The following is a love letter to librarians from Lizzie Skurnick, author of the recently published Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, a sentimental look-back to the children’s and YA books we loved in our youth.
Who could forget Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen and Lois Duncan’s When the Bough Breaks — books that dealt with the lives and dramas of adolescent girls on their own terms, in their own worlds?
Shelf Discovery is a funny look at these important and, for many adolescent girls, life-changing books. It includes essays from other writers on their favorite well-and little-known teen books and authors, in-depth essays about the leading teen authors, a cover gallery, “extra credit” reading lists, plus an online component with Q&As from famous YA authors featured in the book, vintage cover art, a “plotfinder” section, recipes for unforgettable meals from YA books (Harriet’s tomato sandwich, anyone?), book club guides, and a place for readers to post their own memories and insights.
So…to the lucky first 25 who reply to this post, we will send a complimentary copy of Shelf Discovery. We’d love to hear what you think of this trip down memory lane, so send in your reviews and we’ll gladly post them. Happy Reading!
Dear Librarian,
I can still remember the exact cover of the book (pink plastic dust jacket, fraying) and where it was shelved (fourth bookcase on the right towards the back, middle of the second shelf from top). The spine had long since been rubbed to illegibility, and, looked at from the side, the crumbling pages were jagged, like teeth. The condition of the book may have been due to the fact that my grade school library in Englewood, NJ simply was in dire need of funding. But I suspect I inflicted much of this damage personally—since for a period of some months, that copy of Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl was, twice a week, the only one I ever stamped out.
For a child, stepping into a library is the literary equivalent of eating dinner at a new friend’s house—a meal filled with strange spices and preparations, people who serve salad in bowls on the side or corn without butter; people who (!) only drink water. One week, my Old-Fashioned Girl was missing, so I had to make do with some Burnett (handily shelved almost alongside; it wasn’t a very big library), who sustained me until whoever had taken my Alcott (you can see I’m not the ideal library patron) finally returned it, at which time the sympathetic librarian gently pushed me towards Bradbury and Cather, presumably trying to alert me to the rest of the alphabet in the case of another emergency.
In Shelf Discovery, my reading memoir of the books that filled my formative years, I’ve tried to go back to that exact combination of doubt followed by passionate ownership, when a gap where “Zia” was supposed to be shelved could seem an impossible betrayal until I looked down to find Zindel; where the end of the 40 minutes we were allotted to read was maddening if it wasn’t already Friday, the only day we could go ahead and actually bring the books home.
Now, books increasingly can be indexed, searched, located and downloaded with a click, and we devote a lot of (digital) ink to the vast benefits of having all texts at our fingertips. A passionate clicker, I am not insensible to such benefits, but there was also something wonderful about the sheer unavailability of texts in that library of my childhood, where the eclectic collection’s works were removed or added without notice; misshelved or stolen (ahem) outright; absorbed only in meted-out intervals; only chosen for lack of what one was actually seeking.
A library, unlike a private collection, is by its very nature a hodgepodge of recommendations both deliberate and unintentional, a place where serendipity triumphs over natural selection, a place where we must be alive to new ideas whether we want to be or not. In that public school library, I learned that the items I didn’t know I wanted were often the ones I grew to treasure the most, and that to make do is to also make discoveries. That was not only a guide to the best kind of reading. It was a guide to the best kind of life.
I hope you enjoy Shelf Discovery! Let me know what you think.
Yours very truly,
Lizzie Skurnick