11:59 AM
I can only hope that some of you share my unbridled awe towards large libraries. I was deep in the stacks of the Wisconsin State Historical Society doing research this morning when I stumbled across a book on Indian treaties written by Thomas Jefferson and printed by Benjamin Franklin. Not a reprint--the actual book, from the late seventeen hundreds. Just sitting there on the shelf. Granted, it's unlikely that the author saw every copy of his book, and it's likely that it was someone who worked for Franklin and not Ben himself who printed it, but in a Six-Degrees-of-Physical-Separation kind of way, for that moment I felt that much closer to two people I'd only read about in history books.

Beyond that slightly-psychotic mix of sentiment and speculation, I love the high chance for serendipity at large libraries.

If you go to your local public library, you'll find two classes of book: a) books that every library has (a set of encyclopedias, the Guinness Book of World Records, the Chilton manual for a 1982 Suburban...) and b) books that you really don't want to read (Are You There, God--It's Me, Margaret, Stephen King's Evil Comes to Maine Yet Again, the Chilton manual for a 1982 Suburban...) Somewhere in there there are books you actually do want to read, but they're really hard to find, so you end up going home with a 1200-page Grisham novel on 3-day loan and a Chilton manual.

But at large libraries--and even the Madison public library doesn't count here; I'm talking major university size--there are so many volumes in the collection that your chance for finding those interesting books seeded in among the dross is that much higher. It helps if you (like me) tend towards being informationally omnivorous, but it doesn't take too long to find jewels like FEMA's instructions for postmasters in case of nuclear attack, obscure biographies, ancient novels that draw you just by their spine design (I found the work of John Kendrick Bangs that way), subjects-in-collision books on the weirdest topics (William Howard Taft and the American Circus.)

One of the saddest realizations I ever came to was that I'll never be able to read everything I want to before I die...