My editor asked me to write a post for Avon Loves Librarian’s
Week because I used to be a librarian. Well, sort-of-not-really. I spent
several years writing catalogs of rare books and manuscripts for major auction
houses in London and New York. My love for the rare book
business made its way into my historical romance series,
The Burgundy
Club, featuring a group of Regency era book collectors. Later I worked in
Special Collections at the Dartmouth College Library in Hanover, NH,
cataloguing a collection of plays, playbills and other items relating to the
theater. I’ve used some of what I learned and saw in my books. (Writers are
champions of mental recycling.)
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The Radcliffe Camera,
Oxford. |
My earliest library memory is of the mobile library van that
toured our part of rural England. It stopped about half a mile from our house
and my mother would walk us there to stock up on enough books to last two
weeks. (I always ran out.) Since then, I’ve used all kinds of libraries, from
the local library in my small Vermont town to the greatest of all, like the
British Library, the New York Public Library, and Paris’s Bibliothèque
Nationale. No matter how large or small, there’s magic in entering a room full
of books, a feeling of endless potential. You never know what treasure of
knowledge or entertainment awaits you.
At Oxford University, the library I used most was the
Radcliffe Camera, the great domed building that housed the history and English
collections of the Bodleian Library. Later I used another famous circular
library, the Reading Room of the British Museum, where luminaries like Karl
Marx, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker worked. The British Library has now moved to
new premises and I love it for it’s breathtaking efficiency. In the old reading
room it could take hours, days even, to get a book and quite often the item you
requested had been lost. But the staff were always wonderfully helpful. I
remember once needing to look up one section of a work that came in dozens of
volumes and I didn’t have the proper citation. Against the rules, a librarian
snuck me into the stacks to find what I needed.
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| The old round Reading Room at the British Museum |
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The old British Museum stacks.
I've been there! |
In New York, I got to know the legendary Lola Szladits,
curator of the NY Public Library’s Berg Collection of English and American Literature.
Her motto was “what Lola wants, Lola gets.” The tales of how she bribed and
cajoled the archives of numerous writers into her hands were fascinating. Lola
is an example of how a great librarian can make a collection.
Lola tried to persuade me to go to library school and become
a librarian myself but I never wanted to be on that side of the library desk. I
enjoyed the two years at Dartmouth but it was enough. Working as a library
cataloguer did make me appreciate a side of librarians that most patrons don’t
see: the painstaking and frequently tedious work of cataloging and shelving.
Because if a book is wrongly described, or shelved in the wrong place, it is
basically lost and useless, unless discovered by serendipity.
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| The main reading room at the New York Public Library |
This weekend my local library holds its annual summer
festival and fundraiser. It is with great pride that I see my name listed as
sponsor and local writer. None of us, readers or writers, would be where we are
without libraries and the dedicated people who run them.
