When Your Upper West Side Co-op Has a Secret Library in the Basement Laundry Room
Think what you will about Kafka’s famous claim that a book must be an axe to break the frozen sea within us. We read other kinds of books in addition to the tremor-inducing ones. What Kafka’s dangerous, proud pronouncement does not take into account is the conditions, the very places, in which we read any books: whether murderous or life-affirming, complex or simple, tragic or comic, heavy or light. For many of us, the library is the—dreadful phrase—safe space, that place where blood pressure goes down, imaginative and intellectual pleasures abound, where silence at least used to prevail, and where the world’s plenty is at one’s finger tips.
I have spent my life in libraries. When I was 8, my family moved to the green Philadelphia suburbs. I went to the local library to get my card. It was a proud moment. In ninth grade I did my first “research” paper, encouraged by a noble English teacher with whom we were reading Les Misérables. For reasons unremembered, I decided to write about the Paris sewers. Mrs. Ehrlich told me to go to the main branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, near the Benjamin Franklin Parkway: a splendid, 1927 Beaux Arts building by Julian Abele, modeled on the Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. These were the days when a 14-year-old boy could safely use public transportation on his own. (He still can, of course, although fearful parents refuse to believe it.) I presented myself at the research desk and asked to see the maps and plans of the sewers, which then appeared at my desk. Ask, and it shall be given. A scholar, although not a future engineer, was made.