What is it about Librarians?

What is it about Librarians?

I’ve made no secret of my admiration for librarians over the years. They’ve been the ones to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” since long before Google.

This edition of Marginalia is dedicated to those beautiful souls who are dedicated to books and sharing them with everyone. And it’s inspired by yet another new book in the recent trend of historical fiction focused on libraries and librarians, this one titled The Librarian of Burned Books, by Brianna Labuskes.

Set in the period leading up to and during World War II, the book is rich in themes that seem even more important today: attacks on books and learning, authoritarianism, anti-semitism, LGBTQ+, and political intrigue. But it’s Labuskes’ talent for writing quotable dialogue and thoughts that provides so much material for this post!

Warning: I’ve tried to avoid spoiling the plot by staying away from the action, but you may pick up on some of what the author meant to reveal as the story unfolds.

On fearfulness

One of the main characters, an author, on her decision to leave small town Maine and accept a residency in Germany near the beginning of Hitler’s rise to power:

“What is the worst that could happen? she’d asked herself.

You could die, the fear whispered back.

What is the best?

You could live.”

Shortly after her arrival in Berlin, she’s rewarded for overcoming her initial fears when a bookshop owner acknowledges her with the title, Die Bücherfreundin — “a friend of books.”

The books we’ve read

Jumping forward to New York City on the eve of D-Day, another of the main characters is working at a library specializing in preserving copies of books burned by the Nazis. She says she doubts we’ll ever know all the books lost, but explains in a way deeply meaningful for writers, readers, and those who work to connect the two,

“Books are a way we leave a mark on the world, aren’t they? They say we were here, we loved and we grieved and we laughed and we made mistakes and we existed. They can be burned halfway across the world, but the words cannot be unread, the stories cannot be untold. They do live on in this library, but more importantly they are immortalized in anyone who has read them.”

That one gave me chills. Writing, editing, designing, producing, and sharing books — that’s what we do here, too. And she captures why we love it so much.

Another bit that jumped out at me in the above quote was her mention of the mistakes we make. You’ll have to read the book to fully feel the significance of that inclusion. But it made me think of the post I wrote a while back called Kintsugi Mind, where I talked about applying the Japanese art of golden repair as a philosophy of life, where we can accept our mistakes, our broken parts, because “the most beautiful, meaningful parts of yourself are the ones that have been broken, mended, and healed.”

I think Labuskes would agree.

The stories we tell

We say it all the time, stories are not just for fiction. They’re an important ingredient — maybe the most important — in a quality nonfiction book.

And in the middle of this novel, one of the main characters is explaining her strategy for convincing a U.S. Senator to change a piece of legislation regarding a books-for-soldiers program she helps run. She’s organizing an event to rally public opinion. She’s talking with a friend who’s a rising star Congressman about lining up speakers who will talk about their factual, real-life experiences with the book program.

When he warns that people are tired of talking about the war, she reminds him,

“But you know better than anyone people love a good story. I just have to find the right one to tell.”

And the books we will read

Later on, the librarian is asked about her favorite book and after resisting the notion there can be just one, she quotes this,

“When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue — you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humor and ships at sea by night — there’s all heaven and earth in a book.”

Every single book has that potential.

Why it matters

As the event date approaches, the organizer visits the librarian again to recruit her as one of the speakers. Part of her pitch:

“When I first visited your library, I couldn’t see a way forward with this fight … But then you put into words why all of this is so important. We … we humans, we love telling each other stories, don’t we? We’ve done just that in caves and in amphitheaters and in the Globe and in kitchens and around campfires and in the trenches. Every culture, every country, every type of person in the world tells stories … and they have always, always been an indelible part of our very humanity … stories can help us understand each other and ourselves and our world.”

Some advice for authors

Later, talking with her main speaker target, the organizer offered this about the relationship of authors’ messages, themes, and stories in books:

“Is it your job to always say something? … Your message is perfectly tailored to inspire men to go to war for this country’s values. … Don’t get me wrong, your themes are important. But … I think sometimes people get so caught up in the literary prestige of a novel, the idea that reading should be fun is lost. … I don’t think an author’s job is always to change the world. I think sometimes it’s to make it more enjoyable.”

I’ll quibble just a bit. I think any book that makes the world more enjoyable will change every person who reads it in some small way. And that changes the world, too.

The burning (or banning) of books

Some thoughts the characters expressed on the Nazis book burning campaigns:

“… many Germans who burned their own collections all across the country after that night cherished books. But they loved their beliefs more. And that kind of love? It can rot a person from the inside. Can rot a country from the inside.”

“[on when Germany as she knew it was lost] But sometimes I think it was the moment right before the gasoline was poured on the books. The moment the most educated country in the world willingly, joyously, wholeheartedly turned away from knowledge.”

“I can tell you there are people out there who want the world to only think as they think. [Hitler] wrote in Mein Kampf that a smart reader should take away from books only the ideas that support their own beliefs and discard the rest as useless ballast. … I can tell you that banning books, burning books, blocking books is often used as a way to erase people, a belief system, a culture.”

“And I promise you, if I’ve learned anything from my time in Berlin, it’s this: an attack on books, on rationality, on knowledge isn’t a tempest in a teacup, but rather a canary dead in a coal mine.”

All this, in a beautifully woven tapestry of three women finding their way in a war-torn world. What else could you want in a novel?

And why are so many novels these days centered on books, libraries, and librarians?