In these economic doldrums, Manhattan’s libraries are busier by double digits. But the city is cutting back their hours.

ARE THE CITY'S LIBRARIES TOO BIG TO FAIL?


Even in my sports-obsessed childhood and adolescence, I’d peel off from my buddies occasionally and go into the library by myself. This was small-town stuff in rural western New York. You knew the librarian, because you knew her husband who coached one of the teams in Little League. And your parents knew the librarian because they’d grown up with her. She wore glasses on a chain, and she was always nice to you — a kindred spirit you could tell, smiling with her over-bite … as she sat at her desk with books around her, stamping a customer’s card with one of those rubber date-stamps, before she slid the card snuggly into that tight back-page pouch and closed the book and handed it back, taking her glasses off her nose as she did.

I don’t know what I went in there for, really. Why did I leave my best friends to go in? Probably for nothing specific. It wasn’t for Gulliver or Daniel Boone — though it may have been for Davy Crockett, a huge obsession some time in grade school. Hardy Boys, maybe. Sports books, too. But I didn’t really need the white-framed Whipple Free Library for those. My parents were well-off and could buy me all kinds of books. I was mostly going in there to roam around. In the quiet. Among all those different-colored rectangles. To see what I might see. To find what might jump off the shelves at me.

The other night, the late architect and brilliant raconteur Philip Johnson was profiled on an obscure cable channel; they followed him walking around his grounds in New Canaan, going in and out of the half-dozen structures he’d designed on his 40 acres there. In one small building he walked into, there were books lining shelves on all the walls. Nothing else. No streamlined clocks or Rothko prints. He smiled with his bald head and big black glasses and said something about how books were the most beautiful things. They are, of course — everybody’s current iPad-gasping aside.

Libraries are filled with beauty. Bookstores, too. If you’re one of those people, like me, who sees it that way, you probably spend more time in museum bookshops than you do looking at the art on the gallery walls. You’d rather look at paintings and photographs in a big book by lamplight on your couch than slide along the exhibition walls, not knowing when to speed up or slow down, finding yourself going in the wrong direction too much of the time. You’re a book person, after all. Most comfortable with a rectangle in your hands, your eyes (heart?) all alive when you’re reading.

A book person, you may have gotten a letter last week from the New York Public Library that began like this:

Dear Friend, If you need proof that our City is hurting, step into your local library. With visits to our branches up to 18 million—an increase of 11 percent—in the past year alone, we have never been more in demand. …In the current economy, however, our financial resources are strained. Careful control of spending continues at the Library, allowing us to maintain a minimum of 6 day service and offer extended hours at many locations. But we’ve had to rely on a leaner staff and reduce our budget for the acquisition of new books and other materials by 25 percent in our branches and 35 percent in our research centers, all at a time when people need us most...

The letter goes on to ask you to become a Friend of the New York Public Library. The levels of suggested giving range from $25 to $1500. We should do it. Go to nypl.org and get the address. Maybe you can do it all online. Here’s why: About the same time the letter came, the NYPL email newsletter arrived, announcing that the city’s budget cuts were causing the library system to have to reduce hours at many of the branches. Still 6 days, but shorter hours. The Queens system has already announced cuts in their hours. Brooklyn hasn’t yet. My neighborhood branch will open two hours later three mornings a week and will close an hour earlier some other days.

I could complain about my branch. The noise of people ravenously riffling through DVDs. The library worker shelving books too loudly, the noise of it unnoticed by her because of the music-sizzling headphones in her ears. The sleeping homeless types and methadone addicts, dominating the periodical area, the day’s tabloids strewn in front of them. The cell phones ringing, answered in a loud manner. The lack of anyone seriously overseeing it all. The anger that wells up inside some days at all the distractions. The lack of comfortable seats.

But it is still beautiful to me, with its variety of books on shelves and in carts, waiting to be put back in place. And its wonderful, generous free-ness; you can actually take stacks of books home to look at. What a wonder. Let’s hear it for Ben Franklin. And let’s hear it for the mothers and the nannies who wheel in little kids to go upstairs where a spacious and wonderfully-stocked children’s department awaits, staffed by bright young women who never seem to run out of energy or patience. They must have dreamed that they’d one day be working in a vibrant library with little kids in New York City. Let’s hope they aren’t among the cuts.

