Bigger Inside Than Out: A Child's First Library

by

Nicki Leone

There is a scene in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn where young Francie Nolan makes her weekly pilgrimage to the library. She has an ambitious project to read every book there, and in the methodical way of children she started at the “A’s”.  She is now into the B’s, and is feeling a little discouraged because she is finally almost done with the ‘Browns” only to discover that there are still dozens of “Brownes”  to come.

Francie checks out her books and walks the several blocks home, stopping only once by the five-and-dime to purchase some penny candy. Once at her tenement, she retreats from the noisy family apartment, climbs out onto the fire escape landing outside her bedroom window, shaded by one of the scrawny trees in the back yard (she calls them “trees of heaven”), and settles in to her private space to read for the rest of the day, a small cracked dish of penny candy by her side.

I was about Francie’s age—nine or ten--when I first read about her attempt to read every book in the library. I didn’t think it was odd. Like Francie, I made weekly trips to our neighborhood library. Like Francie, I was in the habit of holing up in a secluded space with a bowl of junior mints and a stack of books, not to resurface for the rest of the day.  I could admire Francie’s goal to read every book from A to Z, although I was too easily distracted by the lure of all those books to be so methodical myself. Like Francie, I read books because I wanted to know things. I believed what I read in books, and looking back now, I can see that I didn’t make much distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Pippi Longstocking was as real to me as the books on dinosaurs and sharks and space with which I was equally obsessed.

My mother walked my brother, sister and I to the Fairfield Branch library in Buffalo, NY, about once a week—a feat of dedication which I now look back on with some awe. It was a seven-block walk and it can’t have been easy to do with three kids under the age of ten.  Sometimes my best friend Kathy from across the street came with us, but her mother wasn’t as diligent as mine about having new books to read every week. I was glad I had my mother and not hers, although my mother insisted we return the books when we were done—something I always objected to. It is that acquisitive tendency in me that explains why I became a bookseller, not a librarian, when I grew up.

The Fairfield Branch Library was built in a neo-classical style and at the time I thought it was the biggest building I had ever seen. Its marble-white steps led up past pillars that rose above most of the trees.  Inside, it was one large room with two-story high ceilings pieced by windows at the top through which the afternoon light poured in. Tall wooden bookcases lined the walls, jutting out at intervals to mark different “sections.”  The librarians were at a round enclosed area in the middle with a swinging gate I was just beginning to be able to see over. The card catalog, with its dozens of little wooden drawers and typed labels in brass holders encircled the librarians, who kept an eagle eye on us when we wanted to look something up.  I don’t remember who first taught me how to use a card catalog, but I have very clear memories of carefully opening the “H” drawer to see what books they had by Marguerite Henry.

Walk in, and the children’s and young adult books were on the right. I remember this because I would often follow my mother to the left instead, leaving my friend Kathy with her “B is for Betsy” and instead dogging the heels of my mom because I always wanted to read what she was reading.  To the left was fiction—presumably adult, although mom seems to have found enough to interest a ten- year old girl willing to be interested. Around back behind the librarians’ island the floor went up several steps to where they kept the adult nonfiction books—thick books on history and science, biographies and poetry. To the right, past the kid’s section, were the how-to books on gardening and knitting and cooking.

It was a cavernous place, almost like a church. In fact, it was so much like a church in my mind that for years after I had grown and left home, I was convinced that it had a high domed ceiling like the Hagia Sophia, with which the Fairfield Branch library was somehow equated in my mind. On some level, I thought of them as the same kind of building.

Of course, it was nothing of the sort. The Fairfield Branch of the Erie County Library is a small place that despite its historic status (the building dates back to 1897) is currently scheduled to be closed by a financially-strapped county. The front steps aren’t marble, merely a clean-swept concrete. The pillars don’t reach above the trees, merely about one and a half stories. And the building itself, despite its classical trappings, is a tiny box with grey shingles and white trim. It’s a far cry from the cathedral-like atmosphere I had given it in my memories, but my childhood instincts weren’t all that misguided—according to county records the building was originally created to be a church.

Anyone who walks into the Fairfield Branch Library today would hardly call it “cavernous.” It is a tiny, one-room library not really much larger than the two-bedroom house I live in now. The space between the front door and the back wall, where all those weighty history books were kept on what would have been reserved for the church altar, can be crossed in about 15 or 20 steps.  It is entirely possible that I have more books in my house than it does on its shelves.

And yet it remains expansive in my mind, and I can’t shake that feeling of vastness, even when confronted with the realities of floor plans and blueprints. It is all those books, of course. There is an early scene in CS Lewis’s Narnia story, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” (first discovered on the shelves of the library), where the professor explains to Lucy that things can be bigger on the inside than they are on the outside.

This is true of any room full of books—which never feels close or claustrophobic to me, but rather bulges with the promise of the undiscovered. It is especially true of my childhood library, which was my very first room full of books and the starting point for so many literary journeys. The Fairfield Branch of the Erie County Public Library may measure fewer square feet than my neighbor’s three-car garage, but is still as far-reaching as the books it holds, and it will always be ever so much bigger inside than it looks from without.

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this with the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.