The Joys of Working in a Library

This is an article I wrote for my staff newsletter. Unlike quite a lot of the articles I've submitted to staff publications down the years, it was actually included, and got quite a good response. (I am sure I have the record for rejected articles to UCD library staff publications.) When I started, there was a printed newsletter called LibSpin. It has been replaced by a succession of online newsletters, the latest simply being called The Staff Newsletter. It's mostly just staff news. I'm pretty much the only person who writes articles per se for it. And even poems sometimes!)

I love snow. I grew up in the nineteen-eighties when snow was a rarity in Ireland, and the idea of a white Christmas seemed as exotic as palm trees and sandy white beaches. Sometimes, when I meet people who live in a snowy climate and I express envy of them, they reply: “You wouldn’t like it so much if you had to deal with it all the time.” This irks me because I know they’re wrong. I know that I would like it. Familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed contempt.

Here’s one example of familiarity not breeding contempt. I started working in UCD library in October 2001, close to twenty years ago. I can remember my wonder and delight the first time I surveyed its shelves, its apparently endless succession of books on every conceivable subject. So far from diminishing over the years, that sense of delight has only intensified. Being surrounded by books still gives me more pleasure, more of a sense of well-being, than anything else in life. It’s my “happy place”.

The world is full of wonders, but I honestly can’t think of anything more wondrous than a library.

Perhaps it comes down to the wonder of the written word itself. History begins with the discovery of writing, and when you think about it, no subsequent invention is more transformative. I can’t get over the fact that marks on a page can convey thoughts from one mind into another, even across centuries and continents. That seems to be the primordial leap, after which every other communication technology is mere refinement or enhancement.

When I was a boy I used to take a random book from our bookshelves at home, open it at a random page, and read the first lines that came to my eyes. It always gave me a thrill to find myself thrown into some story or discussion, to realize that this book had (in a sense) a life of its own even when nobody was reading it. I savoured the sense of mystery and possibility in the lines detached from their context.

I didn’t join my local library until I was fifteen years old-- partly because we had so many books at home, partly through an odd timidity. I can still remember the books I borrowed on my first visit; Brown Lord of the Mountain by Walter Macken, Water on the Brain by Compton Mackenzie, and The Complete War Memoirs by Spike Milligan. I quickly became a familiar (perhaps too familiar!) face to the library staff, and I was even inspired to write an ode to the library. “Stand here among the silent echoes of mankind”, was the first line-- I forget the rest, although the words “all history hangs in the air” featured at some point.

There is nothing like a library to induce, as Louis MacNeice so perfectly put it, “the drunkenness of things being various”. Philosophers talk about the problem of “the one and the many”, and I believe some dim awareness of it lies permanently at the back of all our minds. Why should the world be so multifarious? How did we get so lucky? It might easily have been otherwise. I feel some tingle of this every time I come across a book on the shelves that delights me with its particularity. It might be an anthology of skipping rhymes, or a sociology of utopian communities, or a cultural history of the banana. When the reader opens such a book, for a moment everything else-- World War Two, the dinosaurs, politics, religion, everything-- recedes into the background and this unique subject holds centre stage. Of all the numberless subjects and books in the world, you find yourself immersed in this one, at this time. There’s a great dignity to that, a specialness.

Time itself seems suspended in a library-- or rather, not suspended, but somehow flowing at a different pace, or at a multitude of different paces. For instance, if you browse the literature shelves, you enter into the time of literary history-- not quite timelessness, but on the edge of it, so to speak. I remember once, shelving books in the Jonathan Swift section, and becoming acutely aware of the slow “conversation” that was occurring on that shelf, by critics writing decades apart. The number of books on Swift gave me a sense of “hype”, but “hype” of a contemplative and refined type. “Swift must be a big deal”, I thought. “But a big deal stretched over a long, long time…”

Then there are the titles! The poetry of book titles is captivating. The title that immediately comes to mind is the history of children’s literature with the title Boys and Girls Forever, a title that I find both jubilant and poignant. There is also a book about cinema with the title Light Moving in Time. Or (to stay on the cinema shelves) the Graham Greene film review collection with the delicious title Mornings in the Dark. Of course, there are hundreds more, thousands more.

Perhaps it’s strange, even presumptuous, that a library assistant should write a love letter to the libraries for an audience of library staff. Who do I think I’m telling, after all? But I don’t want to be the guy in the snowy climate who becomes blasé about the snow-- or even the guy who just acts that way, out of a fear of seeming eccentric. I would rather be the guy who cries, "Look at the snow! Look at the snow!"