Today we have a special treat for you, beloved LLF Readers. Instead of my ramblings, we have the eloquent stylings of Katherine Hall Page, prolific author of the Faith Fairchild series. Her latest book, The Body in the Boudoir, celebrates it's Book Birthday today, so please click through, and join me in welcoming her to our library land!
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I’ll get to blogging about my new book, The Body in the Boudoir, the 20th in the Faith Fairchild series and a prequel set in 1990, but first I want to indulge in a little Library Love Fest of my own. Whenever I give a talk, I like to relate some of my favorite library factoids: there are more public libraries in the United States than McDonald’s, 68% of Americans have library cards, and reference librarians answer on average 8 million questions a week!
Henry Ward Beecher, brother to Harriet, wrote: “A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.” My first library was housed in an old farmhouse in Livingston, New Jersey. Today, the town I grew up in bears little resemblance to the small, farming community it was in the early 1
950’s when we moved there. The children’s room in the Livingston Public Library had been the kitchen and although it wasn’t in use, the old cook stove was still there. I worked my way around the kitchen walls reading about the March family, the Moffats, All-of-a-Kind Family, Ballet Shoes and the other shoes, Misty of Chincoteague and the other horses, and all the Landmark books.
When I was about nine, I had exhausted the kitchen’s offerings and Ruth Rockwood, the librarian, allowed me to enter the parlor—the adult section! Each week she would pick out a book for me to take home and read. The first was A Lantern in Her Hand, a tale about a Nebraska pioneer woman written in 1928 by Bess Streeter Aldrich. I loved it and after reading that canon progressed to Frances Parkinson Keyes (including Dinner at Antoine’s, her only mystery), and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings—Mrs. Rockwood’s favorite authors, I assume. My home was filled with books and Ruth Rockwood didn’t instill my love of reading, but fanned the flames. What she did instill was a lifelong passion for libraries and librarians.
I’m a member of five Friends of the Library groups. I enjoy giving talks at libraries, especially at meetings of ALA, PLA, and my own MLA tion—what’s the collective for “librarians”, as in a pride of lions, “a tome?” “a volume?”
The access to libraries, and therefore information, that we enjoy in this country is rare worldwide. I can use my Minuteman Library Network card at over 40 local libraries. Simply walk in, check out a book or some other material, use their computers with no questions asked, no fee required, and nothing under lock and key. In addition to their roles as providers, librarians are also protectors.
They’re a feisty bunch. I’ve always thought so, even before the Nancy Pearl action figure came out. The figure’s hand comes up to her lips to shush patrons, a gesture I have never seen a real librarian use. More accurate would have been a librarian waving an arm in protest. In my mind’s eye, I envision librarians atop barricades, protecting our civil liberties, guarding our rights to privacy, and unbanning books.
Libraries have functioned as gathering places and centers of learning since Alexandria, but now more than ever in these economic times, they are providing services that individuals cannot afford elsewhere. Courses in ESL, literacy, computer literacy, job-hunting skills, tax preparation, writing of all sorts, and book groups for every taste are standard fare. Andrew Carnegie suggested “Let There Be Light” be carved in stone on his libraries. Yes, librarians are keepers of the light as well as matchmakers— and it’s a match made in heaven.
And a match is what my new book is all about.
Faith Sibley is a single young woman leading a glamorous life in New York City. She has good friends, a great apartment, and her own flourishing catering business, Have Faith. On the job at a wedding, she does not realize the handsome man she meets while replenishing the buffet has just performed the ceremony, changing from his robes into a suit for the reception. It’s one of those rare love-at-first-sight moments. By the time they’re in a romantic horse drawn carriage in Central Park much later that night and Faith discovers his occupation—a daughter and granddaughter of clergy she has sworn to avoid this fishbowl existence—it’s too late. The journey to the altar turns treacherous, however, and Faith almost doesn’t make it…
I had an enormous amount of fun researching wedding customs, yes at the library, and found out the traditional gift for a 20th anniversary is china—very nice—but the modern one is platinum! Yet when it comes to gifts, nothing beats books! Happy reading!
– Katherine Hall Page
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Thank you so much, Katherine!
– Annie