My Love of Libraries, by Ceridwen Dovey:

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One of the most enjoyable events I attended when the hardcover of Blood Kin came out last year was the Public Library Association Conference in Minneapolis. Caught up in all the public library love, I found myself admitting to a room full of librarians that my first fetish object was a library stamp. One of my favorite pastimes when I was little was cataloguing and labeling and then arranging in alphabetical order every single book in our house, and then checking them out to myself and my imaginary borrowers with my sister's Hello Kitty stamp. My mother, needless to say, was not impressed when she discovered that her first edition J.M. Coetzee novels had been Hello Kitty-ied.

We moved around so much when I was little that we could never take many books along with us (despite books being my family's main passion, as my mother was a literary critic), and our pilgrimages to the new public library in whichever town we turned up in were some of the most anticipated journeys of my childhood. If my mother ever lost track of where I was in the library, she knew she would find me gazing longingly at the due date stamp at the check-out counter, mesmerized as the librarian changed the date with a twirl of the metal numeric rings, and the confident way she stacked up open books on top of one another to stamp their back covers in quick succession.

Even now, after so many years spent wandering through the stacks of various university libraries, I get so excited when I first enter a library that I get a bit dizzy and breathless. There is something amazingly democratic about a public library: that anybody can have access to any of that knowledge, so beautifully arranged and ordered, for free! And there is a magic about the materiality of library books - the way you can track how many people have held that same book in their hands, or the random thoughts of a reader who scribbled in pencil in the margins, or which page another person saw fit to dog-ear because something in it touched her.

I know I'm supposed to encourage anybody I can to go out and buy a copy of Blood Kin, but I would be just as happy if you check it out of your local public library, as long as you think of me when the librarian's stamp makes that satisfyingly mechanical noise as the due date is imprinted on it.

Soon after my return to New York from Minneapolis, I received this email from one of the wonderful librarians I met there:

Hi Ceridwen,

We met at your reading at the Public Library Association conference. You can get the personal library stamp kits from  several sources, but one close to home is the New York Public Library shop, http://www.thelibraryshop.org/products2.cfm/ID/29450/c/organizer-kits, which of course
benefits the library!

Really loving Blood Kin; planning to suggest it for our book club. I'm impressed that you write so well from the viewpoint of 3 men. The portraitist is especially poignant.

Take care, and enjoy your library fantasy!

Lesley

So now you know what I bought myself for my 28th birthday.

And just in time, too! Lesley recently wrote to break the sad news to me: We've stopped using date due stamps at EPL! Like many libraries, we've gone to printing receipts for customers listing all their check outs, which saves time in line but is admittedly less satisfying than that solid thump! in a new acquisition. The buzz of the receipt printer just isn't the same.

Bobst Library at NYU still uses the stamps, thank goodness, but my parents' local library in Sydney has also started using a receipt printer, which at first glance doesn't seem a promising fetish object candidate.

 

Ceridwen Dovey, Blood Kin, Penguin, Penguin Books