32. All For the Love of Libraries

AMY: Hey everyone — welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes, here with my friend and writing partner, Kim Askew. And Kim, okay, it occurred to me the other day that this podcast (and actually, more specifically I guess, our reading habit in general), might just be hazardous to my health.

KIM: Uh-oh. How so? 

AMY: Well, I was in bed one night this week, about to turn off my bedside lamp to go to sleep… the stack of books that was hovering over my head on the nightstand could potentially collapse on me in the event of an earthquake (and we are prone to those here in L.A.). It would probably take a search and rescue dog to unearth me if this pile of books collapsed on me. So I ended up relocating two or three of the topmost books from the stack onto the floor, but let’s just say the book pile is getting totally out of control. 

KIM: Okay, I am right there with you, and I love this conversation, because Eric has been begging me to clean up my nightstand because it was turning into a Tower-of-Pisa sort of situation. And I did, but honestly, if left to myself, I would pile books up all over the house and love it. But he’s a bit of a neat freak as you know, and it’s not the worst thing, though, of course, in the general sense. But anyway. 

AMY: We both, I guess, are fortunate to have neatnik husbands so they kind of offset our own tendencies.

KIM: Yeah, they’d probably love to live together! Just stick us in the other house…

AMY: And we would live in our squalor happily. Mike’s not super thrilled about the state of my bedside, and I will totally post a photo on Instagram to show you the marked difference between his side of the bed and mine. Yeah, it’s funny. I wish I could say that my books resemble the wonderful, perfectly stacked and organized titles that you see on social media, but I just don’t think that I would ever qualify for being a Bookstagrammer.

KIM: Me neither. But I do love looking at people’s pretty Instagram photos of their bookshelves. My bookshelves aren’t color coordinated or in alphabetical order. I’d say it’s maybe glorious chaos, personally. But I often wish I had it in alphabetical order when I’m trying to find a certain book and searching and searching. Usually it’s just right where I looked over and over and finally, I see it. There’s just too many books.

AMY: Yeah, your eyes kind of glaze over. But this point in the podcast is when I sheepishly have to make a controversial confession. It’s going to come as no surprise to you, Kim, but maybe it might surprise some of our listeners. Yes, I have several dozen books piled up by the side of my bed, but I don’t have books anywhere else in the house really. I don’t have bookshelves. Or books.

KIM: You heard that right, everyone. She doesn’t. Have. Bookshelves.

AMY: That sounds so scandalous!

KIM: Ominous.

AMY: Dah-dum!!!! I know that it makes me a really odd bird among book lovers… and I do love books. I just don’t keep books, with the exception of one cabinet where we keep our kids’ books… and I DO have one shelf in my office cabinet where I keep books that were written by friends… or, you know, I have the collected works of Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Some of the biggies. But those are hidden away in a cabinet. Other than that, I don’t hang onto books. If I buy a book, I read it and I give it away, and I’m happy to give it away. 

KIM: Okay, so I read many of mine over and over again. I loan them out, I refer to them, and the ones I don’t reread, it really just makes me happy to have them. To see their covers and their spines there. But Amy, I know what a voracious reader you are. Why do you not hang onto your favorites?

AMY: I guess to begin with, I very rarely re-read a book and when I do, it’s years later. For example, I just re-read The Great Gatsby, but it’s probably been 20 years since the last time I’d read it, so I don’t understand why I would hang onto the book for two decades just because I might want to re-read it. It just doesn’t make sense. And also, I really love the library. I go to the library at least once a week (that’s even now, during a pandemic.) Growing up, my mom and dad both took me to the library probably once a week as well. I just love the idea that these books are constantly circulating and being read by other people who lead different lives. I feel like books are meant to be read. They’re not meant to just sit on a shelf and collect dust, they’re meant to be out there getting used.

KIM: Just talking about libraries makes me feel really good. I’m actually smiling just talking about them. And my parents used to take me and my sister to the library every weekend too, and I would always leave with the maximum number of books allowed, so I’d carry this huge stack out. When I got home, I would just read and read, and I hated to be interrupted for anything. (Actually, not much has changed, really.) And then when I was in fourth grade, I was asked to assist the librarian with shelving books in the school library because I spent so much time during recesses and lunch there. Even now, yes, I have a ton of books, but I do read so many that I probably went to the library maybe once a month before the pandemic. I don’t have any great libraries in my neighborhood, and definitely nothing I can walk to, so I would actually drive over to this pretty little library in South Pasadena, which is not close, as Amy knows.

AMY: Across town from you. Yeah.

KIM: Exactly. And I used to walk from my office downtown to L.A.’s main branch at lunch before the pandemic. It’s a stunning library. It’s art deco circa the 20s and 30s, and it actually was mysteriously set fire to about 30 years ago. Over a million books were burned or damaged in the fire. Susan Orlean wrote a book about it in her book, which is called The Library Book. 

