National Library Week and the Public Good (bonum publicum)

How public libraries might be our last true bastion of bonum publicum or public good

After I graduated from college in Dublin, I set up house in a studio flat at the top of a house in a tiny, one-street town in the Irish midlands. The town’s biggest claim to fame was that it hosted Ireland’s largest weekly cattle mart. In my memory now, it was a lonely, cow-shit-smelling place for a 20-year-old to start her working life as a teacher in a four-classroom parochial school.  

Back then, 1982, 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 rural 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 When

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 writing and a trillion digital distractions, 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  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 point of view—I no longer need to borrow books that other people have read before me, where someone has left light pencil marks in the margins or cookie crumbs in the crevices. 

A Lifelong Library Patron

The Emma L. Andrews Library and Community Center — my local library where I volunteer and serve as commissioner.

Being a library patron is not about money.

It's about being part of a real, flesh-and-blood or virtual community of readers.

For me, it's about remembering the things and the people who were there for me during the lowest and loneliest times of your life.  Our public libraries might be one of our last bastions of genuine bonum publicum or public good.

So during this year's Library Week 2022, let's remember and celebrate our public libraries and how they save us.