I remember the smell like dried mushrooms and tree bark, a touch of vanilla and sawdust and smoke. There were secret doors that I imagined only I knew about, hidden windows that filtered daylight through rippled panes of glass dusted with fifty summers-worth of salt and pollen and pelted clean again by a thousand thunderstorms. That’s when I loved it most – on a summer day when the rain cut the heat and swelled the ditches full of polliwog water but the lightning kept me indoors by my mother’s decree.
We had to drive 2 miles of asphalt winding through pine woods, twice crossing low bridges over bronze bayous, past the tiny St. Pierre’s Episcopal Church and the abandoned creosote plant, over the railroad tracks, and onto the highway that arrowed through 8 miles of marsh, arced over the river on an ancient drawbridge and into “town.” Pascagoula was twice as big as my hometown – big enough to have a Sears and a high school and a hospital. Big enough to merit a public library.
It was an old brick building – ancient by my kid-reckoning – with big windows all around and white stone steps spilling from the front door. Everything on the other side of that door was a catalyst for fantasy and daydreams. The hardwood floors creaked like the trees they used to be bending in the wind on some Appalachian mountainside. The ceiling towered twenty feet high and dust motes like tiny planets or fields of asteroids floated through shafts of light shining through the tall windows, whole galaxies adrift above the readers bowed over their books like monks at long tables.
In the center of the room, a bank of card catalog cabinets stood like a high mesa of wood and brass in a badland desert of comfy reading chairs. The card holders and pulls on each drawer weren’t just brass but an arcane alloy made of copper from the desert southwest and zinc from Alaskan mines mixed and cast in metal loops the girth of a finger to open a drawers full of secrets written in Dewey Decimal code. The stacks occupied the left half of the room, canyon walls of fiction and fact made from paper, ink and glue. I was convinced that if all the books could whisper, a flood of sound and stories would wash us away, all the way down Market Street and into the Gulf of Mexico.
(image via ebookfriendly.com)
The Pascagoula Public Library was demolished in 1987 and a bland new brick and glass box was erected on the site. It has fluorescent lights and Berber carpets and computers instead of card catalogs. I hate it, but I’m almost glad. Have you ever reread a book you loved as a kid only to find it wasn’t nearly so captivating the second time around? The old library is gone. I’ll never reread that particular book, so I can remember it however I like.
It seems a shame, though, that our sons will never have the same experience. We went to the library quite a lot when they were little guys for story time or to get stacks of books for us to read to them at bedtime. But by late elementary school, I had to beg, bribe or threaten them to get them to a library. They just wanted to stay home and play video games or watch Cartoon Network. And now that they’re in high school, they have laptops, Facebook, Youtube, and Netflix as well as an Xbox and the Nintendo Wii. Even the word “library” is becoming obsolete. Their schools have “media centers” where books are almost extraneous. The only reason our boys know what a card catalog is is because I bought one at an architectural salvage place and put it in the living room.
Can you smell them? (image via Cafe Press)
I read an article recently about the smell of old books. It detailed the aromatic chemicals given off as the organic materials they are made from – the paper, glue and ink – decay. Books die, it said, but that also means they have a life. And in the course of that lifetime, they actually absorb certain strong odors, too, from things their readers expose them to like cigarette smoke or coffee. That’s what future “media centers” will lack along with the card catalogs and world globes and the maze-like stacks. One thing will be noticeably absent – the smell of all those living-dying, well-handled books.
A small price, you might say, for our kids growing up with a whole world of information and literature at their fingertips. And it is, I agree, an amazing time to be alive and curious. Until the power goes out.
*This post was written in response to the WordPress Daily Post Writing Challenge. Check it out at:
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/writing-challenge-details/
I feel exactly the same. I love books, the look of books, the atmosphere in old libraries, and the smell of old books. Great picture of the trees in the library, by the way.
And the feeling of holding a book in your hands and turning pages – a kindle will just never be the same. I knew you were a bibliophile right off the bat. I think one of the first posts I read on your blog was about going to a used bookstore and stacking books to make poems from the titles which sounded like great fun (and I still need to try. I tried one day at home but wanted more titles to choose from). I love used bookstores too. Some of them are as cool as old libraries. Isn’t that a great picture? (I do love what you can find on the internet. I just love what you can’t find too – like real books.)
Very true. And yes, I’m a bibliophile. I was a librarian in Holland, and a more or less librarian a few times here, but my degree was never recognized. By now libraries and technology have changed so much, I’m not that interested anymore.
Enjoy savoring through the senses of one who can call that smell, taste, touch, sound, or sight by its true name. Wonderfully creative and vivid, thanks!
Thank you! Recreating the sensory in words is one of my favorite things to try and do and I’m pretty pleased when people like the result. Thanks for reading.