AMY: I actually took a tour of the downtown library and they told us this anecdote about that fire and that rush to rescue all of these books. I mean these books wound up being completely water-logged. They have a process with which they can dry the books out, so they wound up recruiting freezer space in restaurants across L.A. and they stacked tons of soggy books in the freezers, because once they’re frozen, nothing can happen to them. So all these books were piled into freezer spaces across the city so that then they were able to slowly take the books out little by little and do the process of thawing them out and drying them meticulously, and that saved so much of their collection doing that. It was pretty amazing.

KIM: It just feels very much like an L.A. story. I love that. Um, it also makes me think of Han Solo, but anyway, that’s just me…

AMY: Coming out of the carbonite? Is that what you’re talking about?

KIM: Yeah, exactly. Everything’s “Shakespeare” or “Star Wars.” Anyway, I miss going to the Downtown Library’s ALOUD series too. It’s so great! I saw Rachel Cusk, Hanya Yanagihara (she wrote A Little Life), Ta-Nehisi Coates, and so many more, and I’m a proud member of the Library Foundation. Every year they have an annual Stay Home and Read a Book Ball and it’s extra perfect this year, since that’s really all we can do anyway! So support your local library!

AMY: Yeah. Happy to have it still operating during this pandemic, that’s for sure. One of my criteria any time I moved to a new place, a new apartment, was that it had to be in walking distance of a library. So with one exception (I’ve moved around a few times) but every apartment I’ve lived in (or now, my current house) has had a library just a couple of blocks away. And the fun fact about my current local library, which is about an 8-minute walk from my house, is that it sits on the location of Leonardo DiCaprio’s boyhood home. He actually donated $35,000 to the construction of the library, and so in his honor, they have a special “Leonardo DiCaprio Reading Room,” and there are all sorts of signed posters from him on the walls — posters of him as [Titanic’s] Jack Dawson or from Romeo + Juliet. It makes me smile every time I see them all.

KIM: That is such a great L.A. story, too! I love it! I love that story. My friend, illustrator and author Ann Shen (Amy, you’ve met her), she wrote Bad Girls Throughout History. She turned me on to this great 19th century library video on YouTube. I play it on my TV while I’m reading and it goes on for hours and hours. It’s got a crackling fireplace and a rainstorm and piles of books. And every so often a door creaks open mysteriously. Talk about a mood! 

AMY: So it’s just the ambience of a library basically?

KIM: It’s a room, and it feels like it’s in an old castle or a big old mansion. You can see the fireplace. It’s like a view from one part of the room to the other, so you can see furniture, stacks of books, the rain on the windows. It’s computer generated, but it looks really cool.

AMY: We have to link to that.

KIM: It’s really good. Basically for the last four months, I’ve had the YouTube fireplace thing going non-stop, and when Ann told me about this, I switched to this one and I’m even more addicted. But speaking more about libraries, Amy, I feel like you used to work at a library at one point, right?

AMY: It was my first job, actually, when I was a teenager. It was not quite as thrilling as you might expect for a high school kid because it’s a very quiet environment, obviously, and there were four high school workers on staff, and our shifts never overlapped, so I never had anybody my age to interact with, which is what you want. You want to work at the mall, you know, or somewhere where there are a bunch of teenagers that you’re goofing off with. But it was still a really good job for a book lover. My main responsibility was reshelving books, so I’d basically walk around the stacks with the big rolling cart of books and I put everything back in its proper place. And I really got to know a lot of different authors and genres that way. I shelved a ton of mysteries and trashy romance novels and Tom Clancy kind of books... those were always popular ones that most of the patrons were checking out. There were lots of children’s picture books, too though… that was always a big job. When you would come in and see all those kids’ books on the cart and go “Oh, boy, here we go.” I discovered Edward Gorey’s children’s books on that job, and I remember taking The Gashleycrumb Tinies, which is a book all about children who die gruesome deaths… it was the first time I had seen the book and I took it up to the librarian on duty and I was like, “Are you sure this is supposed to go in the children’s section? It doesn’t really seem appropriate!” And it probably actually didn’t belong there. I think she might have set it aside.

KIM: Your true crime fascination began with Gashleycrumb Tinies. Speaking of children’s books, that makes me think of Anne Carroll Moore. She was the influential New York City librarian who lobbied for children to be allowed to patronize libraries. Prior to that, people didn’t believe children under the age of 14 should even be allowed inside libraries, which is crazy to think about now. They were considered a nuisance. And Anne Carroll Moore (or ACM as she’s known in the literary world) headed up children’s library services for the New York Public library from 1906 through 1941.

AMY: Yeah, there’s actually a really super cute children’s book by Jan Pinborough called Miss Moore Thought Otherwise. It’s all about Anne Carroll Moore’s crusade to start children’s departments in libraries. Moore also wrote children’s books herself, one of which was a runner-up for the Newbury medal in 1925.

KIM: Right, but she was also a really controversial figure, too, in that she was a very powerful gatekeeper in the world of children’s literature. She was friends with Beatrix Potter, for example, but she could be super critical of some children’s book authors. She hated Goodnight, Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown, for example! (One that I’ve been reading a lot lately.) She refused to carry it in the New York public library.

