“Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books,” reads a pullquote by fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld from a magazine spread that’s been making the rounds.
There he is, pictured seated in a room walled with books. A spiral staircase twists upward to even more books. A 2007 New Yorker profile of Lagerfeld states that his personal library contains at least 150,000 books.
I read yesterday about how Camden, New Jersey is planning to permanently close its library system by the end of the year. The city’s three libraries have a total of 187,000 books (37,000 more than Karl’s collection), all of which will be donated, auctioned, stored or destroyed.
I don’t know this as fact but I suspect that the sort of people who wonder why we still have or need libraries, what with the internet and its fruited plain of free, reliable information, are the exact people who haven’t set foot in a library since school, or ever.
Here’s why we need libraries: not everyone has or makes as much money as you do, and libraries offer access to many things for free, namely books. But also internet access; the photo above shows Miguel Garcia and Damarys Rios (with their daughters), looking online for jobs at Camden’s downtown library.
Libraries also offer access to information professionals called librarians; they're like the web, only smarter and containing much less porn.
There are even free movies at libraries. In fact, they’re the largest lender in the country: 2.1 million DVDs a day compared to Netflix’s 2 million per day.
On a soppy personal note, I have proof that libraries whetted my creativity and made me a better, smarter person. I recall fondly a childhood of summer reading programs and volunteering to shelve books and organize card catalogs. Later, in college, I read many interesting articles on microfilm when I was supposed to be reading many uninteresting articles on microfilm for scholastic endeavors. Plus, you know, all those books.
If books are drugs, let’s keep libraries open, lest we suffer withdrawal.
(Camden library photo by Tom Gralish for Philly.com.)
Monday, August 9 Update: The libraries of Camden have been given a reprieve.