Dear friends,
Fortuitously, an old pal from the London arts’ scene (circa 1999) called us up last Friday and told us they were dropping off a bunch of books for sale. We’ve known this good soul for a long time and were delighted by the call, in part because he’s a great conversationalist and kind community member, but also in part because we know he has beautiful books. We are greedy when it comes to seeing other people’s secret stash. Sure enough, his books were gorgeous. After a good long chat, and sadness from our end to hear he was moving to Nova Scotia, we said good-bye and dove into the boxes he left us: Canadian Literature, Beat Poetry, Eastern Philosophy, and other titles for smart, kind people.
These tumultuous days, Canadian Literature really warms our hearts. Stumbling upon uncommon Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, and W.P. Kinsella first editions felt even more joyous than usual.
The current upswing in Canadian spirit, and these well-met first editions, brought to mind our early days at the old London Public Library. It was a burgeoning regionalist’s paradise—-and what is Canadian spirit if not regionalism? We recall rainy mornings climbing those Queens Avenue steps and walking into what was perhaps the best library we’d ever encountered, the one against which all other libraries would be measured (even yours, NYC!). Both of us went to high school downtown (Central and Beal), and so the library was just a hop-skip-and-a-jump for both of us. We aspired to literary greatness; Jason in his brown fedora, skipping class to learn about avant-garde and experimental creations; and Vanessa in her Parisian boho black sweaters, using her brown-nose-teacher’s-pet status with Winston Schell to spend her English classes two blocks away from her schoolmates.
Here we discovered Greg Curnoe and Don McKay. We flipped through 20 Cents Magazine in the old London Room, guided by librarian Glen Curnoe. We explored zines, newspapers, posters, and ephemera from our unexpectedly bright and interesting local art scene’s history. For both of us, it was a step beyond the background of our home berths into a larger, cosmopolitan community weirdly just at our doorsteps.
That library made us writers.
Its collection was a classic mix of arts and humanities. It was curated with deep care. The relationship between those books crafted a sense of things that the info-dumps of our current state-of-mind make impossible. There was something incredible about reading the lines of Chris Dewdney’s paleozoic dreamscape and then walking 300 numbers down on the Dewey Decimal System (eight or so book cases if we remember right, just on the back wall) to find a book about the prehistoric fossils of Southwestern Ontario that inspired him.
We’d spread all this mind-blowing stuff out on those handsome wood tables and WRITE AND WRITE AND WRITE. We hunkered down with the naive verve of teenagers discovering greatness in their own city, and do our best to create something, anything, that could merit inclusion in that cannon. Hours would go by. The small, poorly stocked coffee shop in the basement provided mediocre sustenance. Librarians sometimes got excited about what we were doing, and popped over to set an Anne Carson book on our piles, saying, “I think you might like this.”
Sure, you might argue that we’re being stodgy and conservative and that the splendour of access offered by the intertoobs is unmatched and, yes, there’s lots of stuff we wouldn’t know if we didn’t get this whole internet thing in our lives, but there is something key to comprehension when you can walk, even saunter, from one subject to the next, adding and remixing as you go quietly about your day.
You might ask what threateningly personal insights could possibly have been available back then in comparison to today. You might wonder how anyone came up with anything new when all they had to work with was the collection of what was, in retrospect, a modestly sized main branch of the library of a relatively small city. You might think that the silence would be unbearable in contrast to the din of boastful and alarmed social chatter.
You, then, are among the same folks who can’t abide a person sitting quietly reading on their lunch break, and must interject. You are unlikely to ever understand. That old library taught us how to simply be in books.
We can still remember what the rain sounded like hitting those huge windows, and it calms us. As readers, we repeat this experience every time we sit down with a good book and discover something new about ourselves and our world.
Here are some new arrivals.
Much love,
Jason & Vanessa
Photo of the old London Public Library courtesy of the LPL Facebook page.
