Open. We need you. That’s what it boils down to. It’s been 11 weeks since Oregon issued its stay at home order, 12 weeks since my local library shut its doors and barricaded its books, and 10 weeks that I have been obsessively checking the library website every few days to see if there’s an opening date scheduled.
There isn’t. In fact, the latest greatest is that book due dates, originally extended through the end of March, have now been stretched into mid-September. Are you kidding me?
We’re in Phase Two, people. I can get curbside ice cream, dine out, and catch a flick at the theater, none of which means a single iota to me. (Okay, the ice cream matters, a little.) Travel restrictions have loosened, but I still can’t use the most important passport in existence: my library card. Which raises the all-important question: Why?
I mean, first of all, social distancing is totally possible in a library. Even on its best days, the local literary watering hole was never exactly a hopping joint. I mean, come on. Have you ever been in the library on a day when it would have been even remotely difficult to keep approximately 8 book-lengths away from every other person in the building? I think not.
And in the second place, if the response of local businesses to COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s that there are options. Why aren’t the nation’s libraries, the throbbing heart of hundreds of years’ worth of creativity and thought, able to plagiarize a few ideas from small business owners, if not come up with a few themselves?
Even I, a humble blogger, can do that much.
Idea One: Social distancing is going to happen pretty much automatically. The wanderers of the stacks are choice souls, few and far between. And they are marvelously respectful about personal space. Perhaps nowhere else on earth can you meet with such a charmingly distant collection of people, who speak in whispers and apologetically bob their heads with a quiet “excuse me,” if they happen to be looking at the same shelf as someone else. So just shut down every other computer station and let the people in. I don’t know how many people in Eugene, Oregon are desperate to use the library, but surely with 96,700 square feet of space downtown (not to mention the Bethel and Sheldon branches) we can make this work.
Idea Two: You’re not convinced social distancing will happen by itself? Foreseeing a run on the library? Fine. Then make social distancing happen. Open those doors to only a limited number of people. Maybe you only let in a hundred people at a time. Maybe you have a time limit (pretty much already taken care of by the parking meters—I don’t know about you but I can’t afford to spend hours at the library, much as I would love to). Maybe you even book appointments to use the library. Just tell me the number to call.
Idea Three: Take a page out of the restaurant’s books and offer curbside pickup. No, it’s not quite the same as browsing among the intoxicating aroma of earthy paper and tangy ink, but at least the end result would be a physical book in the hands of a reader. Because I’m sorry, these electronic services whereby one can “check out” a virtual volume to read on the phone or iPad? Not cutting it. I tried. I really did. But book starts with B, not e, and it will always be so for the true, dyed-in-the-page bookworms of the English-speaking world.
Idea Four: Maybe the bookmobile is due for a comeback. The travelling library has a long and glorious history in America reaching all the way back to the 1800s, and if ever there was a time to resurrect it, now is surely as auspicious an occasion as any. Everybody is delivering right now, from Amazon to the dinky little ice cream vans that somehow keep managing to scrape in enough kids’ allowances for gas money. If the people aren’t allowed to come to the library, maybe the library can come to them.
Idea Five: Bear with me here: a library drive-thru. Whip up a menu of 100 books and let people order by phone and pickup at the window. Yes, you might have to switch up the menu each day to stay in supplies, but I would totally pretend I worked at an office just so I could swing by a book drive-thru on my way home each day. I’ll take Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café (Fannie Flagg) with a side of Bread and Roses, Too (Katherine Paterson) and a tall Milk and Honey (rupi kaur). And hey, on that side, could you make that with A Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) bread?
In all seriousness though, if we want to look back at COVID-19 and be able to call it the best of times as well as the worst of times, we need our books. We need the escape that only a story can provide. We need the perspective that only recorded history can give. We need the expansion of mind and intellectual engagement that only an introduction to the best and brightest brains can deliver. Most of all, we need the pure pleasure, the unmitigated joy, and the unparalleled satisfaction of an unputdownable read.
So, libraries of America, we need you. (Before September. Way before September.) Get creative, plagiarize those entrepreneurial business owners if you have to, but open. Because America needs her books.
