In Praise of Libraries, Books, and Bibliophiles

I speak today in praise of libraries, books, and bibliophiles. This topic is colored with nostalgia for me, bathed in the soft light of memory from many happy hours I have spent in libraries exploring the treasures of knowledge therein. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is not clear that the library as I knew it as a boy, and the book culture they nurtured, will survive. A cartoon in this week’s Sunday paper illustrates the brave new world of libraries today—a world caught between paper and digital information technologies.¹

I am grateful to live in a digital information age, which provides not only access to libraries from anywhere and at anytime but also wonderful search capacities. Nevertheless, I identify with Opus, curled up with a book in a comfortable chair and surrounded by shelves full of books. I expect that it will take a while for book-loving dinosaurs like me and Opus to become entirely extinct. Something there is that loves the feel of a book.

President Hinckley evidently is a dinosaur too, with much the same feelings about books and the libraries that house them. I recall at the groundbreaking of the underground addition to the HBLL that, after marveling at the prospect that a remodeled HBLL would become the digital information hub for the entire Church, President Hinckley lovingly held up a book and confessed that he still enjoyed the heft of a book in his hand, especially books that had become familiar companions of many years. He spoke of pulling out a volume from Harvard Classics the night before, turning its pages to Washington’s Farewell Address, and re-reading a passage that was on the page just as he remembered. I have since learned from research for an article I published on Shakespeare among Latter-day Saints that President Hinckley grew up in a bibliophilic family. His father and mother were both great readers. They amassed a tremendous family library of over a thousand books.² They encouraged their children to explore the home library and read. President Hinckley became a life-long reader. Once when I visited him, he spoke of having a stack of nine books on his bedside that he was reading his way through, including Glen Leonard’s history of Nauvoo, which he noted was “very long.”³

As a child, I lived a block away from the public library in South Pasadena, California. It was a wonderful two-story Carnegie library built in mixed Classical and Mediterranean Revival styles and leisurely situated in the middle of a city block of its own. The building was surrounded by large magnolia trees, with heavy, tangy-smelling blossoms whose fragrance still summons up childhood memories. It was bordered on two sides by my elementary school and only a block away from my house, just down the alley and across the street. I spent many a summer day and Saturday at the library. Some days were spent playing on the grounds, catching Tiger Swallowtail butterflies in nets fashioned out of old pillowcases and playing games like “No Bears Are Out Tonight” after hours. But I also spent many hours inside the library too, browsing the collection and checking out as many books as I could carry home. Each summer my siblings and I participated in a library-sponsored contest to see which child could read the most books. We tried to read the daily limit. For every book read, the librarian would put stickers on a chart so that the whole community could see which child read the most books.

The library had two entrances: one for adults, which led to the main collection, and another for kids, which led to the juvenile collection. The children’s library was an especially magical place for me. Even the entrance promised that worlds of adventure lay within. Its entrance was flanked by two statues depicting a sailing ship and a knight slaying a dragon, romantic scenes from the world of story. The statue of a ship in later years reminded me of Emily Dickinson’s poem “There Is No Frigate Like a Book”:

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!⁴

Inside was cool, quiet, and welcoming. Since my siblings and I were practically daily patrons, the librarians knew us well. Sometimes our version of “Marion the Librarian” scooted us out because we were too noisy. And no doubt we deserved it. I once secretly brought Skipper butterflies into the library and released them in an act of surreptitious defiance against library decorum. But mostly librarians were our cheerleaders and guides to a world of books. One time, the librarian singled me out for a memorable honor. She invited me to be the first to read a brand-new book and tell her what I thought of it. It was called A Wrinkle in Time. What a read that was!

Since my early years of living by a public library, I have spent much of my life in libraries. I have been privileged to visit and do research in many of the great research libraries of the world, including the Bancroft and Doe libraries at UC Berkeley where I was a graduate student; I spent many hours in the stacks of books and in its marvelous reading room. The Folger Shakespeare Library in DC, as well as the Library of Congress. The Bodleian Library in Oxford. The British Museum Library. The New York Public Library. The Vatican Library. And, one of my favorites, the Huntington Library. The Huntington was only about four or five miles from my house. As a child, I knew only of its gardens and art collection from many school field trips there. I did not discover the joys of its library nor the civilized pleasures of lunching with other scholars in its tea room while conversing about our research projects until I was a graduate student.

