'In Former Times It Was a Simple Place'

My earliest unambiguous memory of a public library is of dragging a heavy wooden stool across the floor so I could sit while scanning the lower shelves. The stool must have screeched on the linoleum – once a sin in the library’s monastic silence – but I don’t remember that. The remainder of the memory is fuzzy but I think I was looking for Robert McCloskey’s Blueberries for Sal (1948). A visit to the library came with a sense of hushed formality, not unlike entering a church. One didn’t holler or run. Hunting for books, browsing, collecting a stack, was a methodical business. One worked for the privilege of one’s pleasures.

That’s no longer the case. The central library in Houston is a noisy, dirty place heavily patronized by homeless people. Older books are routinely culled from the collection. I’ve seen volumes disappear, wiped from the shelves and the catalog overnight, while banks of computers are forever occupied. Volumes are readily available on open shelves that would once have been judged pornographic by reasonable people. Comic books and “graphic novels” occupy more shelf space than the 870’s and 880’s. J. P. Celia published “The County Library” in First Things:

“In former times it was a simple place,

Where one could read without a blushing face,

With thickly bound and edifying titles,

Like Noble Greeks, and red highlighted Bibles,

And Shakespeare (sans Andronicus), and Mark Twain,

Whose humor, though defiant, was humane.

“Today it’s more permissive, and diverse,

Though who’s to say it’s better, or it’s worse.

Now crammed beside the Good Book, mere shelves over,

Are bloody tales as chilling as October,

And novelettes as lurid as those scenes

Displayed in certain grownup magazines.”

To answer his implied question, we are. It’s worse.