David Wellington is a delight. Some of you might be familiar with him for his Monster Island Trilogy, some might remember him for his appearance at TLA (zombie historical figures featured in his short story). Either way, I super support you checking out his latest book The Hydra Protocol, in which Jim Chapel must infiltrate a top secret Russian military base and disable an unstable supercomputer.
David has popped in today, on the birthday of his book, to share some thoughts about his childhood library.
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I’ve written before about the library where I worked, but today I’d like to take a second for some fond memories of the library where I grew up. It was sprawling and full of people. It was built of oiled wood, painted steel shelving, scuffed linoleum; it sounded like the repetitive chunk-chunk of the machine that printed out due dates. It was heaven.
It was in that library’s stacks I first found Kerouac, and Camus, and Isaac Asimov. My finger tracing across the spines of all the great novels of history, all of them there for my perusal, whenever I wanted. But go back farther, to when I was maybe seven or eight, to when I would stand impatient, hopping from foot to foot, while my Mom picked up her week’s worth of Mystery and Horror and anything with an interesting cover.
Then we would head downstairs, to the children’s library. There were programs down there. Summer reading lists printed on fancy bookmarks. There was an Encyclopedia Brown book club, and a scavenger hunt every year, and briefly, at the start of the summer, the place would be packed with noisy kids. But that would be over soon enough and it would be my turn again, the stacks would be mine to wander alone. A miser in his counting house; because it was there I learned to love books, if anywhere. Those stacks full of Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys and weird British science fiction novels for children, and compilations of Sherlock Holmes and Roald Dahl and Kipling. Stories of adventure, and heroes, that would shape how I think, how I’ve tried to live my life. Shape everything I know about writing.
Libraries are changing, of course. The new century means a new way of using books. But I have to say, those brief, endless summer days in the early ‘80s were a Golden Age for libraries—or at least, for how I think of them. What I wouldn’t give to go back there now! If you had a library like that when you were young, I know you loved it as much as I loved mine. Take a second to remember it in the comments below—at the very least, we owe our libraries a moment of recollection and appreciation!