AMY: Yeah, wow. I read that book to both my kids every night before bed for YEARS, so I have my own love-hate relationship with that book (trust me), but I really cannot imagine disliking it to the point that you would have refused to allow it on shelves, right?

KIM: Right.

AMY: She also decided that L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz and E.B. White’s Stuart Little were not worthy of her library shelves because she just really didn’t like them. She also hated Charlotte’s Web, too, and she didn’t love any of the Little House on the Prairie books! So I don’t know what to think about Anne’s taste in books, but she had some strong opinions there.

KIM: I mean how can you hate Charlotte’s Web? I can see maybe having opinions on the other ones, but, I mean, I don’t know how you can hate Charlotte’s Web.  Anyway, it’s wonderful that she was a champion for children’s literature, but as a woman who could make-or-break books, she also sounds like a bit of a tyrant! Maybe she let all that power go to her head a bit? She’s like the Robert Moses of children’s lit or something! 

AMY: I think you could say that Anne Carroll Moore was equal parts “hero” and “villain.” And I think we could probably devote an entire future episode just to her, and I’m sure we probably will because there is a LOT to say about her, and we are really only scratching the surface today.

KIM: Did you ever watch Party Girl with Parker Posey, Amy? Remember?

AMY: Yeah!

KIM: Right. She aspires to become a librarian and then she gets fired from her job at the library by sneaking in one night to sleep with her boyfriend. But I kind of imagine any infractions you committed in high school were more like… sneaking off to read or something like that. 

AMY: Yeah, I didn’t have any boyfriend to sneak into my library, so I don’t think I was having as much fun as Parker Posey’s character. But yeah, I would kind of sneak off behind the stacks when we weren’t busy, hide myself out of view from the adult librarians working the desk and then flip through books that were of interest to me. You were NOT supposed to do that, though, because even on a slow day at the library, you had to straighten the stacks. “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean…” that kind of McDonald’s motto? So you’d start at one end of the library straightening the shelves. You would make sure all the books were lined up with the front of the shelves and pat them all into place nice and neat, and it’s kind of funny because given the current state of my nightstand, which we talked about, keeping books tidy and orderly is not necessarily a priority for me. But it was a really good first job…

KIM: It almost feels cruel that they would give you a job at the library and then not let you read as much as you possibly could while you were there. I mean, that’s the worst!

AMY: I think it’s kind of a misconception about having a library job. I don’t think librarians are sitting around reading all day. They’re kept busy with their regular job. Another interesting thing I learned while I worked that job, because this was pre-Internet… people would call in to ask questions about anything under the sun. I never realized that you could even do that. I didn’t know that was an option, that you could bother a librarian to look up information, but people would call in all the time with just a question, like, “Can you figure out how tall Abraham Lincoln was?” The librarian would be like, “Sure!” And they’d walk over and look up some books and they’d try to get the answer and they’d go back to the phone and give the answer, so it was kind of like an early Google. I didn’t even know you could do that before I worked at the library.

KIM: It’s so quaint, and it reminds me of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Desk Set, where she’s working at the desk where everyone calls to get their questions answered.

AMY: Oh, right! Yeah...

KIM: But yeah, that is so funny to think about. Instead of Google, people were calling an actual person at a library and asking them questions. But another cool thing was you got to see all the books people checked out… it’s like a window into their soul or something.

AMY: Right. You know what else people really loved to check out, though… gobs and gobs of cookbooks. And I didn’t like putting those away because they were really heavy and unwieldy most of the time. They were sort of oversized books. Never liked having to put those back.

KIM: Funny you should mention cookbooks, because in next week’s episode we’ll be featuring a cookbook author. She was really well-known in the 1960s for her witty, sarcastic writing-style and for her time-saving recipes.

AMY: That’s right. Peg Bracken started a bit of a revolution by making it acceptable to not spend your days in the kitchen. We’ll be discussing her I Hate To Cookbook next week with the help of Kim’s good friend and prolific cookbook author, Helene Siegel. 

KIM: Until next time, let us know your stance on collecting books. Is your house filled from floor to ceiling with books like mine, or are you more like Amy and consider the library your home away from home? 

AMY: And what state of chaos is YOUR book collection in? Is your nightstand stack higher than mine? We want to know, so email us or let us know on our Facebook page or Instagram. 

KIM: I would be really happy if we had a whole nightstand stack competition and everyone was posting their stacks of books. So feel free to get in on that.

AMY: I want to see the messiest and the neatest.

KIM: Oh absolutely. Yeah, just share them. All shelves are welcome. We can’t wait for your responses…and for everyone who’s already reached out to us to let us know you’re listening, thank you! It means the world to us! 

AMY: We also wouldn’t mind your reviews of this podcast wherever you listen to us also, hint hint!

KIM: Bye, everyone!

AMY: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit was produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.