Enchanting Stories Check Out the Lives Inside Libraries

IN THE STACKS

Short Stories About

Libraries and Librarians

Edited by Michael Cart

Overlook Press

288 pages; $26.95

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It’s ironic to anyone who’s found a home in libraries, who’s discovered the wild realms and the tumultuous call of words thundering off the printed page amid the cherished stacks, that the very place where one’s imagination is so fired is so shrouded in silence. And yet, it’s wholly fitting.

“In the Stacks,” an enchanting anthology of short stories about libraries and librarians written by a host of well-respected authors, fits perfectly into this hushed world. The narratives limned here are quiet yet suggest the turbulent roar of life just beyond the library’s doors. Edited by Michael Cart, former director of the Beverly Hills Public Library, the stories span from 1906 to 1998 and represent a “mini-United Nations of countries,” including writers from Argentina, Canada, England, Italy, Poland and Russia.

The oldest story in the collection, Zona Gale’s “The Cobweb,” traces the life of two sisters, Lissa and Kate, in turn-of-the-20th century America. Lissa serves one hour nightly as the town’s librarian, loaning books out of the local store where the shop owner has “kept sacred to books a section of shelves, beyond the canned goods and above the salt-fish barrel.” Kate, known to be the less brainy of the two but impeccable at housekeeping, serves as Lissa’s replacement for a few minutes one evening. The townspeople tease Kate for being unable to find a particular book, though, as she reflects, “nobody had laughed at the dust on the City Library books.”

Kate envies her sister’s ability to penetrate books and ideas, to have her imagination stirred by words. Though Kate is read to in the evenings by Lissa, she’s unable to enter the worlds her sister finds; words never transport her the way they do Lissa. When Kate falls ill, though, and Lissa must take over the day-to-day housekeeping of their home, the reader sees just how little book-learning will earn you when work needs to be done. Being a genius in the realm of text adds up to diddly in the hard-and-fast world of keeping home and hearth.

Northern California writer Gina Berriault’s powerful contribution, “Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?,” chronicles a male librarian on the verge of retirement. The librarian’s life is disturbed by a homeless man who comes to his desk regularly, wanting to discuss the esoterica of poetry.

Illuminating the affluence usually associated with reading along with the democratic accessibility of library books to even the most downtrodden, the story is disquieting in a pensive way. Then there’s Francine Prose’s “Rubber Life,” telling of a stereotypically unattached female librarian who’s bored with both her recent reading choices and life. “I skimmed these books as fast as I could and let their simple sentences wash through my brain like shampoo,” she explains of her perusal of “fat non-fiction bestsellers detailing how rich people contract-murdered close relatives.” Her uneventful existence is destined to continue until Lewis, an intriguing library patron with eclectic reading tastes, captures her attention and she begins to check out and read every book he returns.

Even the loudest of the stories--Anthony Boucher’s playful hard-boiled whodunit involving a murdered librarian, and the co-workers and patrons under suspicion, “QL 696.C9,”--is subdued in a jocular way. Throughout the tales collected here, the librarian characters are unassuming and helpful yet human and complex. In Alice Munro’s “Hard-Luck Stories,” we’re given a glimpse into the other lives of librarians--the ones that take place outside the library, and in Munro’s telling, involve illicit love and well-kept secrets. Ray Bradbury’s “Exchange” is a sentimental tale of a solider returning to his hometown only to be disappointed by the lack of connection he finds. When he walks into the library, though, he encounters what he’d been looking for. The elderly librarian remembers him, and he recalls her. “I used to think you were Mrs. God,” he confides, “and that the library was the whole world, and that no matter what part of the world or what people or thing I wanted to see and read, you’d find and give it to me.”

Library lovers will find a similarly quiet yet abiding place in this anthology. The stories here echo the magical near-silence we seek, the stillness that allows imagination to take flight.