September 20, 2006
Dewey-eyed
A 1916 advertisement for a library organizer and director in Northern Wyoming required that applicants “Must be able to get along with Western people, ride and drive, as well as pack a horse, follow a trail, shoot straight, run an automobile, and be able to rough it whenever necessary.”
CP’s a librarian. She likes to visit libraries. I like to take her with me when I visit libraries. It just seems safer that way. She’ll never tell the librarians about her Dewey-eyed past, so I wait until she’s back looking over the stacks somewhere, and then I tell them. It always makes a difference. For some reason, librarians inevitably size me up with a kind of jaundiced look. Just as inevitably, they change to a more welcoming attitude when they learn about with whom I am visiting them.
Having got away from it all and having forgot my houseshoes in this current shotgun vacation with cold floors, it was with great relief to find the Chautauqua Institution’s Smith Library. The librarians here look like they can not only shoot straight and pack a horse, but follow a trail, as well. The Smith Library is at one end of a quad, the bookstore is at the other.
There’s plenty literary about Chautauqua like always, and they’re not ones to let you forget it. When I was a child, I had a folding desk about the size of a laptop computer that was, when I think about it, kind of like maybe a da Vinci computer. It was designed to hang on the wall at about desk height, the front half folding down to make the desk top. This revealed on the back a paper scroll with all sorts of exciting pictures and legends. The desk that opened out was a chalkboard that also functioned as a writing surface. The whole apparatus was called a Chautauqua Desk. This was my first exposure to the word, a word and a concept that has fascinated me ever since. When I think about it, I suppose I might have been a librarian had I had enough moxey and the chutzpah to go with it.
Actually, I did come close. It’s no wonder to me that Jane Langton wrote in The Thief of Venice that to the poet Homer, libraries were holy places like churches, and the priestly librarians a blessed race, a saving remnant in a world of sin. Whenever God grew impatient and decided to destroy the world he remembered the librarians and stayed his hand.
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