Book lovers brave cold to enjoy library’s offerings

Our community library has been closed for several weeks due to heating problems, so long that a librarian feared townspeople would lose interest once inconvenienced.

Her concerns were allayed when one recent day it opened, rather unannounced, save word-of-mouth. Staff, both volunteers and paid employees, wore coats. The rest of us rushed in, regardless of the chill, perusing the shelves as if parading down a brunch line at a Bar Harbor inn, selecting pastries, smoked fish, and eggs Benedict.

It was as delicious, if not more so. The New York Times Best Seller list was a few weeks old, but we scoured it, moving on to books featured along the top stacks: mysteries, biographies, popular fiction, big-print books for those in need, Maine authors, children’s books.

I chose John Jakes’ “Charleston” and another by Tracy Chevalier, “Falling Angels.” Her “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” which according to Time magazine, brought the “real artist Vermeer and a fictional muse to life in a jewel of a novel,” was as good as advertised. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on another Chevalier.

My taste is as eclectic as most readers and frequenters of libraries. I’ll go from David McCullough’s unforgettable “John Adams,” to lighter reading, “Standing in the Rainbow” by Fanny Flagg, to Barbara Kingsolver’s “Poisonwood Bible,” to Richard Russo’s “Empire Falls,” to autobiographies, then to more lighter reading, to John Grisham, to Richard Ford, and back to Eudora Welty.

I devour the treats just as others do. And I miss that smorgasbord when the local library cannot serve it, regardless of its intentions and those of others.

On a chilly Wednesday, people rushed into the library; oblivious to temperature, they were dry and in need of an oasis. They left, clutching books, thanking librarians, smiling in satisfaction with the knowledge their thirst would be quenched.

How well I remember James Russell Wiggins’ love of libraries, his own, and those in the public domain. When the renovated Ellsworth Library opened, editor Wiggins of The Ellsworth American wrote this simple verse to accompany a photograph of a boy reading in a boat, a small skiff the innovative library had placed in the children’s section:

“Oh the finest place for a boy to be is adrift in a boat in a library, embarked on a craft that’s safe and sure, to sail on the seas of literature…. A boat in the library lets you know you can start to wherever you want to go, wherever your fancy may be leading, adrift in the boat and the book you’re reading.”

Local libraries, be they in Bangor or Ellsworth, Camden or Portland, provide an opportunity to sail on the seas of literature; the boat is inconsequential.

For those of us whose library hours have been interrupted, we’re here to note there’s a National Library Week, one that should be celebrated 52 weeks a year. There are just some things we shouldn’t take for granted.