Public Library and Other Stories

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In a poem pamphlet by Sophie Mayer called TV GIRLS, full of poems about contemporary TV heroines, Mayer lists the weapons that Buffy the Vampire Slayer uses throughout the show’s seven TV seasons to keep the vampires, demons and various forces of evil at bay. On her list, in among the stakes and swords and sunlight, is ‘library card’.

I wrote and asked her about the library card as weapon. This is what she replied:

Libraries save the world, a lot, but outside the narrative mode of heroism: through contemplative action, anonymously and collectively. For me, the public library is the ideal model of society, the best possible shared space, a community of consent — an anarcho-syndicalist collective where each person is pursuing their own aim (education, entertainment, affect, rest) with respect to others, through the best possible medium of the transmission of ideas, feelings and knowledge: the book.

I believe that within every library is a door that opens to every other library in time and space: that door is the book. The library is what Michel Foucault called a ‘heterotopia’, an ideal yet real and historically delimited place that allows us to step into ritual time (like the cinema and the garden). It is a site of possibility and connection (and possibility in connection).

Without public libraries, I would not have known there was a world outside the conservative religious community in which I grew up (and of which I would probably still be a part without the heroic librarians in our small suburban library who faced out work by Jane Rule and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Leslie Feinberg even after the passage of Section 28). I believe libraries are essential for informed and participatory democracy, and that there is therefore an ideological war on them via cuts and closures, depriving individuals and communities of their right to knowledge and becoming on their own terms.