A lot is asked of the libraries, especially in this big city where most of the patrons are strangers. And now they’re not going to be open as many hours as these people need them to be.

I increasingly lie awake in bed in the dark, shocked from sleep by some bump in the night. It’s a sign of age for sure and of a genetic endowment from a long-dead mother who felt the bumps too. And among the many things I think about, when I don’t just get up and start my day at 3:00 in the morning, is my recurrent plan, for this project — to every day get on the train and go to a different library in the city. Take my laptop and a marble-covered notebook and head out to other parts of Manhattan and the Bronx and Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island, beyond the reach of most Barnes and Nobles — where libraries are centerpieces of the neighborhoods, where community fliers fill bulletin boards and countertops like they do in the back of old churches. Where immigrants learn to make their way in this new and confusing place. I don’t know why I haven’t undertaken that. Maybe it’s laziness. Maybe it’s all the competing stuff of little consequence that gets in the way. Maybe in the light of day the city still seems new and confusing to me. And so I stay close to home, deluding myself that the two blocks to the local library are my small-town Main Street and that when I go into my branch, the lady with glasses on a chain will be there smiling at me.

There was an item in the paper a couple of weeks ago that said kids, when they weren’t in school, were on the internet and on their phones texting and in front of the TV just about all the time. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, and I’m not moved to go on Google to find them, but it was an unbelievable amount of time spent with some gizmo or other. And I’m sure adults aren’t far behind. Things are changing fast. The iPad is the latest thing. I’ll admit I even felt stranded a month ago when I was in the center of town wondering where the closest Kinko’s might be, realizing that if I’d had an iPhone or a Blackberry, I could find one.

Books are endangered. Skyline Books on 18th Street just closed. Biography Books has lost its place on Bleecker Street. The aforementioned iPad and its relatives are primed to take over. Maybe it’s an age thing, but I mourn. Another bump in the night. I worry that kids won’t have the private book experiences we book lovers have had.

One hopeful sign, in the midst of all this flux, is the new library branch by Grand Central. It’s bright and has big windows like a new store, and there are good chairs to sit in and read, and there’s a Teen Center where kids can come and get good books and hang out. Here’s another idea I had in the dark. Maybe the city could open more new libraries like that around town. Places with a welcoming, modern feel. Maybe any new real estate development that looks for government funding or tax breaks could be required to put one of these facilities on the ground floor of their projects. The neighborhoods could use all the books they can get. Maybe the city could also give tax breaks to bookstores. This city has long been the center of book publishing. And those traditions should be cherished and saved and helped along, like Broadway shows, and Wall Street firms, and sports teams have been.

There has to be money for books. The kid that put down his bat and ball and went inside his hometown library and never really left says so.

Photo caption:
A RAY OF HOPE FOR BOOKS IN THE CITY. Maybe we could get more small libraries like the new Grand Central branch.

Now That’s a Book!

The Catcher has it all.

I tried this just now. I opened The Catcher in the Rye randomly to 10 different places and read the first sentence my eyes fell upon. Not one wasn’t interesting. It didn’t surprise me. If it surprises you, you haven’t read it in a while, or maybe you’ve never read it. There’s nothing like it. A female friend in Cleveland said she’s read it 20 times. When I was in 8th grade in 1961, my older sister had a boyfriend visit from Boston. He was quickly the older brother I’d never had, and always wanted. He was funny, drove a little sports car, kinda looked like Paul McCartney. He could hit a jump shot even with a camel hair coat on, in loafers, on our icy driveway. His parents were dead and he lived with an old New England sea captain. His name was Billy Young. One night on our porch, I saw him reading Catcher.

Photo caption:
Our Book: Likely the most significant book to my generation.

Nose In It:

A train trip to the Midwest made for great reading time. Trains, which surprisingly don’t have wifi, give you back your sanity. Just you and a book (and the little pillow they toss to you). In my case, Flannery, A Life of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch. I bought it at Penn Books, downstairs at the station, just before departure. Perfect choice for me. When I got back, someone bought me the new Don DeLillo novel, Point Omega. The Times didn’t like it much. I did. I don’t care about plots. But this lean story drew me in. The writing is precise and clear. The right details are everything. He’s not Don DeLillo for nothing.

