Some plot the timelines of their lives in years. I plot mine based on which library was, at the time, important to me. It seems a fair measure of time after all, as there are many points in my life for which time is inseparable from place.

*

The first library I can remember is that of my parents: two bookcases in their living room, flanking a gas fireplace that I only remember ever being lit once. Upholstered chairs that enveloped my small, ten-year-old body stood in front of the glass doors to the shelves, making it difficult to open them more than a foot wide. I would reach my arm in and select a book based on the title or the color of the spine and sit in front of the fireplace hearth skimming the pages.
Many of the books were Reader’s Digest condensed collections, while others were humor. For some reason, I was always afraid of getting caught reading their books. Because they were enclosed and sheltered, I imagined them as “off-limits” to me. There was one shorter bookshelf that was not behind glass, on the other side of the living room, and I remember taking them one at a time to my bedroom to read, no matter how dense the material was. Great Books of the Western World. In those volumes, I learned of Kant and Plato, Shakespeare and the poems of Milton. I just wanted to read everything I could get my hands on. They were there, I had easy access to them, and so I read them.

*

Of course, as I got older, I wanted to read more than just the books my parents had collected. As a suburban pre-teen in the 1980s – before the age of Barnes & Noble and Borders, and especially predating the advent of the internet and online retailers like Amazon – I relied on our small town’s library as my primary source of books, outside of the few I was allowed to purchase through the Scholastic Books program at my school.
The town’s library was established through the efforts of the Glassport Women’s Club, a volunteer group that held fundraisers and planned a “Book Donation Day” in November 1940 to acquire enough books for a library. With 1800 books on its shelves, the first Public Library of Glassport opened on November 7, 1941 – only one month before the United States would enter World War II.
I was a voracious reader. I meticulously tracked which of the Nancy Drew mysteries I had read, and which I had yet to read. When I became bored with the town library’s selection for juveniles, I “snuck” into the adult fiction room and checked out the novels there based solely on their titles (most of the books lacked their dust jackets). I will admit to being very disappointed when, as a twelve-year-old, I discovered that The Agony and the Ecstasy was not anything at all the novel I’d expected it to be.

*

A few years later, it was from my Catholic high school’s library that I first checked out and read Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and marveled at what a writer could do in a book. I look back now and wonder that that book was stocked by a religious school – obviously none of the nuns had ever cracked the book open to a glimpse of the large asterisk and Vonnegut’s relating of what it represented. Or perhaps I have always misunderstood those nuns. After reading Breakfast of Champions, I simply had to join the school’s Library Club, so I could continue to discover new books through the process of shelving what others had read.

*

In the late-80s, I practically lived in my college library with its vast aisles of shelved books. I wrote my senior thesis on the history of media censorship in a small cubicle that I personalized with quotes and photos. One photo was of Edward R. Murrow, who was my hero for his open criticism of McCarthyism and the Red Scare.

*

After graduation, I moved to Washington, DC, and admired the beauty of the Library of Congress, attended poetry readings by Poets Laureate, and even read my own poetry in the Library’s “Poetry at Noon” reading series.
Meanwhile, the number of volunteers in the Glassport Women’s Club dwindled. On December 18, 2007, the Samuel A. Weiss Community Library in Glassport was closed. I cried when my parents told me the news. There is something about the idea of the destruction of books that brings me to tears; I even cried when, in The Name of the Rose, the fire in the abbey library was detailed, along with the attempts to save as many of the illuminated manuscripts as possible.
On March 1, 2008, Glassport’s library was opened one final time so that residents could select books from the stacks to take home with them. Those books not taken by residents were offered to local senior centers. I made sure my parents, who still live in that town, picked out a box of poetry for me.

*

Because libraries were important to me as I was growing up, I made sure my young daughter would be exposed to the many resources that our library in Northern Virginia offered. We attended many events at the library, checked out dozens of books each week (as well as videos), and became regulars at the library book sales.
When she began to read in earnest, we even started volunteering at the library as stack organizers – going through the juvenile fiction section and ensuring that books remained (or were put back in) alphabetical order by author. When the staff asked us which section we wanted to take care of, and I replied “I can do juvenile fiction”, I was suddenly treated like the eccentric-but-wealthy aunt that everyone thinks is crazy, but who is happily welcomed because she means well and brings the most interesting gifts at Christmas. Through this volunteer work, my daughter and I were exposed to many new books and authors we’d have never discovered relying simply on bestseller lists and award-winners.