I feel a great affection for each of these magnificent libraries—not to mention for the Marriott Library at the University of Utah and the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City. But the research library that is dearest to me is our own Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.

It is a splendid library! I love its magnificent atrium. I love its beautiful new auditorium. I love the sculpted panels that remind patrons of the importance of writing and preserving books. I like the new “No Shhhh Zones” that invite patrons to exorcise the specter of Marion the Librarian while engaging in collaborative learning. I love both its regular and its special collections, as well as its rich electronic resources that I can access from afar. I like the Library’s changing displays and its lecture series. I even like my quiet little carrel. About the only thing I don’t particularly like about our library now, as AVP, is having to fund it.

The Harold B. Lee Library is a wonderful “house of learning” (D&C 88:119, 109:8) located, appropriately, in the very center of campus. President Hinckley said at the groundbreaking for the underground addition: “A great library is the heart of a university.”⁵ It seems appropriate that the HBLL literally occupies the heart of campus.

It also pleases me that the Princeton Review voted the Harold B. Lee Library number three in the nation in student satisfaction.⁶ I feel the same way about our library. I am comfortable in it. It fits me like an old pair of well-worn shoes. I count myself fortunate to be among hundreds of thousands who have worn down the HBLL stairs in the pursuit of knowledge. I have grown up with and in this library. It has supported my research from a freshman term paper on the role of African-Americans in settling the West to an article I am doing on Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn—an ardent, eccentric eighteenth-century bibliophile who dispersed what he called “liberty books” to libraries and individuals all over the world. I shall say more about Hollis and his books in a minute.

When I walk through libraries, I often recall a passage from Milton’s Areopagitica that inspired Hollis to spend his might and means disseminating books across the world. Milton writes: “For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest . . . extraction of that living intellect that bred them. . . . they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.”⁷

I like to share Milton’s metaphor of books as vials containing the living intellects of those who wrote them when I introduce my freshmen students to this library. I invite them to think of the library not as a quiet mausoleum but a lively convention hall housing the living presence of authors. I invite them to imagine themselves as entering into conversations with these authors, who are simultaneously engaged in conversations with each other. The thought of books talking to each other sometimes has amused me as I have placed volumes by the prim Emily Dickinson against the lusty Walt Whitman on my own bookshelves.

I also share with my students Machievelli’s practice, while in exile, of dressing up at the end of the day as he entered his study in order to prepare himself for an imagined conversation with ancient authors. He describes his daily humanist ritual in a letter to a friend:

When evening comes, I return home (from the local tavern) and go to my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty workaday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death; I pass indeed into their world.⁸

This image from Machiavelli sounds stately, indeed reverential. But books do not merely inspire decorous conversation. Books can change the world. Reading is potentially dangerous, for the mind once stretched by a book never returns to its original shape. The image from Areopagitica that most appealed to Thomas Hollis, who wanted to fan the flames of liberty, was Milton’s image of books as the mythical dragon’s teeth strewn by Cadmus. He hoped his liberty books, like the fabled dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus, would spring up as armed warriors in the struggle for human freedom. Thomas Hollis devoted much of his adult life and most of his large fortune to disseminating what he called liberty books in the hope of spreading the blessings of liberty across the world. I pay tribute not only to him but also to you and to bibliophiles everywhere who resonate with Erasmus’s remark: “When I get a little money, I buy books, and if any is left, I buy food and clothes”⁹; and with Thomas Jefferson who confessed: “I cannot live without books.”¹⁰

Such is the power of books; such the value of libraries and of bibliophiles. It is good to remember this amid the daily vexations that afflict modern university libraries and librarians. There is romance and relevance in what you do. For you are the custodians of the world’s collected wisdom, the guides to a world of reading.

Now a concluding thought: We sometimes call the buildings on campus “temples of learning.”¹¹ If any academic edifice deserves comparison to a temple it is the library. The library preserves a temple-like sense of quiet and dignity of purpose. Like the temple, the library requires a card to make use of it, and some of its precincts, such as Special Collections, even require special permission to enter. Further, like the temple, the library connects patrons to the living presence of those who are absent physically, to give Milton’s metaphor a new twist. So let me conclude with a statement by President Hinckley made at the groundbreaking: “There is something sacred about a great library because it represents the preservation of the wisdom, the learning, the ponderings of all men and women of all the ages accumulated together under one roof.”¹²

May you find renewed inspiration for your labors in these reflections on the value of libraries, books, and bibliophiles. Best wishes in 2008.