Nor is Dylan Dylan for nothing. I read his Chronicles (volume one) when it came out in 2004. Something made me pick him up again last week. I read it all again. It’s even better than you think it would be, even if you think it’d be better than almost any writer out there. The way he puts words together, the intelligence, the recall. Unrivaled. I felt lucky to be reading him.

Skyline Books window before it went dark.

Kindles and Nooks show me nothing.
When they add more features, they’ll be even worse.

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE


I’ve been in the Union Square Barnes & Noble 20 times since they moved the tables of new and noteworthy paperbacks and cleared the big wall of books to make room for the ‘Nook’ counter and display area, and it still looks incongruous to me. Gone is the variety of colors and designs on the books that used to be there. Instead, the new space is clean and spare and bright, like a made-up-airline counter in an old sit-com. That’s how they want it to look, I guess. Modern and sleek.

This is all coming fast. On Christmas Day, Amazon sold more e-books than regular books. That’s big, no matter how you explain it. And that’s with sales of the Nooks and Kindles still in the pre-baby-step stage. I’ve seen maybe four people, at most, reading one. Wait till they become the big deal to have. Most people won’t want a big ol’ book anymore. They just won’t. Not even a beautiful book of black-and-white photographs of Paris. No more than they want the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’ album on a 331/3 record in a cardboard sleeve, a format they would never have thought they could do without. Remember (some of you) how you’d prop the sleeve up, or hold it and stare at it like a concert poster, while the record was playing?

I don’t want this change to happen. I don’t want books to go away. I’m sitting here in the dark of very early morning in a blue knit cap like Kurt Vonnegut had on for the dust jacket photo of Breakfast of Champions. I’ve got books in wonderful piles everywhere you look, like you’d think a guy wearing a blue knit cap indoors might have. Books are art to me. If I won the lottery, I’d buy all the beautiful books of black-and-white photographs of Paris.

I find nothing appealing about the Nooks and the Kindles. I was standing next to a guy who was reading one on the subway. It looked like a Magic Slate. It was gray all over. And they’re talking like it’s a beautiful thing. I don’t get it. It might be revolutionary, but it’s nothing design-wise. (I don’t think Apple computers are that big a deal design-wise either, if you want to know the truth. They’re rectangles with an Apple logo on the front. ) Look at the covers of the books on your shelf. Some of those are beautiful. Hold on to them.

Here’s part of a paragraph from a book I’m reading about book thieves, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. This is the author talking, not one of the thieves:
…my daughter returned from camp last summer with her copy of 'Motherless Brooklyn' in a state approaching ruin. She told me she’d dropped it into a creek, but couldn’t bear to leave it behind, even after she’d finished it. This book’s body is inextricably linked to the experience of reading it. I hope she holds on to it, because as long as she does, its wavy, expanded pages will remind her of that hot day she read it with her feet in the water — and of the fourteen-year-old she was at the time. A book is much more than a delivery vehicle for its contents…

Here are two things I overheard people say; people, I think, who can’t resist new gadgets and are looking for a reason to get an e-book reader:
‘Now when I go on vacation I can take 10 books with me. I won’t have to lug all those books.’ (Please, I wanted to say, don’t bullshit yourself. How many books are you really going to read while on vacation?)
‘Now when you finish a book on the subway, you can start another one right away.’ (Please.)

But here’s the part of the transformation that’s most troubling. Especially in an age of incessant computers and Blackberries. Books are the quiet things. They stand silent. When you’re with one, it’s just the two of you. But with e-book readers it won’t be that way. Already you can get The New York Times on them, and magazines, and as many books as you want. I’m betting that eventually you’ll get a lot more. ESPN.com. Google, of course. Anything you want. Some company will give you all that, and the rest of them will have to follow. Netflix. Photo capabilities. You know that will happen.

And then it’s not just the two of you anymore. All the ruckus that’s on the other gizmos will be on the little book machines. Reading will never be the same. Come across a long descriptive section in the book you’re reading, or notice that the next chapter is 20 pages long, and your restless nature will have you pushing some button to take you to a magazine or ESPN or Yahoo or a news bulletin with a list of the just-announced nominees for the Oscars. Complete with pictures or clips from the nominated movies. Who’s going to go back to that 20-page chapter with no pictures? Not young people for sure.

