Public Libraries and the Public Good

In 1982, just after I graduated from college in Dublin, I left my native County Mayo and found a job and a one-room flat in a one-street town in the Irish midlands.

I didn’t know anybody there. The town’s biggest claim to fame was that it hosted Ireland’s largest weekly cattle mart. In my memory now, it was a harsh and lonely place for a 20-year-old to start her working life as a teacher in a four-teacher, rural school.

Back then, my apartment house had no residential telephone and, of course, this was way, way pre-cell phones or internet. 

However, the town's public library was open a few evenings per week, and the librarian and I had almost identical reading tastes. So when certain new books came in, she auto-reserved them for me on a hunch that I would like these titles.

Her hunches were never wrong. 

I never told my librarian friend this, but often, as I chatted across that circulation desk, the sound of my own voice startled me.  Except for those library visits and my stop at the town supermarket, I was completely alone--unless you count the seven and eight-year-olds in my classroom. 

Still, isolation had its perks. Without a TV or a record player, with little or no social life, there was much more time for reading. And the longer and denser the library book, the better I liked it.

What I Read Back Then

Now I live three thousand miles away from that town where I tried and failed to launch my adult life.

Nowadays, as I balance work and home and creative writing and teaching, I marvel at what a 20-year-old kid like me managed to read each week.   

I devoured most of the works of Heinrich Böll, the German post-World War II novelist. I read fat biographies of Maud Gonne and Agatha Christie.  

Short story collections. Novellas.  Novels galore. I remember how I wept when I read "The Well of Loneliness," a heartbreaking and previously banned love story about an illicit and banned lesbian relationship—a topic and a lifestyle that were taboo and illegal in 1980s Ireland.  

I'm still an avid reader, but these days—at least from a financial and digital-access and -download point of view—I no longer need to borrow books where the borrower before me has left light pencil marks in the margins or food crumbs in the crevices. 

But once a library patron, always a library patron. So here I am.

A Lifelong Library Patron

Being a library patron means being part of a real, flesh-and-blood or virtual community of readers and listeners.

As an author and a reader, from technology access to educational programs, to take-home print and audio books, I see our public libraries as one of the finest examples of bonum publicum or public good.

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