The Library

By Vince Basehart

October 26 -- Growing up, my parents badgered me with stories of childhoods marked by the Depression, polio epidemics, walking through snow to the bus stop and Pearl Harbor.

What with the blessings of a soft life and the dogged march of technology, I have been reduced to relating to kids the hardships of growing up without Google.

If I wanted information, I tell them bitterly, I had to go to the library. I had to rifle through yellowed index cards, write down the numerals assigned to the book on a scrap of paper using a tiny pencil, and search the stacks to find the thing. All by hand.

In an age of laptops and search engines, it seems libraries would go the way of the stone tablet. Thankfully, the Santa Monica Library Main Branch, at 6th and Santa Monica, is one which has kept up with the times by transforming itself into what students of library science now refer to as “information centers.”

It is anything but musty. The cavernous two-level facility feels like a Swedish modernist experiment-meets-Battlestar Gallactica. Its gray cement floors, stainless steel railings, glass panels, beehive-looking ceiling lamps and monotone color scheme make some operating rooms look downright cozy.

Countless shelves offer CDs, audio books and DVDs. The place houses dozens of blonde wood desks the size of drawbridges, each featuring smartly integrated electrical outlets and wi-fi Internet hook-ups. There are banks of public computer terminals allowing searches of every possible type across the entire city library system, specialized Internet links, and niche databases.

On the second floor there are even more tables with public access computers. There are private, glass-walled, soundproofed study rooms.

In the courtyard outside is the requisite coffeehouse.

Yet, beside all the gewgaws and modern trappings, the star of the show is clear: books. Good, old-fashioned, ink-on-paper, turn-the-page books are why people come here, and what occupies the most acreage. Books one can touch are a human need.

I walked the stacks and passed titles, simply inhaling them and their subjects in ways that one simply can not by browsing a web page. In seconds I passed through Mayan civilization, interior decorating, the history of opera, dolphins, the life of Marshall Tito, the intricacies of building a log cabin, the Constitution. I passed massive, unabridged English dictionaries set out on pulpits, where they belong.

In one corner I spied a bunch of high schoolers who were pretending to study, while flirting.

A stunned looking young man in a Dodgers sweatshirt, perhaps a Santa Monica College student, sat in front of a three foot high stack of volumes on Japanese and Chinese textiles. He scrawled aimlessly in a spiral notebook, praying for inspiration.

Another young man pored through the Los Angeles Business Journal as if looking for the meaning of life.

I passed two women who were sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the aisle, smiling rapturously as they turned the pages of books. Books which were theirs, but at the same time shared with every one who had once checked them out, and who would check them out in the future. You don’t get that feeling from clicking on a link.

Back down on the ground floor there were the characters that occupy all urban public libraries: the Cougher, the Weird Intense Starer, the Newspaper Rattler, the Shoosher.

I heard a little kid, a Dr. Seuss book tucked under his arm, tell his father that he wanted “another lie-berry book.”

Last but not least there are those souls who decide to devote their careers to library science, not to print out yellowed index cards, or even to arrange amazing databases, but to share the joy of finding information and discovering the written word in books, glorious books.

Let’s hear it for Santa Monica’s lieberrians.