There's just something about a library

By Bob Greene

On an evening not long ago I was attending an event at the University Club of Chicago and, being unfamiliar with the beautiful old downtown building, I decided to wander around for a while.

I had been in Cathedral Hall on the top floor. I walked down a staircase, and when I was on the 8th floor I looked down a hallway and there seemed to be a library. Not a reading room or a study, but a library.

I went to take a look. It was well-stocked and impressive (later I would learn there are more than 30,000 volumes in the club's library); the bookshelves covered every wall, and there were areas to sit and read, areas to do research or merely relax. Especially at the moment I was there - in the evening, with darkness outside the windows, not another person present - it was as unexpectedly peaceful a room as a person could ever hope to find.

There's something about a library.

I walked slowly past the shelves, pulling books out, leafing through them, putting them back, reading a few pages from one and then from another. The setting was what made this so delightful: As enticing as public libraries are, this - a full library in a private club - felt so different from what most of us usually encounter. I could tell from the selection of books that the room was meant for pleasure, not duty - the club's library was heavy on novels, both old and relatively new.

It was as if the room existed for the purpose of soothing the club's members on quiet and solitary nights.

Later I found out it is, indeed, rare, even in private clubs, to have a library this extensive. I was told the University Club employs a full-time librarian who works in the room every weekday, and that the library is available to members 24 hours a day. I had once encountered another full library in an unexpected place - at sea, aboard the Queen Elizabeth II - and my reaction was the same: This is civilized. This is a gentle surprise. This is what the world ought to feel like.

What the world does feel like is a planet packed with health clubs and hamburger stands and video stores and barrooms; sporting goods stores and T-shirt emporiums and coffee houses and car-rental counters. What all of those have in common is that they make economic sense. A library - especially a private library - makes no economic sense at all. It is not cost-effective.

But what a lovely feeling. I walked over to the card catalog in the library of the University Club, and started to look through the long, thickly-loaded file drawers, the off-white cards coded according to the Dewey Decimal System. It never fails, the sight and texture of those cards in a library's drawers; the typeface, the arrangement of the words and numerals on the cards, the classification style at the cards' edges and bottoms - it's as evocative as time travel, it takes you to the first library you ever knew, fills you with thoughts long filed away.

Card catalogs are being phased out these days; all over the country they are being replaced with electronic versions of their old selves - computer terminals a browser can use to find what he or she is looking for. These are pretty efficient, when they work; they don't have a real feel of their own, but they get the job done.

Yet the card catalogs are like warm echoes of American social history, rich and specific and home-like. I received a letter from Marion F. Gallivan, director of the library at Gannon University in Erie, Pa. The university's library, she said, was automating its card catalog, and in order to raise funds to maintain the library, a dinner was being planned to auction off autographed catalog cards.

The library was asking authors whose books were represented by cards in the drawers to sign those cards and send them back.

She had enclosed a card representing one of my books; the book would remain in the library, but the card would be replaced by a blip on a piece of computer software. Would I sign the card and return it to the library for the auction?

Of course - after I finished holding it in my hand and thinking about it. For those of us who write for a living, there is still something, in a frenzied and impermanent computer-linked age, about seeing yourself in a library's card catalog that makes you stop and smile and think: Yeah. I was here on Earth. Here's the proof.

At least it feels like that if you're part of a generation that's old enough to care.

There's something about a library.

I was due back upstairs; on the 8th floor of the University Club I took one last look around the room, which was empty of people, unless you counted the 30,000 voices that are always there.

Chicago Tribune