This weekend I went down to Calgary Public Library’s Central branch and bought my first library card as an adult taxpayer.
I took out three titles, all of them nonfiction books about starting your own indie record label or promoting your band or going on tour. I am so definitely not a musician, nor am I interested in doing much besides taking the odd ill-advised violin class or checking out Beatles tribute nights at local hipster havens or advocating for rock concerts in libraries, but I was doing a little bit of informal research for a friend (Dewey 780, I told her, that’s all you need to remember) and I thought titles from 2004 through 2007 were probably not so egregiously outdated as to be useless. We pulled maybe twenty books off the shelves, and she selected the three with the cleanest covers. Or maybe the ones most relevant to her needs, I didn’t ask.
This is actually the first library card I’ve had since somewhere around middle school - you know, whenever I stopped being a child and the card stopped being free. It’s definitely the first card I’ve paid for.
For a long time I was kind of ashamed of myself, not having one. What kind of librarian doesn’t have a library card? It was something I’d say self-deprecatingly at social events when I was introduced as the librarian. And for a while during grad school it became a calculated statement that I’d toss off to friends: I could get my scanned journal articles and the latest canlit novel written by my old professors at UBC from the academic library on campus, so why would I bother to collect scraps of mail (which I didn’t receive anyway) and trek over to the main branch of Halifax Public Library? That’s ludicrous: as a student, if it wasn’t on the screen in front of me it most likely wasn’t all that useful anyway. I had deadlines, and HPL’s collection wasn’t exactly focused on academics anyway.
And then, after I moved back to Calgary, not having a card became even more of a statement: what kind of library charges its members - who already pay for the service through municipal and provincial taxes - for a piece of plastic? Shouldn’t they just be grateful that anyone in this day and age even remembers the library exists? Let alone charge them twelve bucks for the privilege of leafing through a grimy paperback? There’s a reason people prefer Amazon: it’s actually less effort to get an item shipped from Ontario than to try to find parking around 7th Avenue. Plus, the arriving text is less likely to be contaminated with swine flu or peanut butter.
But I went. And I paid for the card without arguing with the staff at the circ desk, and I got these three books that are actually kind of awesome - one was a serendipitous find off the new arrivals shelf, and was actually recent enough to mention social media as a viable publicity option - and I spent a few hours hanging out near the German Art Indexes from the 1970s reading and writing and listening to people and their totally unnecessary but still fascinating cell phone conversations.
I had a good time. I found what I wanted. I found something I didn’t know I wanted. I existed in a public space with my fellow Calgarians. I ventured into the vacant downtown core on a weekend. And I had to pay for the privilege. Five out of six isn’t so bad, CPL.
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