That first picture is amazing. LOVE it. Nice post!
It is a cool picture. If you go to the website in the caption, you can download the wallpaper I think. Thanks for reading!
No problem, keep posting. I’ll visit again soon.
A beautiful tribute, Tori. I love the image you found.
Our old Carnegie library was replaced by an award-winning green building with a natural prairie yard and renewable energy sources. I loved the old library, too, but am so proud of our new space. Plenty of room for both the old books and new technology.
Your new library sounds amazing! How cool would it be if all new libraries were like that?
Thanks for the great article. I am fairly young (27) and work as a product designer in central London – an industry full of people who love the next gadget! My job is 15% of my life, to be honest Im working towards being a yoga/qigong teacher. It is so refreshing to read this post. I often think that people just don’t get it, that technology isn’t everything….maybe m just in the wrong industry! Thanks again for sharing, I agree wholeheartedly – nothing beats a good coffee stained dog-eared book!
An old friend has been urging me for many years to try yoga and I have just recently begun to dip my toe in the water. I know very little so far but am very interested in learning more. I look forward to reading more on your blog.
The new Gulfport library can never take the place of the old! It basically has a moat surrounding it, and I could watch the fish that swam there for hours! Another victim of Katrina I am afraid.
That’s a shame. Katrina took a lot (including my parents’ house). What a monster of a storm. Good to hear from another Mississippi Gulf coaster, though! Thanks for reading.
Very nice !
Thank you!
Lovely post. There are so many people in the world who yearn for the feel of a book and the potential it offers. While there is a chance some will leapfrog into a new connected world -particularly in Asia – for many the gulf will become ever wider.
Here’s hoping things will change and every child will one day have access to books and/or the internet.
ah, wonderful article… and you’re absolutely right. it’s a sad thing.
funny — i have that first image sitting on my desktop. kindred spirits!
Thanks, Serenity-Fey! I’m not surprised you were drawn to that image, too. Very cool.
Great post. Love the image you describe of your old library. I hated my old library as a kid and I’m sure glad it’s gone! I hated going there and I don’t think I ever checked out any books. Thankful I have an excellent replacement now.
Aww. That makes me so sad for the kid-you! But I’m glad you have a good library now
It’s OK. I’m making up for lost time.
Well, dang. Look at that. I just checked you in my reader and now here you are on FP! Woohoo! Congrats!
Woohoo! Thank you!
I wish there was a library that looked like that!
Me too!
True on the organic rewards of books. True on the nostalgia for old libraries (though technology is a good thing it should have been integrated with respect for the architecture), and by extension true on the organic reward of LP records. 12″ art work with sleeves of info and creativity. Two sides of the vinyl which many artists used as part of the story/theme of the album. The hiss and pop of an album as it earns its value through playing (and almost never wore out unlike the cd which was originally marketed as being forever pristine). And ambient sound, so warm and natural compared to sterile,digitized recordings. All that we have lost in LP’s we have lost in libraries and are losing in the transmogrification of reading material.
Yes! I agree on all counts. And what an eloquent description of the intrinsic value of LPs.
Hey great post right there! I am following you now, if you ever want to know about Ocean Paddling then follow us back. Cheers!
Thanks and I will! Unfortunately, I live 200 miles from the ocean but one day I hope to correct that. In the meantime, we visit as often as possible.
Oh my goodness! What a beautifully written post. Good for WordPress for recognizing you – congrats! I, too, am enamored of the sensory in words,, and your writing is gorgeous. The topic is close to my heart — you brought back a tiny one-room library we used to go to when I was a little girl. The smell, the creaky floor. i see it all in my mind at knee-height.
I’m so excited to have been introduced to you by FP.. I’m following!
Thank you for your kind words and for following! I’m glad I managed to evoke good memories, and I appreciate your sharing them. I really enjoy hearing from other library-book-lovers.
The gravity of absent current was hoisted to the front of my thoughts by an opinion article that asked what exactly we would do when the power went out. And here, brought up, I wonder: would we know enough to recover it? Despite the damp and mold, aging and weight and volume, authors had their works published on paper, language-in-text, disseminated in that medium. It was not fear of fire that prevented the writing; there was no other alternative. Now our letters spring up from black abstractions; we take for granted each keypress to provoke the familiar glyphs. Where be our knowledge once time invokes decay – which fragments will they keep of the slideshow-pages on their recovery tablets? Curators and Electricians in amber or cerulean, striding amid mainframe aisles, tracking and cataloguing every stray scrap, archives of an information explosion. Supposing they could only preserve a fraction, which of our correspondences would survive?
Excellent question. And what an eloquent way to pose it! I enjoyed your comment and righteous wordsmithery.
