Athenaeum Sorcery
One of the fascinating things that has electroplated into my lazy-susan curio cabinet of fantasies are old libraries. I am not talking about the local library that has been around since the town or city had been founded 50 or so years ago. I am talking OLD. Like your great grandma’s grandma old. The kind of library you can walk into and smell the smart farts of crotchety scholars old. Where the handcrafted environment is void of anything resembling manufactured Amazon selections via corpo-mass-production. They aren’t everywhere, but when you can find one, IT’s AWESOME!
I did get to walk into one a long time ago in Eurasia. Smack dab in Russia. It wasn’t the oldest I have been to. But it was the most charming. It changed a deep seated part of me to my bones. Back then, the communist party was still in power and the fact that this library was still in functional working condition baffled me. The town it was in, was run down, and almost abandoned. We only saw a couple people walking on the main road during our stay (which was about 4 hours). The building wasn’t big by the standards of modern city libraries. You could say it was the size of a two story lower class home (in modern standards of size).
It stood separate from the rest of the other surrounding buildings that were made of ancient wood and poorly set concrete. Every part of the library’s skeleton was stone. With patches of extremely old dark wood scattered about like pockmarks. The grounds surrounding the mini-me castle like structure were not too well kept either. Weeds furrowed close to the walls, and most of the dirt and rocks were spatially peppered with small pieces of paper, cotton bloom flowers, and feathers. Even the stones seemed to have a marbled texture of moss recently scrapped clean. But only at about 7 or so feet up. Everything above that was scattered nature slowly claiming territory. Nothing was paved. No sidewalks, and the road was just packed gravel and dirt. Like many of the towns and villages outside the large metro areas, this one was ran down and battered. We even saw tank tracks that past by on the main road outside the town. As if this place did not exist to the military. We actually saw the towns the military visited. They weren’t towns anymore.
The interior of the library on the other hand, was breathtaking. White, mocha, and cream colors with varnished wood everywhere. I honestly had expected to be onslaught’d with the smells of rot, decay, and staleness before walking in. But it truly was another world separate. It made me wonder if all the other buildings were like this on the inside. And there it was, the rows of book spines lined up neatly at attention. Tall, thick, short, thin, tattered, polished, worn, and faded. Oh, the smell. It was the aroma of aging wood and books. That amber vanilla hue of brittle earth, mixed subliminally with sweet pressed flowers. Ink and oil accents that brushed your skin and sense memory. It beckoned from the walls in whisper form of historic knowledge, “Come, the answers you didn’t know existed, are here.”
All of this, triple-pile-driving my brain. Then, a sweet old lady with huge orange plastic-rimmed glasses came up to me and smiled. At that point I was a melted lump of squishy. Far too overstimulated to speak. Our translator told me later that day that my expression looked like I was in a constant state of electrocution. I still don’t know what the hell that kind of expression looks like.
But the tour of the library was fascinating. The old lady spoke Russian and our translator spun her tale for us. Both her parents grew up there. As well as her grandparents, and so on. Truly a deep family tradition that spanned a millennia. Originally the building was a kind of outpost that the town slowly grew around. As the town grew, the owners became caretakers of birth records and residential events. From there, a slow influx of books and pamphlets began to be stored. Then, a library was born. It became a way for the town to grow and prosper from outside knowledge that their class of people did not regularly have access to.
Suffice to say, this town was not a tourist attraction site and we weren’t allowed to purchase anything. But what I saw in that library moved me. Each book was a treasure kept safe and cared for. Made by hand and older than some countries. They even had a large scroll section upstairs sealed in glass cabinets.
I used to live in downtown Portland Oregon and constantly visited the Multnomah County Library. It was a weekly treat for me on each visit. One of these days I am going to Pensilvania to visit the Library Company of Philadelphia. That one is prime time on my list. I have already visited the Franklin Library in Massachusetts and got my heart melted. The sheer history of these very old places and the atmospheres can’t be replicated.
If I am ever able to visit the Al-Qarawiyyin library in Fez, Morocco (NW Africa), I think my brain will explode. Seriously, my body would probably go into a state of over excited anaphylaxis. I will swell to a human sized balloon and just pop.
Yeah, you could say I kinda like libraries… As for books? Well, that is a whole other level of insanity.
