In my youth I bought books, borrowed books, checked books out of the library and haunted bookstores, list in hand. Mostly I bought books, and today those eagerly-made purchases still stand in rigid formation on the crowded shelves, thick and thin, tattered and almost pristine, in colors garish and subdued. I have sticky fingers where books are concerned; best not to loan me a book, it will creep in among the others on the shelves to hide anonymously. On occasion, possessed of a cleaning-out zeal, I trawl the shelves, thinking guiltily that someone else would surely enjoy having some of these nearly forgotten titles. I find the purchases from university bookshops, the volumes that covered the backseat of the car after a stop in Cambridge - back when books were cheap in England - the booty from second-hand sales, birthday presents, paperbacks left by decamping guests. I can't part with any of these volumes. The cleanup zeal passes the bookshelves by.
At some point it became clear that this purchasing mania was going to have to stop. Continuing to bring home all those lovely treasures would soon drive me out of the apartment - there'd be no room for me. Not that that would be a problem actually, for I would be residing in the poorhouse anyway, having spent all my cash on printed matter.
Not buying hasn't mean less reading; joining three libraries has seen to that. There is the friendly, homey library in the next town, which must have a sizable English language readership, for there are continually renewed shelves of the latest paperbacks, convenient for popping into my backpack and transporting on the train. The library of the American Women’s Club of Zurich yields a larger selection and audio books, but it is the Zentralbibliothek, the library of the city of Zurich and its university, that yields up most of my present printed treasure.
The general reading stacks in this library take some getting used to. They are located in the catacombs in the cellar. These underground warrens have no windows. The stacks slide on rollers, the mechanical equivalent of little cat feet, so that many of them can be jammed together, separable by means of hand-turned wheels at the end that set them gliding. One is cautioned to check that no one is searching in one of the open gaps between shelves before moving them to create one's own gap. A friend who hated the whole dungeon-like setup once got caught by someone who didn't "mind the gap". I experienced this once also and was more dizzy than frightened. I felt that I, not the shelf, was moving, a very eerie experience indeed.
That's the hardware of the stacks - now we come to the software, the identifying numbers on the books themselves. Whereas the Dewey decimal system and the alphabet have always been good enough for me, this library does things its own way. The North American Library part of the Zentralbibliothek, housing books by American, Canadian and Mexican authors, simply marks each incoming book by the year and a number corresponding to its arrival from the library's own bindery, which re-covers each book in what amounts to armor plate. One feels that this is a too zealous manifestation of Swiss quality. Browsing is also impossible; one has to look up the identifying number on the computer beforehand.
Wanting to check out several books but not enjoying schlepping home a lot of armor plate, I pull my little 2-wheeled shopping cart behind me, rather like a dog on a leash, up the library steps past the gawking students. I assume they finally realize that I am decades older than they, and they probably feel proudly Herculean toting their weighty tomes home to their desks. I am grateful that my books get to ride and can be rolled onto one of the new railway coaches with floors level with the platform. At home they are stacked in the hall bookcase, and then begins the unequaled pleasure of stretching out on the couch with one of them.
Old fashioned am I, you say, to be so enamored -still- of the printed word in this electronic era? No e-books, no Kindle? Think how much easier, I can hear you say, it would be to stretch out on the couch with the laptop and just download the weightless electronic equivalents of my armor-plated volumes.
Yes, but it is I who am old-fashioned, not only my library-visiting habit. I would miss the search in the stacks and the feeling of being among students once again - I feel I am one of them for a few moments. I would feel bereft to hold a tablet in hand, rather than the weightier, thicker item with pages I can turn. My shopping cart is going to continue to bring home as many books as potatoes.
At some point decrepitude will force the electronic reading world upon me. What is most important will stay the same of course - the reading experience; the soaking in of the mystery, the love story, the fascinating facts. What will be lost is the physical, the tangible, the atmosphere given off by ranks of still-unknown books in quantity, the chunky feeling of the story in my hand. Amusing and ironic is the fact that I will then be back to buying books again - e-books this time.
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