If you proposed it now, at any town council or city hall meeting, you would be laughed from the room. The concept is almost unthinkably indulgent, in our austere times: an institution, open for free to anyone, that sells no products, makes no money, is funded from public coffers, and is dedicated solely to the public interest, broadly defined. And it’s for books.
If the public library did not already exist as a pillar of local civic engagement in American towns and cities, there’s no way we would be able to create it. It seems like a relic of a bygone era of public optimism, a time when governments worked to value and edify their people, rather than punish and extract from them. In America, a country that can often be cruel to its citizens, the public library is a surprising kindness. It is institution that offers grace and sanctuary, and a vision of what our country might one day be.
To the eyes of a modern American, it can be a strange, even disorienting vision. For one thing, public libraries are unusually beautiful places, the kind of buildings that make you feel underdressed. In many American cities, the public library ranks among the most ornate and stately fixtures of downtown. They’re erected in early-20th century high style, like the Egyptian revival building at Los Angeles’ Riordan Central Library, or Boston’s neoclassical McKim building. Or sometimes they’re modern monuments to an ongoing investment in public services, like Seattle’s fantastic main branch, a gleaming structure in glass enmeshed in steel latticing.
How different these buildings are from the architecture of other American government buildings – from the flickering fluorescent hells of the DMV, or the windowless, prison-like encampment of many public schools. The only public buildings that rival our libraries in beauty are courthouses – but what happens in libraries is much nobler and less vulgar.
Over the past year, I began working in the public library for the first time in my freelance career, regularly making the subway commute from my apartment in Brooklyn to the 42nd Street flagship branch of the New York Public Library. No matter how often I went, every time I mounted the steps to the entrance, passing between the two famous marble lions – nicknamed Patience and Fortitude – that gaze out across Fifth Avenue, I was always a little nervous.
The building felt beyond my station, as if I was about to get caught doing something I shouldn’t. As I settled into my seat at a broad hardwood table and opened my laptop beneath the chandeliers, I always half expected a suited security guard to arrive and ask me politely but firmly to leave. But what is so precious and stupefying about the public library is that no one ever does. I have a right to be there – not because of any institutional affiliation or job or paid subscription, but because I’m a New Yorker, a regular person, in a city that has decided to honor its people with this place.
There are a lot of indignities to American city life, and maybe there are especially indignities to life in New York. There is the indignity of the crowded and dysfunctional subway system, where the cars are packed so tightly at rush hour that my face is regularly crammed into the armpit of a stranger just as the conductor comes over the speaker to tell us we’re being rerouted impossibly far from where I need to go. There is the indignity of the city’s dirtiness, where huge heaps of garbage emit nauseating smells in the summer, and where in winter the streets are filled with brown slush and puddles of mysterious liquid whose provenance you don’t want to know. There is the indignity of the price of rent.
But the public library offers an almost otherworldly dignity, a sense of purpose and seriousness that falls over you when you enter. The silence of the reading rooms begins to feel like the reverent hush of a temple.
The majesty of library buildings is matched only by the nobility of their purpose. The public library does not make anyone money; it does not understand its patrons as mere consumers, or as a revenue base. Instead, it aspires to encounter people as minds. The public library exists to grant access to information, to facilitate curiosity, education, and inquiry for their own sake. It is a place where the people can go to pursue their aspirations and their whims, to uncover histories or investigate new scientific discoveries.
And it is available, crucially, to everyone. It costs nothing to enter, nothing to borrow – in New York, and in many other cities, the public library system has even eliminated late fees. All the knowledge and artistry of its collection is available to the public at will, and it is a privilege made available, without prejudice, to rich and poor alike.
There’s nothing inevitable about this egalitarianism; it was perfectly possible that libraries could have remained permanent bastions of the elites, as they were before a wave of public and charitable investment – and democratic sentiment – established public libraries across America in the decades after the civil war. And the kind of dignified, edifying sanctuary for thought and curiosity that they provide could easily again become the sole provenance of the rich.
Library budgets are constantly being cut; in New York, Mayor Eric Adams has proposed draconian, multimillion-dollar year-over-year reductions to the public library system’s operating costs, the kind of drastic withdrawals of support that will inevitably force some locations to close.
But the optimism and respect for the people that is represented in the public library is worth taking into the future with us. The public library makes a proposition that’s still radical: that learning, knowledge and curiosity are for everyone, and that the annals of history, literature, science and art might not be just an indulgence of the privileged, but an entitlement of citizenship.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist