Jargogled Impressions.

In Seattle, where I live, there are neighborhoods that have erected bookshelves on the sidewalk, calling it ‘the little free library’.  The message on these boxes prompt the visitor to ‘Take a book, return a book’ or a variation of the sort.  The idea is simple – an anonymous book swapping mechanism with which to propagate the joy of reading, of sharing knowledge, of chancing upon a random book one would not have otherwise read.  And all of it free and up to the discretion of the general public to make it work.  It fascinated me when I first saw this and it still does excite me every time I walk by one. I guess I have yet to part with the scarcity mindset I grew up with. 

I remember as a child, I was fascinated by libraries.  The two libraries I had access to – the school library and the district library could not have been more different in their constitution and their collections. My school – a convent school that still ascribed to an anglophone framework of education, was stocked with English books from British and American authors – across Enid Blyton, Franklin W. Dixon, etc. The district library, on the other hand, was filled with Hindi periodicals, arcane regional books, some namesake English pulp fiction potboilers, and mostly pamphlets and novellas masquerading as book collections.  I also remember the paperwork and the fees that the library charged on a monthly basis.  

My father’s brother was an avid reader too, or so it seemed. While my uncle had migrated to Surat with his family, he still had a few rooms he maintained in his hometown. In his room there were a couple of wall-mounted bookshelves stocked with dusty novels, predominantly English and American mass-market authors like Robert Ludlum, John Grisham, etc. As a young teenager, these books seemed too dull to interest me, and yet, the mere fact of their existence was a source of excitement. I remember just flipping through pages of these paperbacks out of fun every now and then. Across the road, our second cousins lived and they had a rack full of encyclopedias organized neatly in their living room. While I never could find the courage to ask my uncle and aunt for lending me these yesteryear versions of Wikipedias, I found myself constantly fascinated whenever I sneakily flipped through some of the volumes filled with colored images of sundry things around the world. 

In Kota, where I moved after my early schooling and lived for a few years preparing for JEE entrance examination, I discovered a library run by a benevolent lady who stocked Harry Potter (pirated) volumes, Sidney Sheldon, John Grisham, Micheal Connelly, James Patterson, Lee Child, Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, etc. Checking out books incurred a small token fee as deposit and that was only for ensuring a safe return of the book. The lady, for what it seemed, maintained this library out of a pure love for books and for spreading the joy of reading to the young students she found herself surrounded with as the coaching economy of Kota picked up in full steam. But this ready access to books was something I cherished deeply and still do about my time in that sleepy old town in Rajasthan. It was, after all, where I got introduced to the magical world of Harry and of the intrepid storytelling powers of one JK Rowling. 

In Kharagpur, the university library was a maze of books – predominantly textbooks but also ‘some’ noteworthy works of literature. Textbooks interested me only so far till their cover page and the blurb on the back of what the book contained. Pretty much most of it escaped my cognition anyways. Most of the time I spent in the library went more towards browsing these various types of books from all corners of the world versus really reading them. I do remember checking out titles with authors such as Thomas Hobbes, Emmanuel Kant, Sartre, etc. but never reading those. I know now what I was doing then – sort of window shopping for books. 

Then there was the Hall library, each dedicated to the specific hostel and that I pretty much frequented every few days in a week and where I found my first love for reading literary fiction and dare I say, fantasy fiction. There were old issues of magazines and newspapers that got delivered and had a feeling more like The Brooks Hatlen Memorial Library in Shawshank Redemption. A library the inmates could enjoy and often skirt the rules around. 

When I started working, I lived in Mumbai for a few years. I remember checking out The People’s free library in South Bombay purely out of a respect for the building it was housed in – a colonial architecture, painted white and with arches. When I stepped in, the place smelt of books, but old, mothy, termite laden books. When I read this editorial by a historian on the pitiful state of archives in India, it reminded me of this library. 

And yet, not so far away, on the corner of Dadabhai Naoroji Road and MG Road, I found my go-to place for my love for books. The used book store stalls that sat near Flora Fountain in South Mumbai was a labor of love from the 5-6 sellers who maintained a steady collection of books across genres. Since these were used books, and since they emphasized bargaining, I picked up books on a whim and in troves. And that’s how my initial love for a personal library took shape. In the cauldrons of these cheap, second-hand paperbacks, I started building a library of my own. 

Cut to the USA, and in New York, Philadelphia, and Seattle where I lived in different stages of my life, I kept getting astounded and delighted by the ludicrously accessible and amazing system of public libraries that each of these cities hosted. Breezy membership, inspiring collections of old and new books across genres, a digital presence (Libby), and the ability to check out books by the dozens were not something I was accustomed to and yet I grew accustomed to them. 

Till I discovered these little boxes of “The Free Library” dotting the Seattle cityscape. It brought back everything I loved about books, about libraries, about our ability to translate knowledge and stories into these modules of timber-based materials that can pass virally from one to another, sharing stories, building their own stories.