When I was a teenager, we
spent part of one summer with my Aunt Ruth in Easton, Pennsylvania. This was
exotic ground for kids from an isolated Alaskan homestead and we were enchanted
by this small city’s urban pleasures. My aunt lived in a house that resembled
the dollhouse of my early childhood, a big two-storey white Colonial that she
had furnished with antiques. Silver salt cellars rested at each place setting in
the evening but she was a jolly woman who always made us feel relaxed at her
polished table.
My little brother and
sister became ardent disciples of their cousin Johnny, a kindly giant who spent
most of his free time in his bedroom watching television. He would send them to
the corner store to buy snacks and that became another hangout for them, where
they learned the joys of cold sodas and instant gratification.
I loved going for walks
in the morning when the sunlight was still soft, down the hill to the city's core where a local department store had begun to feature clothes from Glamour
magazine’s College Issue. It was still the era of classic clothes for coeds and
I wandered through the tweed and bright wool, feeling as though I’d been
transported into the pages of a magazine I used to treasure and save when it
infrequently came my way in the hills of Anchor Point.
In late summer, Easton
was much hotter than any of us was used to and the afternoons were long. Soon
after we arrived, I discovered that a beautiful house down the street from my
aunt’s was a library and mustering up my courage, I entered what to my
unsophisticated eyes looked like a mansion.
The Mary Meuser Library
was a carefully preserved old house filled with bookcases and for me, fresh
from living ten miles from a library with meager stock, it was my idea of
bliss. I’d go in the afternoon, read until supper, and often return for a
couple of hours until the doors closed at eight. I’d sit near the fireplace
feeling as though I were the daughter of English aristocracy and read greedily,
making up for years of lost time.
I read constantly in
Alaska but the pickings were slim. Often I’d reread the few books I owned
because I’d run out of new words to gobble, or picked up selections on my
weekly trip to the library on horseback because they were new books that I’d
never touched before. Selection had never been a keynote of my reading until I
entered the doors of Mary Meuser’s house.
It became the touchstone
for what a library meant to me: books upon books in lovely, welcoming, and
intimate surroundings, a private club that anybody could join. It took me fifty
years to find it again, in Bangkok, in a library that, like the Meuser, had been a
woman’s home. The Neilsen-Hayes Library was a small white house set in the middle of
a large garden. Many of its bookshelves had glass doors and shutters of dark
polished wood over the windows served as a shield from the sharp Thai sunlight.
It was a sanctuary from
the barely controlled chaos that lay just outside its gates, with tranquility
and elegance that soothed me every time I went there. A long gallery that was
separate from the library offered art and food, and chairs and small tables
were sprinkled nearby in the garden. In a country that prided itself on never
being colonized, this place provided a touch of colonial charm of the best
kind—the sharing of English words in a spot that anybody could enter to be bathed in quiet and surrounded by books.
When I returned to
Seattle after my years in Thailand, one of the first things I did was get a
library card. Although I used it often, the soul of the city’s libraries had
changed. They were media centers, social service centers, and day shelters for
people who had no other place to go. They were no longer refuges from the noise
and exigencies of daily living. A visit to a Seattle library was a lot like a
journey on a city bus, with encounters and adventures that were constant
reminders of lives that were uncomfortable, of sidewalks that held tents, of
illness that was not being cared for. I began to buy my books from used
bookstores, often online, and hated myself for doing that.
Last year word began to
spread of a private library with a yearly subscription fee, a place where
readers could come and sit and work and read and borrow books. My egalitarian back went
up immediately. Why not work on making public libraries more tranquil, I sputtered
to anybody who would listen. Why revert to the club-like atmosphere of the
Gilded Age, where aging, affluent Seattleites could retreat from the social
realities that surrounded them? I felt this way right up until the minute that
I was welcomed through the doors of Folio Atheneum.
As the founder gave me a
tour of the bookshelves, I saw books I’d loved, books I had long wanted to
read, books I’d never heard of. He assured me that this wasn’t an elitist
institution, that anyone could come to sit in the comfortable leather
armchairs, play chess with the set that was waiting on a table, read the books
on the shelves. However the subscription fee allowed readers to take the books home
with them.
When I paid for my membership, the ladies behind the counter were
warm and conversational. When I began to browse the shelves, the silence was
both welcome and welcoming.
And suddenly I was
fifteen again, within the walls of the Mary Meuser library, in a place where
the printed word was paramount and books were treated with the reverence they
deserve. Without formality, the rooms still held grace and civility, qualities
that are as essential a need for all of us as are books.
I know a girl who is just
entering her teens, a hungry reader. She’s not quite ready for the books at
Folio, but as soon as she is, I plan to take her there and buy her a
membership. I know this place will feed her as completely as the Meuser library
did me, and the Neilsen-Hayes library, and the small library in Anchor Point with its
scanty number of books, because like those other places, Folio holds the best
kind of nourishment that can be found. I know. I’m there every week, soaking up its
sustenance and feeling profoundly grateful.
