The Library saved my life: the chronicles of a brand-new denizen of the Ottawa public library scene

“A room without books is like a body without a soul” -Marcus Tullius Cicero

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Growing up in Georgetown, Ontario in the 1950s and 1960s, bookishness was far from Godliness, a definitely liability, especially for a red-blooded Canadian boy. And I was a rotund little fellow, far from red-blooded, commonly referred to as ‘Porky’, ‘Chub’, or ‘Fatso’, frequently bullied, a candidate for the fate of Piggy in Lord of the Flies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies

I looked like Lumpy Rutherford when I wanted to resemble Steve McQueen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpy_Rutherford

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_McQueen

So to escape the slings and arrows of outrageous hazing, I hid for hours in the local old-school public library, perusing a vast array of volumes, including works focusing on astronomy, dinosaurs, birds and birding, and sports, all sorts of sports, before hauling home the maximum amount of booty allowed, to be devoured under the covers in the darkness, sometimes all night long, since my terminal anxiety, which triggered chronic insomnia, was only assuaged by reading, reading, reading.

Thus it was that libraries have become a beacon wherever fate has taken me.

At York University, where I did undergraduate and doctoral work, the library was a second home…and eventually a minimum security prison, for I accumulated an impressive legacy of overdue book fines and university parking tickets, which I was forced to pay back through indentured servitude, i.e. a week’s sentence of sorting and shelving volumes, which had to be acquitted before I was allowed to graduate.

I was the world’s most delighted prisoner! Instead of sorting and shelving, I rolled the book dolly to a remote corner of the stacks, where voracious reading rather than diligent shelving became the order of the day. A lack of productivity eventually came to the attention of the head librarian, who clearly approved of browsing over stacking and summarily commuted my sentence.

Those were the days of the card catalogue, a non-digital era, which as a pathetic Luddite I sorely miss, as I do the attendant feel and odour of the cards, endlessly pawed and ruffled.

Timeworn libraries have always been my preferred havens, and there is none more remarkably venerable than the Literary and Historical Society English Library in Quebec City, part of the oldest existing learned society in Canada:

https://www.morrin.org/en/what-is-the-morrin-centre/

The Lit& His, as it is often referred to, became known in our family as the ‘fusty library’ for its dusty confines, wafts of damp odours, and staid portrait galleries of stern 19th century patriarchs.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fusty

My wife and I lived in Quebec City for over 35 years, and our two sons became inveterate readers through a steady diet of worn and tattered children’s volumes that we borrowed by the hundreds from the Lit& His.

I taught CEGEP (junior college) English for 35 years in Quebec City and became a regular denizen of the school library, breaking all records for book ordering and book borrowing and taking advantage of one of the few perks of the job by taking home voluminous heaps of magazines, including literary journals and more popular fare such as Harpers, The Canadian Forum, and the Atlantic Monthly, in those long-lost pre-digital days.

Our St. Lawrence College library had the niftiest odiferous card catalogue, which the students invariably left all askew, contents strewn, frayed, or crushed.

Of course, nothing gold can stay, and the digital age swept the card catalogue away, along with the name “Library” itself, the moniker “Resource Centre” often becoming the preferred nomenclature. (When I first heard this designation, I thought the new label was “Racehorse Centre.”)

Many more libraries have informed my life, institutions in French as well as in English, on two continents: The Robarts Library at U of T, which everyone called “Fort Book”; Bibliothèque Gabrielle-Roy in Quebec City; and the Vancouver Public Library, which especially shaped my wife, turning her into the world’s most enthusiastic reader and prompting her to seek a career as a library worker, which, as fate would have it, she was forever denied.

And now, as fresh newcomers to Ottawa, we’ve discovered the Ottawa Public Library system, in particular the Rosemount branch, a few steps from our new home:

https://biblioottawalibrary.ca/en/branch/rosemount-0

This library is small-scale, bright and cheery…and very digital. It also has an elevator, which I’ve dubbed the “smellevator” (apparently there are invasive plumbing issues), adding to the compendium of library smells accumulated over the decades. The welcome is typically cheery: “Hi hon!” “No worries; have a good one…” raining down upon us like linguistic manna in the wake of our return to Canada after nearly three years spent in France.

The Rosemount branch obviously means so much to the community, an antidote to the corporatisation of bookdom and to the government cutbacks that so imperil the public’s right to read. Here we find gaggles of kids – nascent bibliophiles – as well as desperately poor dislocated people, local residents, individuals with the most brilliant eccentricities, and the odd incongruous dog, no doubt an avid canine literary enthusiast.

As the final chapter of my wild and woolly existence draws to its inevitable close, libraries form a sturdy thread linking the receding mists of the past to the fretful unease of the present, born of teetering on the brink of an eternal abyss.

Your friend,

Robert

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