Love Among the Stacks

Something about it felt illicit. After all, I wasn’t supposed to be there. I’d run away (again) from the bells and schedules, slipping down the halls unnoticed, hiding within the oft-ignored shelves.

He knew that I was there. I could feel him watching me from his desk as he stamped and cataloged.

“You’re different because you love it here,” he’d told me the first time he deliberately forgot to ask me for a pass. And so each day I sat there, curled-up in a corner of the quiet library, lost in the pages others saw as an obligation.

I had an odd bond with this man. Mr. Spear [“like the thing you throw,” he’d always say and chuckle proudly at his little joke] was the stereotypical embodiment of his occupation: bespectacled and quiet, with a few stories that he routinely told. He was a friendly man who let me hide out in the quiet coolness on the days when I wanted to escape.

It was on one of those afternoons that I discovered her. I’d been looking for something else, when my eyes happened to stop on the fading, nearly illegible words: In Favor of the Sensitive Man and other essays. I placed my forefinger on top of the book and tilted it out slightly.

Anaïs Nin.

The name reminded me of the flowery perfume favored by several of my aunts. I pulled it out completely and studied the black and white picture on the cover. It was of an older woman with a childish face. Her long, graying hair was twisted around her head in an intricate braid; her slim figure wrapped in an embroidered kimono.

There was something feline about her, and I immediately wanted to know who she was.

I brought it back to my chair where the book released a sigh as I cracked its spine for the first time in years. A turn to the faded names and dates on the brittle card in the back revealed that it had indeed been nearly two decades since it had been read.

Library books are memento mori; relics read and left by students past. I thought of the others that once rummaged through these shelves—uniformed ghosts that had long since left their adolescence behind.

I gently turned the pages, at first pausing randomly over the paragraphs, then hungrily going back and devouring each of the essays. The writing was dreamlike, erotic, and completely out of place within the crucifix-studded walls of my Catholic high school library.

It felt familiar, like I was recognizing something about myself.

I worked my way through her words until Mr. Spear gave me the look that meant that he could no longer afford to hide me. I went to put the book back, but found that I couldn’t. And yet I didn’t want to check it out for the maximum two weeks, either.

I wanted it. Wholly. Completely. I wanted to keep it. I wanted to take home the musty pages, the fading cover. It was love at first read and I didn’t want to let go.

And so, with only a slight hint of guilt, I slipped it into my black nylon book bag and walked out with the broken eighth commandment slung casually over my shoulder.

A rougher version of this post first appeared on my old blog back in 2007.