One of the more amusing reactions when telling someone I’d enrolled in library school at the ripe old age of 48 was, “Of course! You’ve always loved books!”
My response? Gently pointing out that lots of people spend their entire lives loving books and not becoming librarians. My parents – a rabbi and a teacher – did it so well that my sister Debby (who has never set foot in a library science classroom) and I grew up in a house filled with them and, as adults, reviewed books for newspapers and magazines.
Still, I did learn things in library school, and one of the first was Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science. Here they are, in order: Books are for use; every reader their book; every book its reader; save the time of the reader; the Library is a growing organism.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the second and third laws, with four words tacked on to each one: “every reader their book” – “at the right moment,” and “every book its reader” – “at the right moment.”
Because Debby and I both reviewed books for major outlets, publishers sent – and sometimes still send – advance copies of titles they’re releasing. Sometime in late 2017, I got a package from Cambridge University Press containing an advance copy of “My Opposition: The Diary of Friedrich Kellner, A German against the Third Reich.”
At regular intervals, I’d pull it off the “freebies I’m keeping because they look interesting enough to read at some point,” shelf, peruse a few pages, and put it back. Still, I never weeded it out of the collection (another term I learned in library school), because it felt like the sort of thing I really ought to read – not so much because it would be fun, but in more of a “Better yourself!” kind of way.
Recently, I pulled it down and read the introduction. The story of how it came to be published is as gripping a tale as the book itself. Kellner’s then-19-year-old grandson Robert (whose own father had abandoned him as a child after being sent to the U.S. by his parents) went AWOL from the U.S. military during a layover in Germany to meet his grandparents for the first time. Robert spoke no German; his grandparents spoke no English. Back in the U.S., he began studying the language and eventually became an academic, who worked to translate and champion the publication of his grandfather’s diary.
As for the diary itself, it’s a tough slog. Friedrich was an ordinary working German who understood in real time what the Nazi party was, documented what he read and what he saw – people around him embracing an ideology that was divisive, fantastical and ruinous.
Which brings me to yet another addition to those two Ranganathan’s laws, specifically “for the right amount of time.” There are people who can absorb this kind of book in one go, and in a different historical moment, I might be one of them. But some of what I’m reading is hitting a little close to home, what with everything going on in the world. So I’m balancing Friedrich’s diary with three other books that are very different. All are fiction, set in different times and places. I’m nearly finished, much to my dismay, with Allison Pataki’s excellent historical novel, “Finding Margaret Fuller,” a fictionalized account of the first American war correspondent and the least-known member of the Transcendentalists of the 1820s and 1830s. That one is a library book. I’m about halfway through “The Overstory” by Richard Powers, a big old brick whose unifying theme is trees. I got it from my friend Shauna, who was weeding her collection in advance of a move. And I’ve just started “Death of the Author” by Nnedi Okorafor, which I bought at my favorite local independent bookstore. The story is a book-within-a-book, containing the author’s novel of earth in the post-human era and the story of the author herself.
All this to say, there’s a lot happening in the world right now. Find comfort where you can and remember Ranganathan’s first law: Books are for use.
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Amy Waldman is an occasional Chronicle contributor and a Milwaukee librarian.
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