The printed word

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This article was published 06/08/2024 (753 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the free public library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.” — Andrew Carnegie.

I live surrounded by books. Thousands populate my home. I invite more in every week. They have been and remain the “tools of my trade.” But they are much more than that. Books, or actually their authors, have taught, provoked, surprised and sometimes even comforted me. This has been going on for years.

I cherish them all. Most rest only a few metres from where I write. With a considerable degree of accuracy, I can tell you where any particular volume stands on my bookshelves — I even get annoyed when one is not returned to its “rightful place.” When I go looking, they need to be where I expect them. Order is reassuring.

These books are rather like close friends. Some have been around for decades — their frayed covers and dog-eared pages are evidence of that. But, whenever I return to any of them, I’m reminded that the year in which they were published doesn’t matter. Books don’t age, at least not like we do.

The gateway to my bibliotheca is a bedside table. I like to read before I meet Morpheus. Several books are always on call. Having a selection sates my desire for diversity. Just now I’m reading The Showman, Simon Shuster’s timely biography of Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky; Colonialism, by Nigel Biggar; The Unicorn, Virginia Moore’s exploration of the Hermetic teachings influencing the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats; a troubling discourse disputing free will, presented in Robert M. Sapolsky’s Determined and an English translation of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s War, a bracing fragment-of-a-novel. And I just finished Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. I got a hint about why this 1942 opus would be worth my time from Timothy Garton Ash’s Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, published just this year.

Perhaps you have noticed that I do not mention e-books. I have never owned one and, hopefully, never will. Whatever their supposed utility, I recoil instinctively from such phantasms — non-corporeal things can’t be held, and are not like friends you have jostled, jousted and smiled with. And, to access a ghost book, you must connect to one of those gadgets almost everyone seems irreversibly addicted to, forgetting how these devices hoover up the details of your lives, and not to your benefit. I prefer a library that informs me, not others about me.

There is an exception. Whenever a guest explores my library, I am exposed, for they soon detect what interests me. This is acceptable because, in turn, I see who browses the collection (many don’t) and what attracts them. It’s a good tactic for separating savants from servants.

You might wonder how I came to have such an affection for the printed word. That’s a question answered easily.

When I was in grade school my mother escorted me, every Saturday, to the Kingston Public Library. Unlike Winnipeg’s first public library, ours wasn’t one of the 125 Andrew Carnegie’s wealth established across Canada, out of the 2,500 his corporation financed around the world. But it was nevertheless a splendid place. And, every weekend, I was allowed to borrow as many books from this sanctuary as the library’s lending rules permitted. There was never any censor or censure. Only one condition was imposed — all of the books I picked on any given Saturday had to be read by the following one.

The only disappointment I ever experienced with my library’s service was when I asked the Reference Desk for Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” I had just watched Errol Flynn in a 1936 film of the same name. Swept up by its heroic portrayal of British cavalrymen during the Battle of Balaclava, I confess I wanted to be like them. Alas, the librarians could not find the poem. It wasn’t until 2010 that I stood on the actual battlefield and read this poem aloud. I’ll do so again when Crimea is liberated from the Russians.

Mother persisted in taking me to this publicly funded space, dedicated to fostering knowledge, until I was a thoroughly smitten book-lover, old enough to go on my own. I pray some mothers are still guiding their children to public libraries, letting books inoculate their young against the Janus-faced devices they will otherwise become enslaved to.

Libraries are cradles of democracy — iPhones aren’t.

Lubomyr Luciuk, a professor of political geography at the Royal Military College of Canada, does not own an iPhone and never wants to.