In today’s newsletter, my summer reading assignment for y’all:
- Visit your local library and apply for a library card. (Or pay your fines and renew.)
- Ask a librarian for a tour of the library building, the online catalog, and the digital holdings. Ask the librarian to show you how to put materials on hold, how to request materials for purchase, and how to use interlibrary loan.
- Check out at least one item. (So you have to return.)
Read the rest here.
In my latest newsletter, I wrote about becoming obsessed with Roget’s Thesaurus, after realizing that every thesaurus I’d ever picked up was alphabetical, and alphabetizing a thesaurus basically destroys the meaning behind what Roget was trying to do.
“We tend to think of a thesaurus as a collection of synonyms and antonyms,” writes Roget’s biographer, Joshua Kendell. “But Roget’s is essentially a reverse dictionary. With a dictionary, the user looks up a word to find its meaning. With Roget’s, the user starts with an idea and then keeps flipping through the book until he finds the word that best expresses it.”
Read it here.
Adam Sternbergh has started a newsletter, and his first dispatches concern his “Year of Reading Recklessly,” brought about by a sense of dissatisfaction looking at his year-end list.
“My reading life had become a grim slog,” he writes. “My TBR pile — ever higher, ever teetering, ever chastising — had become my enemy and jailer, not my conspirator and friend.”
(Unfortunately, I can relate!)
To spice things up, Adam set himself new goals: “Browse more. Purchase impulsively. Let books surprise me. Give myself a chance to stumble on something revelatory.”
He sprinkled some tips amongst his list of recent shelf discoveries:
Lesson 1: A.B.B. Always. Be. Browsing.
Lesson 2: Books make the best souvenirs.
Lesson 4, 5, 6: Very short books are a great way to leaven your reading routine and let you take risks you might not otherwise take. Also, trust staff picks. Also, if you set a reading goal, cheat with abandon.
You can read more over at Substack.
I love this idea of reading recklessly. I can point to two things have helped me: Kindle sample chapters and weekly visits to the library.
Here is a photo of one of the lamps that frame the entrance to the Defiance Public Library, designed by the Wing & Mahurin architectural firm in 1904. Accompanying the hand holding a torch are the supposed last words of Goethe in German, “Mehr Licht,” or “More Light.” (As @JoshLipnik explains, “It’s common to see tributes to Goethe at American libraries, especially in states like Ohio which had many immigrants from Germany at the time.”)
“More light” is a near-perfect motto to put on the side of a public library, but it’s even more meaningful when you know something about Goethe, who is not only seen as a giant of the German en-light-enment, but also spent decades of his life literally investigating light, culminating in his work, Theory of Color.
Goethe’s big idea, as far as I understand it, was that light is pure and doesn’t contain color, but rather that our perception of color is the result of light colliding with various mediums of darkness, and that the spectrum of colors we see is the result of a “polarity” between light and dark. So, unlike Newton, Goethe didn’t think of darkness as the absence of light, but polar to it, something for light to interact with. (More on the difference between Newton and Goethe.)
According to Goethe: Life as a Work of Art, Goethe sought refuge in his color studies in times of personal and political struggle. (Apparently he had a “large paper sack” made to fit all of his manuscripts, color charts, and sketches.) Many people were angry at Goethe that he was wasting his time on color when he should be speaking up about more pressing cultural matters. When Goethe finally published his book, scientists mostly mocked it or ignored it.
But his color studies colored his understanding of life. He wrote in his diary on May 26, 1807:
Love and hate, hope and fear are also only different conditions of our murky inner life through which our spirit looks either toward the light or toward the shadows. If we look through those murky organic surroundings toward the light, then we love and hope; if we look toward the darkness, then we hate and fear.
As for his last words, “more light,” while they are poetic and symbolic, what he actually said to his doctor on his deathbed was probably a little more down-to-earth: “Do open the shutter of the bedroom so that more light may enter.”
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Filed under: light
…can hold so much interest other than just the book itself. Look here at the Austin Public Library bookplate…
…and the date stamps…
…and that lowercase “i” in the library stamp, trying its best to keep things weird!
My hotel didn’t have my room ready when I arrived, so the fabulous librarians at the Richmond Public Library let me hang out in their board room and work this afternoon. I like these digs!
From @NYPL’s Instagram. (Related.)
If you know me, you know how much I love libraries, and how I like to duck into libraries when I travel. Today I posted this picture of the 3rd floor of the Oak Park Public Library and added the hashtag #librarytourism on a whim. Turns out a ton of people use it — I lost quite a few minutes scrolling through…
Here’s a photo of me in front of some punk rock flyers I saw while touring the Chattanooga Public Library before my chat with the mayor for his new book club.
My favorite part of the library is the 4th floor, which used to just be storage (hence the sign when you come out of the elevator: YOU’RE IN THE RIGHT PLACE), and is now a gigantic creative lab, with a Zine collection, 3D printers, laser cutters, a vinyl plotter, photography studio, screen printing, power tool, and all sorts of other stuff:
On the second floor, there’s even a full-blown recording studio that you can reserve for a 3-hour session with your library card:
I love doing library gigs so much, because 1) I’m a former librarian and librarians are my people 2) I get inspired by all the amazing ways libraries are adapting themselves as resource centers for their communities.
(Two years ago I was honored to deliver a few talks for the public and for staff development day at the Richland Library in Columbia, SC. I was so impressed with that place.)
As I’ve written before in my posts about how much I love my local library, library tourism, and my summer reading assignment, I think of the public library as one of the last spaces in this country where you can go and feel like a real citizen. You’re not being sold anything. You’re welcome to be who you are, or work on becoming what you want to be. The library is there for you.
Here I am speaking with Mayor Andy Berke in the wood-paneled auditorium. (It’s a bicentennial building, built in 1976.)
Here’s a bonus photo of Josh — he teaches marketing to culinary arts students — I loved how his tie matched the post-it notes that were packed all over his copy of Show Your Work! so I asked if I could take a picture.
(You also learn something every time you visit a library: one of the women in the signing line was named Tonette — a musical instrument I’d never heard of!)
Special thanks to Corinne Hill, Mary Jane Spehar, Andy Berke, and the Friends of the Chattanooga Library and the Chattanooga Airport for having me out. (If you’d like me to speak at your library, drop me a line!)
I indulge in silly little writer fantasies, like rehearsing my answers for the “By The Book” column in the NYTimes. (“If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?” Lydia Millet had a good answer: “This president? Yes. One book.”)
On Twitter, Erika Hall asked, “If you could assign every American to read one book over the summer, what would it be?” She got good answers, many of which might be on my list: Amusing Ourselves To Death, A People’s History of the United States, The Fire Next Time, etc.
If I gave a summer reading assignment to every American, here’s what it would be:
That’s it.
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