Why God Made Libraries
We have two bookcases in our home both organized carefully using the home library version of the Dewey Decimal System. That is, they’re arranged by book size. It’s not always easy to locate what you’re looking for, but it does look really pretty.
We have a third bookcase hidden away in our office where our guests won’t see it and judge us harshly. It doesn’t look pretty at all. There are books sticking out every which way, books on top of it and a stack of books growing up from the floor beside it. It looks like an earthquake hit a library.
This bookcase is organized using what I call the Dewey Decimated System. I created the method myself in order to overcome the main obstacle presented by bookcases: they don’t stretch—much. The shelves are slightly bowed, however.
The bookcase in my office contains the books I want to read someday and there are a lot of those. In fact there are more than would fit in my bookcase even if it did stretch. Maybe you’re thinking I should just get another bookcase. I can’t do that. My office doesn’t stretch either.
Or maybe you’re thinking I should get rid of some of my books. I can’t do that either. Well, I could. But I don’t want to. You see, I have a certain weakness. Actually I have many weaknesses, but we’ll leave the rest for another day.
Some people snack late at night. Some people binge-watch old TV shows. I read. And one of the genres I like to read the most is mystery. The problem is once I find a mystery author I like, I’m compelled to read not only every book in any series they’ve ever published, I must read them in the order they wrote them.
So along with a lot of nonmysteries I plan to read, the bookcase in my office has dozens of mysteries I’ve acquired that I can’t read yet because I haven’t read the ones that come before them. Unfortunately I don’t have room for the ones that come before them because, as we’ve already established, my bookcase doesn’t stretch.
And that, my friends, is why God made libraries—to store mystery series until I get around to reading them all in the order in which they were written. Oh, and to store other books too. In fact, not only do libraries have access to practically any book you’re interested in reading, they make it easy to find it because they don’t organize their books by size the way I do. The shelves still look really nice though. And there are never any book stacks growing up from the floor.
This is all a long way to explain why I’ll be celebrating National Library Week April 19-25 with a good book or two—just like I do every other week. Maybe I’ll have cake and ice cream to make it extra special.
Libraries are worth celebrating and April is a big month for doing it. The entire month is National School Library Month. Then we celebrate National School Librarian Day on April 4 and National Librarian Day on April 16. What are libraries without librarians? If you ask me, appreciation for librarians is long overdue. Sorry.
I do have great admiration for librarians though. Now there’s a job I could never do. If I worked in a library, I’d be tempted to hide in the corner, and read all day. A customer would come by and ask me for help and I’d say, “Can’t you see I’m busy?” Librarians never do that.
By the way, I did come across a couple of other library-related holidays in my research. February is National Library Lovers Month, the first week of March is Return Borrowed Books Week and September is National Library Card Sign-Up Month. A library card is a handy thing to have if, like me, you don’t have bookcases that stretch. And I bet they wouldn’t even make you wait until September to get one.