I’ll never own a Kindle or anything like it.
I don’t think I’m the Kindle type either.
Love it! Your post is beautifully written and, to me, actually reads more like poetry than prose. Congratulations on being Freshly Pressed.
Thanks and thanks again! I’m glad you enjoyed it.
I love the very first picture! Cool!
That is a cool picture, isn’t it?
yeaahh!!
I remember that library and the places you described. It’s sad for me to think it’s gone now, but then Pascagoula has changed so much from what it was when I was a child and teenager. Thank you for pulling out those old memories to remind me of mine.
Oh cool! A Mississippi girl! I haven’t been to Pascagoula myself in many years, since before Katrina I think. I can only imagine what it looks like now. I’m glad I could evoke good memories.
One, LOVE the first picture. Where is it from anyway? Two, good article. I, too, love to smell (that sounds a bit weird when written like that) and read physical copies of books. While I totally understand the pros of digital books, and I am certainly of the generation who uses them more and actual books less, I just prefer actual books. Always have and I think I always will.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your love of books. Cheers.
beautiful post, and that first photo is just enchanting! I totally agree with you,I refuse to own and will never own an electronic reading device of any kind – a book just isnt the same with that book smell, pages to turn, illustrations to look at and paper to feel – its half the magic of reading a story in the first place. Im never going to curl up in a chair by the fire with my favourite ‘digial copy of a story on my electronic ereader’, just doesnt have the same charm does it?
fantastic post
http://www.handmaderaspberry.wordpress.com
love this post
You described Pascagoula to a “T”. We drive through Pascagoula on a regular basis from Texas to our condo that sits on beautiful Pensacola Beach. I loved reading your post and I agree with you on how technology has changed some things for the worst such as old libraries . New does not always mean “for the better” in my opinion. Some things are better left alone.
Congratulations on being FP!
I totally agree, I remember spending hours reading books up the Guava tree that we had in our backyard. I am So traditional when it comes to reading books, i like to hold them, turn the pages, smell the pages, its just not the same online!
A few years ago they closed my lovely inner city library, which was a ten minute walk from my house. I spent hours there as a kid and it’s a shame that this institution no longer exists, and that we now have to drive to the next closest one.
I was never too much into reading, I always wanted to work on a computer. Laptops were fairly new then. It all changed when I started my MS degree in software engineering. It’s like my dream was coming true but I started missing my library and my dear books. Its really strange but I am a bookworm now. I do have an iPad and can afford Kindle but I like to read from paperbacks. I have even built my personal collection which now has 63 titles. I frequently reread some old favourites and the smell of my books is very comforting
I really enjoyed reading your memories of the old public library. It was great to read about another book lover! Your description of the smell of books brought me back to when I worked at my grandparents’ bookstore. Many of their books were old, since they didn’t care much for making a big profit. Computers and tablets are powerful and convenient, but they greatly lack the character of old libraries and local bookstores. Here’s to cherishing those printed books and the place where you actually find them.
Look at you!! All FP and stuff! Great start!
Thanks! Yes, it was a happy surprise.
That was a beautifully written piece. I especially loved your comparison of dust balls to planets hanging over the ceiling, and the smells of various things in the first paragraph. And of course, the abrupt ending sentence that makes everyone reading, including one who’s so tuned into technology think twice. Some sentences were a bit long, but the descriptions are vivid and burn into my mind. Last but not least, thanks for introducing me to the writing challenge!
Beautiful description. So lovely. I remember getting lost for hours in my own local library. I miss the card catalogues and later getting to say the word ‘bibliofeesh’ which I have written like it sounded and now realize I have no idea of what it really is spelled like. Ha! It facilitated research of old articles… Anyway, this was a lovely piece. Thank you (:
I’m thankful to have stumbled across your blog. How interesting! I, like your other readers, am the same- as a writer, there is just something about physical books (especially worn ones with creases, cuts and bruises) which add so much character. I was shattered when a friend lost my roughed-up copy of Alex Garland’s ‘The Beach,’ which had survived countless journeys across Northern Australia and Thailand. Feel free to drop by my blog sometime if you like- I like to provide inspirational food for thought, and talk about issues of the heart. Best wishes.
Part of my professional life is wine. Often, I’ll smell ‘an old library’ when I’m meditating on a wine, and it’s hard to break it down into smaller pieces. I grew up loving books, and my home is covered in them. It’s one of those things that I’m determined, despite enjoying the digital age, to entirely lose. I like to think of Captain Picard in his quarters, reading a physical book instead of one of those data pads. Maybe there will always be the enthusiast carrying a torch.
I grew up in Mississippi, and visited the Gulf Coast often, thanks for bringing back many great memories.
I have tons of cousins in Pascagoula. Thanks for the trip back there