I said in the rules of the contest that mention of one of my books wouldn’t give a person any extra points, but…

I loved the depiction of childhood glee in Susan M’s piece, since who wouldn’t love a secret passageway into a world of books?  But honestly, I had to recognize Kathy Eliot, who made the mistake of wandering into a library’s annual sale, and had her life taken over.

Two women who lifted the lid into a new world, and fell inside.

Susan M:

My childhood library had a built-in window seat.  One day I noticed that it had a pull-ring on top of the seat and the entire seat was actually hinged.  I lifted the seat/lid and found the storage was crammed with books, wonderful books!  I still remember the thrill of discovery. I also wondered why no one had told me that there were more books inside the bench, it seemed like something everyone should be told about.  My current favorite library doesn’t have secret storage in a window seat, but it does have a fireplace and the most wonderful staff in Tulsa.  I still love discovering new and exciting books at my local library!

And Kathy Eliot: Once Upon a Book Sale

Our largest library is the one at the University: it’s the best stacked, best catalogued and most up to date. Once, they were having a book sale to clear some of their older copies, and I came across this book called ‘The Moor’.

I put in on the shelf until I finished my Bachelors. I had lost interest in Sherlock Holmes for a number of years, but reading that novel rekindled all the love I had for the great detective. I hunted the rest of the series down, and spent a number of tortured months waiting until I had them all, so I could read them in the correct order.

Nowadays I’m pursuing my Masters in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Criticism. And my dissertation will be about Holmes Canon vis-a-vis Russell Kanon. My tutor tells me that it is very possible for a single book to change the course of your studying career completely. That library book sale completely changed the course my studies would have taken, and consequently had a very large impact on my life. Libraries are, simply put, unopened treasure throves, simply waiting for anyone one willing and brave enough to come tug at their lid.

The fourth winner in last month’s library contest is Beth Anne, whose piece offers insight into the richness and humanity of archival research.

Archival research usually consists of long stretches of boredom punctuated by tedium, until bits of evidence start to tumble out of the documents. There is nothing like this sense of discovery, which one eminent scholar described as akin to “the feeling of having sat on a cat.” I was fortunate to experience this many times while carrying out my dissertation research at Oxford. But strangely enough, the things that stick in my memory almost more than the discoveries that were so important to my work were little glimmers of the personal and corporate lives of the fellows and scholars I was studying.

In the documents from one college archive, I followed the career of a clerk called Walter. I read that he cleaned windows, tidied the chapel, helped with the music books, and performed other myriad tasks across a span of several years. And then one day I read the entry in the accounts paying for his funeral. I was shocked. What, Walter dead? I felt rather foolish when I reminded myself that Walter has been food for worms for five hundred years. But I was still sad for the rest of the day; it was like losing a friend who had accompanied me on part of my journey.

Other things also caught my eye, glimpses of what kind of people the college inhabitants were in life, and how they lived. In addition to their studies and religious duties, they had fun: one college had an annual outing on Midsummer’s Day to hunt for strawberries and have a picnic. They cared for their animals, buying medicine to treat a sick horse. They ate things I recognized as food, like mustard and mutton, and things I probably wouldn’t touch if you paid me, like lampreys and herons. (Well, maybe I would eat heron. But definitely not lamprey.) One scholar complained loudly about the Lenten fare in a letter to his elder brother, saying, in effect, “If I have to eat one more piece of salt fish I swear I’m gonna barf.”

And then there were the fingerprints. Every so often, in the margin of a scroll, there is a perfect pattern of whorls and ridges left by a long-ago scribe. Fingerprints were always a joy to find, a unique trace of the living, breathing person who had penned those documents, someone who had had friends and a family, who ate and slept and worked and walked the streets of Oxford, someone who was more than a historical statistic for me to incorporate into my dissertation.

Archives and libraries are grand things, vast repositories of knowledge that can lead to discoveries that change the world. But they also hold many smaller treasures that for all their seeming inconsequence are equally powerful as reminders of our common humanity.

The third winner of last month’s National Library Week giveaway, Ashley W. tells us about her “Thrill in the Stacks”:

My most personal library thrill actually happened at an archives. The Archives, to be exact. A friend works at the National Archives and is a specialist in US Department of State records. He was taking me on a behind-the-scenes tour of the stacks, when we passed a section on death records of Americans killed overseas. I asked if that included military personnel killed during peacetime and we stopped to look at the index. My great-great-uncle was a Marine killed in Nicaragua in 1927 – the extent of my knowledge about him from his headstone at Arlington Cemetery. We found a listing which led to the discovery of letters from the Nicaraguan Minister to the Secretary of State with “the most earnest expression of regret for the lamentable loss of those brave men who so generously succumbed in the discharge of their high duty.” It seems that my relative and a Marine Private were killed while defending a town against bandits. It was something unexpected and fascinating.

