Lingering in New Haven's Libraries
Last week, my Brooklyn Library Card expired. I’d used it just once – in a foiled attempt to secure free meeting space at the Prospect Park branch for my book club.
Emails encouraging me to renew my card at any location keep piling up in my inbox, yet all I can bring myself to do is ruefully flag them as a task for another day. Step 1: Become better person. Step 2: Renew library card. Step 3: Actually use it.
Loathe as I am to admit it, my adult relationship with libraries is aesthetic rather than practical. I appreciate libraries for their atmosphere – love admiring them, photographing them, and lingering in them for hours on end – but ultimately I prefer to buy my books on Amazon or at Albertine. For me, the charms of borrowing can’t compete with the permanence of ownership. I like my books for keeps.
Once upon a time, I used to have a much less delinquent relationship with the libraries in my life. I spent my formative years at my local branch in London, Ontario, dedicating summer afternoons not to making friends or playing outside, but to tearing through Babysitters Club books (where else do you think I picked up my love of Connecticut?). When I was in journalism school, right at the tail end of the era when academic research required reading physical books, I knew the contours of the university’s shitty MacOdrum library by heart. And last summer, a week after the worst thing to ever happen to me happened, I went to the New York Public Library’s Bryant Park branch – a library so iconic it hardly seems real – and slipped into a seat along one of its gargantuan tables to write until closing time. Libraries loom large in my memory.
Yet the zenith of my library patronage was undoubtedly grad school, a time when I found life so compelling and distracting that nothing short of staking claim to a century-old table surrounded by glorious gothic architecture was sufficient to make me study.
So during our pilgrimage to New Haven a few months ago, I dragged my Mom around my old haunts – namely the more-impressive-inside-than-out Beinecke Rare Book Library and the classic-Ivy-League-good-looks Sterling Memorial Library. We also stopped by the Wilbur Ross Library at the new campus of my alma mater, the Yale School of Management. But while the building is impressive (much nicer than the middle school-esque one I studied in), the less seen of or said about this book-less “library,” the better.
Both Sterling and Beinecke, on the other hand, instantly took me back a decade. You pull back a heavy wooden door or slip silently through a revolving one and suddenly you’re in a different world. The temperature drops, a hush surrounds you, and the light dims. As your eyes adjust, magic springs up around you. Giant card catalogues. Row upon row of gleaming desks. Jewel-toned spines rising towards the ceiling. And the best part about these libraries? Since I’m no longer a student, I couldn’t have checked out any books from them if I’d tried. All the glorious atmosphere, none of the accompanying guilt.
