Fair’s Fair “For Book Lovers”

From early childhood, I have been in love with libraries. My parents, non-readers, would drop me at a suburban Ottawa/Nepean library. The first time, I entered alone an immense room of old brown books. They were intimidating, inviting. I plucked them, thumbed them. A kindly librarian guided me to the Children’s Room, the portion of a library, which even today, at age 49, remains my favourite. The wee seats may be a squash, but the volumes are enchanting.

Wherever I live must be within walking distance of a library. I’ve lived near both Oak Bay and Nellie McClung branches in Victoria, BC, dragging bags of books, almost too heavy to lug. As a graduate student of English Literature at the University of Victoria, I would take a break from my studies and check out Antonia Forest’s Marlow family stories, so much more engrossing than literary theory.

Now, I am close, in many senses of the word, to the Capilano Library in North Vancouver. It is a place better than the bar on Cheers, where everybody knows my name. It is a second home.

There, I use my husband’s library card as well as my own to ensure that I maximise my requests (20 + 20 = 40, heh heh). Greed and gluttony are good things when applied to books. I have read wonderful books, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and Ian MacEwan’s Atonement, each kissed several times before its return.

At the “for sale” cart, I pore over the “discards” (bah! what an inappropriate word) in hope of treasure. (Oh, a Carol Shields, and in such fine shape, too!) Why can’t each library have elastic walls, why can’t all books rest on their hallowed shelves forever, I bemoan even as I riffle.

My travels outside of North Vancouver have been marked by finds at other libraries. My husband has been a more compliant accomplice in my search for libraries in San Diego and Paris since the availability of Internet access. Finding a special book saved the unrelieved hideousness of a trip to Las Vegas: the cubist artwork outside the minimalist library building was more pleasing than the ersatz glitz of the Strip.

A trip to England in 2000 to research the work of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is marked by a copy of Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings, delicately stamped “withdrawn, Exeter Branch.” Exeter is just miles from North Tawton, where I saw the house Plath and Hughes lived in, and got yelled at by his widow (but that’s another story).

That research, yelling included, resulted in a book, After Ted & Sylvia: Poems, my first. Just before the book was published, the assistant at Ronsdale Press asked me to think where I might like the launch: my place of employment, the local bookstore…? Sheepishly, I confessed to being more of a library sort of girl. I approached Sarah Ellis, librarian and award-winning writer of wonderful kids’ stories, about reading at the Capilano Library; she was enthusiastic; and a date was set during Library week in October of 2003. That night, in the same room in which over the years I had discovered many “finds” at Friends’ of the Library book sales, I had my book launch. Family, friends, colleagues, librarians, and fellow library users. Getting but giving back. Gratitude. Heaven.

As thrilling as it is have seen my book sold on the BC Ferries, to see an excerpt from it on Vancouver buses through Poetry in Transit, it is even better to see my book on the shelf of Canadian poetry in my library. Or perhaps that’s not quite it. Best is to notice its absence and to confirm it has been checked out. By whom? What neighbour and fellow library user is perhaps reading it even as I write this?