Our second winner of the National Library Week contest (and there is no rank among the winners, by the way, no first prize or runners-up) is by “EMB”.  And how could it not be, coupling precision with the words “Bodleian” and “mitigation” in its very first sentence–then going on to a mystery involving the Tremulous Hand of Worcester, and a quick exuberant lap around Duke Humfrey’s?  Read on…

One of my greatest library thrills was not in the stacks, though perhaps the fact that the Bodleian has closed stacks is something of a mitigation on that score. Although I’d not only studied palaeography, but also run weekly tutorials for fellow grad students enrolled in the relevant courses, this was my first major research trip, and I was fairly certain that I was broadcasting to all of the other readers in Duke Humfrey’s Library that I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. So, there was an added charge when I finally began to successfully decipher the interlinear notations in the manuscript I was transcribing, an eleventh-century copy of a number of Old English homilies and other religious texts. I needed not only the Old English text, but the thirteenth-century annotations by the gloriously named Tremulous Hand of Worcester and the sixteenth-century notes entered by John Joscelyn, a secretary to Matthew Parker, who was then the Archbishop of Canterbury. Learning to read a new hand is a little bit like shifting into a new gear, and once you’ve done it, everything runs smoothly until the next time you need to shift, but the trick is finding that one word that will fall into place. Sixteenth-century hands, ironically, are often more difficult to read than medieval hands, and I had spent several minutes pushing aside panic before I realized that Joscelyn had merely translated the OE word hiht with a very small hope. As simple as that. I managed to contain my exuberance enough to limit myself to a single, quick circuit along the aisle before sitting back down to the manuscript, but I’ve never forgotten that moment of relief and delight.

Last month, while I was away in Japan, we ran a contest with the theme “Thrills in the Stacks”—asking for some exciting event that happened in the library.  I read the submissions when I got back 2 weeks ago, but although I don’t do jet lag, I do get really stupid for a while after coming back from a hard trip, and my brain just wouldn’t step up to the judging process.

Problem is, they were all so great.  Even with a brain that’s starting to function again, picking the best is no easy thing.

But I did finally manage to narrow them down to a week’s worth (a work week, that is) plus one.  (I’ll talk about the plus one when the time comes.) And if the concentration is heavily on academia, well, that’s where my own head is at present.

We’ll send an email to the winners today, but I’m going to spread out the posts all week, so you can enjoy them too.

Thanks to everyone who entered, honestly, your pieces were all really great, and I may post them later on, if you don’t mind.

Because it’s all about the libraries, and why we love them.

1.

An Early Memory, by Sabrina

 

I couldn’t read, so I was promptly dumped off in the picture book section, corralled in by a stack of shelving with books on top, standing upright like staggered crenellations rising all around my patch of faded carpet.  I went to the nearest shelf, pulled out the first book, and looked at the cover: a little boy wearing a furry suit with a tail was dancing with fuzzy monsters under trees.  There were more monsters inside, a boat, and they were all dancing oddly about, however, I wasn’t interested in the pictures.  I brought the book to my nose and inhaled.  It smelled sticky, like the rainbow chairs in the middle of the carpet that I was doing my best to avoid.

I put the book back, taking great care with the bright, mysterious thing, and moved on to the next.  This book was thick, or the pages were at any rate, and there were teeth marks on the moon in the corner, and smudges on the quiet house below.  I opened it and smelled the first page, crinkling my nose in distaste.  Hard pages don’t smell very good; they smell like boxes, and the color was dull where someone’s excited drool had soured and warped the cardboard.  This too, went back on the shelf.

A gleam caught my eye, and I stood on my tippy toes to wrestle this one free.  It was a big book, wide and new, and after I rescued my treasure, it was too unwieldy to carry, so I let it fall and crouched over the big book, staring at the thin man with a striped hat, shirt, and bright blue jeans on the front.  He had brown hair, funny glasses, and was waving, but Oh, that smile was far from friendly.  It was the smile my dog had when he stole my cookie.  The smile my brother’s had when they were up in a tree and I was trying to scramble up a branch I couldn’t even reach.  I detested that smile like lima beans.

Still, there wasn’t a smudge, wrinkle, or stamp on the inside of this book, it was all bright, and the pages were sharp with a smell that sent my toes tingling with appreciation.  I turned the pages, looking at the pictures, full of tiny people with the smirking man standing in every single corner; waving.  I narrowed my eyes at the letters beside him, and although I couldn’t read, I knew that I had to find Waldo.  That was his name, but I didn’t know why, or how I knew.  I searched and scanned the tiny people with striped pants and some with striped hats, or an entire striped set of pajamas, but no one had the red and white striped hat and shirt with blue pants.

By the time I found him, the insides of my cheeks were raw from my teeth, but there he was, ever so obvious now, waving from a sea of stripes, looking not nearly as smug.  I looked down at him, feeling accomplished, full of simple pride, and returned his smile.  I had found Waldo.