*

Several years ago, thanks to the National Book Festival sponsored by the Library of Congress, I came into the possession of a small chapbook published by the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book. Books and the World, number 22 in the Viewpoint Series, is a printing of the speech by James H. Billington shortly after taking the oath of office as the thirteenth Librarian of Congress. The speech was given in April 1988 in Philadelphia in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition “Legacies of Genius: A Celebration of Philadelphia Libraries.”
After years of transporting this chapbook with me from house to house and now overseas to where I live in Berlin, Germany, I finally plucked the speech off my shelf and read it. I was overwhelmed by the memories of my childhood library and filled with a renewed sense of the important role that libraries fulfilled for me – both when I was young and read far more than my allowance could bear, and when I was older as a stay-at-home mother who wanted to expose her daughter to more books than a single-income family could bear.
In his 1988 speech – long before the online convenience of the internet and the advent of digital tablets – Billington said about libraries “We preserve books not out of an instinctive clinging to the artifacts of memory, or even solely because books have encouraged democracy and spurred dynamism in our society. We treasure books because they are the individual’s portable, affordable link with the memory, mind, and imagination of the rest of humanity—a moral antidote, if you like, to the creeping passivity, parochialism, and shortened attention spans of our video culture.”
Books have encouraged revolutions but, on a smaller scale, books have also served to open the world to people who cannot travel. I never traveled outside of the United States until I was 29 years old. But thanks to my library card, I had read stories from around the world. I read about other cultures and histories. I learned that there was a world outside of the small town in which I was raised. I learned that there were other religions. Other beliefs. Other ways of living.

*

After moving to Berlin, I visited Bebelplatz, a plaza along Unter den Linden in Berlin, located between the architectural flourishes of the Staatsoper (state opera house) and the Alte Bibliothek (old library) of the Humboldt University law faculty. It’s a vast space, but if you wander in the right area you’ll come upon a pane of glass set into the cobbles of the square.
Looking down, beyond the grime accumulated on the surface of the glass, one can see a room of empty bookshelves. This is the memorial to the Nazi book burnings that occurred on this spot on May 10, 1933. Designed by Micha Ullman, there are enough bookshelves in the subterranean memorial to hold all of the 20,000 books that were burned. Set in the cobbles nearby is a plaque inscribed with the famous line by Heinrich Heine that translates in English to “That was only a prelude; wherever they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”

*

On a flight back to the United States, one of the films offered was Library Wars, which I at first took to be some reality show competition to see who had the best or coolest library. I, myself, cannot resist clicking on any shared Facebook link with a headline like “10 Libraries You Must Visit Before You Die” or “The World’s Most Amazing Libraries” or “This is What a Librarian Looks Like.” In fact, Library Wars is a Japanese film based on a series of graphic novels written by Hiro Arikawa. The novel series itself was inspired by the Japan Library Association’s Statement on Intellectual Freedom in Libraries.
The Statement is referenced frequently throughout the movie, and I was admittedly excited to find out that it is a real statement – as inspiring and historically provocative as it was in the movie. Leading off the Statement is the following imperative:

It is the most important responsibility of libraries to offer collected materials and library facilities to the people who have the Right to Know as one of their fundamental human rights.

The Statement acknowledges how libraries were manipulated by the government in Japan’s past, noting that “In our country, we shall not forget the history of libraries by the end of World War II because libraries contributed much to the government policy of thought-guidance, and resulted in slowing the development of the people’s freedom to know. Based on such self-examination, we have to confirm now that libraries are responsible for guaranteeing and developing the freedom to know.”

*

The idea that knowledge can be dangerous is not new. I went to Catholic schools and learned the story of Adam and Eve’s banishment from Eden for eating fruit from the tree of knowledge. I grew up wondering how knowledge could be dangerous. I have since learned that many governments and politicians in the world prefer an ignorant, docile population.

*

In the United States, the American Library Association (ALA) Council first adopted a “Library Bill of Rights” on June 19, 1939. The ALA Library Bill of Rights, as it reads today, leads off with an affirmation “that all libraries are forums for information and ideas” and includes among its six guiding policies an assertion that “Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.”

*

One of my favorite quotes on the subject of enlightenment is from Oliver Wendell Holmes – “A mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” Libraries offer this potential to everyone – not just those who can afford to buy books. Those who attempt to censor books from libraries by saying “Well, a person can go out and buy the book for themselves if they want to read it,” speak from a perspective of privilege in which they assume that everyone has the ability to buy every book they want to read.

*

Although the movie “Library Wars” is part romantic-comedy, part sci-fi dystopia, part action film, it has many relevancies to the censorship creep happening around the world – be it a school library in the U.S. that removes a book based on the complaints of one parent, or a country’s government that bans sales and possession of books considered counter to religious or political beliefs.
In “Library Wars,” the main characters are part of a Library Defence Force, consisting of trained and armed librarians who defend the people’s right to possess and read books. The Defence Force even rushes to the aid of bookstores being raided by the Betterment Committee, purchasing all of the banned books in the store to make them part of the protected library collection.

*

I think about the Glassport Women’s Club and the first efforts of its members to raise, through a Benefit Bazaar, funds that would enable the purchase of 100 children’s books as the start of the future library collection. A club armed not with weapons and armor, but with zeal.

*

On April 16, 2014, my daughter and I got our first library card for the local Bibliothek in Berlin and checked out our first book. That was when I truly felt like this city was our home. Building lives in a new country and finding employment meant keeping tight reins on our finances for the first few years.
The library was a welcome space for my husband and I to take our daughter to select books on a regular basis. It was also an encouragement for me to learn German – to understand the words I was reciting, however poorly, at bedtime, learning to love language all over again.