation. Even more people will find their lives becoming limited. Free libraries even out the playing field a bit, and with so many people affected by the greed of the bonus class, even a little bit is something.

I’ve been to a lot of libraries in a lot of places in the world, but I’ve never been to a Philly library. I hope that I’ll have that chance. The CEOs have received obscene rewards for taking us all down. They’re clearly feeling all stimulated, but for me, this blow is simply too, too much. Don’t lock up our books. Free the books!

Comments

[amazon grace]

I have been in Philadelphia libraries many times--I grew up there. Wow. This is devastating. Of course this is a funding issue (I checked out your link at the top of the article.) Hopefully the Pennsylvania Legislature will act to restore funding. I can't imagine that this would be good publicity for them.

[C.S. Lewiston]

Boy, I tell ya, I live in upstate New York. I thought *my* home state's government was dysfunctional!

I'm thinking (and hoping) that the library thing is merely an attempt at blackmail by pols playing budget games or trying to counter same. Otherwise, this would set a very bad precedent and threaten to officialize the central principle of Reganism - that there shouldn't be public *anything*. Just think about it, police departments, fire departments and trash collection, all of it managed by the same kinds of free-market entities which have so effectively managed our health care for years...

Liberals believe that access to information should be free. Traditional conservatives believe that everyone should have the means by which to better themselves. Totalitarians don't want people *reading*. That leads to independent thought, fercryinoutloud! What they want is us (and our kids) sitting in front of our TVs watching Fox News or some kind of Madison Avenue mind rot.

[Dr. Susan Corso]

Amen, Katz! How could they?

[Gema Gray]

Oh Lord! Don't even get me started!

I had those same Saturday outings to the library back on the UK as a child. I read everything they had in the children's building by the time I was 10 or 12, so the librarian would walk me over to the adult library and supervise me there while I chose books. She made suggestions, explained any potentially inappropriate material to my mother so that it was my parent not her who censored my reading, and generally stimulated my already prolific reading habits.

When my Spanish grandfather came to live with us for 6 months I took him there, and they set him up with everything he needed and showed him their Spanish-language books and newspapers. He spent much of his time there, feeling welcome in what to him in his 80s was a strange land.

But the books were universal...he had fought during the Spanish civil war to protect his local library just as the Fascists were censoring the Spanish greats such as Federico Garcia Lorca. They holed him up in a basement with all the books and gave him a rifle. He was there for months reporting for his literary duty. He taught himself to read that way - never went to school - and began reading with the "A"s and ended with the "Z"s...He remains to this day the most well-read person I have ever met.

People have fought and died for books and libraries and now they're shutting them down! My grandfather is surely restless in his grave tonight.

[Sue Katz]

Gema, that is a simply amazing story about your Spanish grandfather. Wow. What a picture your have drawn of him in that basement with the books. Thanks.