Here’s a very-young-people story. I’m out West over the holidays seeing two of my kids, and two of my granddaughters who are very young. We go, for tradition’s sake, to Mass early on Christmas Eve, then we go out to dinner at a nice little place close by. The youngest child, 6 months old, will be no problem, but the older one will be squirmy at best. Early on in the restaurant, my son-in-law, no computer geek at all, slides his iPhone to his not-quite-three-year-old daughter to give her something to do, while we have a drink and decide on dinner. I’m across the table from her and down a couple of seats, but I observe her finding an app familiar to her on the shiny machine in front of her, and soon she’s sliding photos along, like adults do on their iPhones, and soon after that, with her thumb and forefinger, like adults do, she’s enlarging the photos, without squealing over the wonder of it all. It might have been Christmas Eve, but it was an epiphany to me. So, this was the future. No, actually it was already the present.

Now, my granddaughter may have a hundred books. No bedtime, no nap, ever happens without a book or three being read to her. There’s usually a book in bed with her. So, she’ll be all right. She won’t be limited, no matter what new buttons and machines might come her way, to sliding photos with her fingers.

But what about city kids, poor kids, who don’t have a hundred books, who don’t get stories read to them before they go to sleep? What’s going to happen to them in this new world? They could wind up further behind. They could be like crippled kids when their friends get bicycles. The distance will grow. They must be taught to read. They must be given books and time to read them. If it takes all of the 12 years they’re in school to get to be easy readers, so be it; that necessary skill has to be learned. It’s the only way to close the distance. Sure, I want my granddaughter to be in the front of the pack. But I don’t want her lapping anyone. If the schools have the will, they can see that everyone reads well. Reading isn’t a skill that only a few people can learn to do, like standing at the plate facing a 90-mile-an-hour fastball. It’s something that can be taught to everyone. There can be no equivocating about it.

And there can be no grandstanding. Let’s not have some computer company donate 1000 e-book readers to some school in Brooklyn with T-shirts that say ‘I’m an e-Z reader’ for a photo-op. Let’s use the 12 years to actually teach them to read. If someone handed you an assignment to teach a kid to read and told you you had 12 years to do it, you’d be dumb-founded. 12 years! Who couldn’t do that in 12 years? My point exactly.

Photo caption:
TAKE A BOOK ALONG FOR THE JOURNEY, AMERICANS. The world doesn’t need more plastic . Leave the gadgets behind.

Following Crazy Heart

You find what you’re looking for

It’s mid-afternoon and you’ve just come out the side door of the Angelika and you’re glad that’s the sidewalk you’re on. You’ve just seen ‘Crazy Heart’ and you don’t want to be a block over, walking north toward home through the endless cheesiness of Broadway. What you want is a beer in a bar with country music playing, but you’ve just come back from Wyoming and you know that bar isn’t in this town. So you walk toward the corner and you dip down into Mercer Street Books where the lights and the squeeze of books on tables and shelves makes you rub your hands together like you would have in that country bar if it were here. And you know you’ll find something. Half-an-hour later you do. A 25-year-old used biography of James Agee. Five dollars and fifty cents. Your own crazy heart is satisfied for now. You walk home, with your new book, avoiding Broadway the whole way.

Photo caption:
James Agee: A Bad Blake of his own.

Nose In It:

The book you’re reading at home that you take with you on a trip doesn’t always travel well. It can. It can ease the transition, keep you connected to home, act as an emotional buffer, be a security blanket. Or it can lose its appeal in the bright sun of vacation. The National Book Award winning-novel, Colum McCann’s Let The Great World Spin is an example of the latter. It didn’t have enough of whatever I needed to hold me while I was away. Don DeLillo’s and Joseph O’Neill’s ‘9/11’novels (that’s what McCann’s is, in its way) held me brilliantly in ways this one didn’t.

I’m reading Nick Hornby’s first book, Fever Pitch, a memoir of being a soccer fan. It’s wonderfully written, if a bit uncomfortable; his obsession is a little too intense for me.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much is a true story. Also about obsession; about rare books and what some people do to acquire them. Weirdly fascinating.