Everyone who loves libraries has a library story.  Here’s mine:

It begins in Brooklyn, New York, where I had the great fortune to live near my maternal grandparents for the first eight years of my life.  My grandfather was a high school teacher and a talented watercolorist.  My grandmother, who had not finished high school, was a voracious reader with an intense curiosity about the world.  Their idea of fun, of a great vacation, was traveling across the country in their hulking 1948 Nash stopping at college campuses and signing up for summer courses. 

This was decades before Elderhostel, a generation before the concept of the “nontraditional learner.” There was no program for them.  But there they were, a smiling middle-aged couple dressed in summer cottons, identical straw hats perched on their heads, asking to sit in on Modern European Poetry or The Civilization of Mesopotamia or Renaissance Architecture.  My grandfather, the teacher, was the shy one.  It was my grandmother who knocked on doors, made appointments with registrars and cornered professors in the hallway.  She was charming, cheerful, enthusiastic – and insistent.  She never took no for an answer. Every summer, she managed to talk her way (and his) into a classroom somewhere.

Back home in New York in the late summer, they would resume their normal lives and take up once again their grandparently duties, which meant almost weekly visits with their only grandchild, me.  Saturday mornings my mother would drop me off at my grandparents’ apartment, and Saturday afternoon my grandmother and I would walk several blocks to the Brooklyn Public Library.  It was a huge, dark building, scary and thrilling, busy yet noiseless.  I loved it.  My grandmother would use her library card to sign out a small stack of books for me.

When I was four, I asked for a library card of my own.  The librarian took one look at me and shook her head.  Sorry, she said, a cardholder has to be able to write his or her name – in cursive – to get a card.  She leaned forward from her perch behind the counter when she said “in cursive.”   I had just recently learned to print my first name in large wobbly capital letters.  But I wanted a card of my own, and my grandmother wanted me to have a card of my own, and my grandmother never took no for an answer. So together we practiced. 

It took weeks of work, most of one of my grandfather’s sketchpads and dozens of Crayolas.  I would clench the crayon so tightly that it snapped halfway through the “L.”  My grandmother put her large freckled hand over mine to guide me through the loops and swirls, and slowly my fingers relaxed and learned the motions.  Then, one Saturday, I signed my name in cursive at the big mahogany library desk, and the librarian handed me my card.  She said I was their youngest patron ever.

Since then, libraries have been a force in my life – as a reader, a student, a teacher and a writer, from the Lincoln room in the Chicago Public Library to the basement of the old San Francisco library to the lovely old Carnegie library in McMinnville, Oregon, to the glorious new library built by the smart and generous citizens of the town I am lucky enough to inhabit.

As a nonfiction writer, I use libraries hard.  For my last book, I had to teach myself, among other things, the history of the American communist movement, the geography of Manhattan island and the culture of Italy under Mussolini.  For the book before that, I was in the library gathering armfuls of books on the history of aviation and the history of Hollywood.  Before that, I gave myself, via the library, a crash course on the women’s sports.  And before that, tutorials on Meiji-era Japan, U.S. immigration policy and the apple industry.  I have spent many, many hours in the library and many, many months at my desk reading the books I brought home.

I am not, I should note, a neoLuddite who spurns the internet.  I cruise, peruse and use internet sources all the time.  But for the real deal, the fully vetted information, the experts I can trust, for richness and depth, for portable wisdom I can read in bed at night or take with me on a trip, I go to books.  I go to the library.

But I also appreciate libraries in a less pragmatic way.  As a writer, I appreciate a library the way a painter appreciates a museum – a place of inspiration, a living monument to what I do.  It is both exhilarating and humbling to be in the presence of thousands of books, surrounded not just by information but by knowledge, by art and culture, by stories.  

A few years ago, I brought my then five-year-old daughter to a large, sprawling public library.  She looked around, wide-eyed. Up to the ceiling and down to the floor, all she could see were books. She was momentarily – and uncharacteristically -- speechless.   

“Mommy,” she said, after a while.  “Did you write all these books?” (Isn’t it wonderful what small children think we are capable of?) 

“No,” I said, kneeling down to give her a hug.  She squirmed away to look up again at the ceiling-high shelves. 

“Well,” she said.  “Did you read all these books?” 

“I’m working on it,” I told her.

LAUREN KESSLER (www.laurenkessler.com), the editor of Etude and Director of the Literary Nonfiction program at the University of Oregon, is the author of ten books.