This post has only a little to do with Blacksburg. If you want to read about Blacksburg go back one (the “far” button).

I have these boxes I’ve had forever. One used to hold bananas (I think Jeff got it for me at King’s, where he worked in high school), and the other was some inferior box, and I covered them and their lids with fabric and I kept Things in them.

Then I had these other boxes, flat ones with hinged lids, I think from places like Omaha Steaks, and I kept Things in those, too.

Last week I consolidated the two large boxes and at least four smaller boxes into the one good fabric-covered box. I threw away a lot of stuff, and that’s fine, and I have a stack of years of Spy magazines I need to cull, and that’s fine too. What’s left is the gold.

Among the gold I found this collection. This collection is missing one member (its earliest), but as that one predated my predilection to save Things, and would have been in the care of my mother, who has never had that predilection, I can’t really be blamed.

Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, 1983 (moved there) to 1998 (parents retired to Florida)

The expiration date here is 6/95, but that was written after peeling off many old expiration-date stickers. I got this in 1983 or 1984. This library was just beginning barcoding when I was last there. I worked there in tenth grade. They paid me $3.92 an hour. I have many very specific memories of working there. I found Through a Glass Darkly on the shelf. I left the key in the copier and inadvertently let a couple of young boys make about sixty copies of a picture of a tiger for free. Once a classmate of mine (Dawn Heckel), who, to put it very, very gently, moved in different circles from me and was not my friend, had forgotten her library card and (of course, we were fifteen) had no ID, and my vouching for her identity allowed her to check out the books she needed. My favorite job was “slipping,” returning the due-date cards to newly returned books, because the cards were so tactile and lovely. Once I was allowed to sit alone in the children’s department and check out books to people (the regular children’s librarian [Karen’s mom] was out that day), and I misunderstood what the Rolodex on the desk was for and really confused a woman who spoke very little English. I spent at least one day in the back rooms where old, old newspapers were stored, cataloging and sorting things.

As a patron at this same library, I also remember things, for this of course was the library I grew up with. I remember checking out The Catcher in the Rye and reading it through, and then turning the book over in my hands and reading it again from the beginning. I remember spending a long time whizzing through rolls of the New York Times microfilms. I think it was here that I printed out the page containing an ad for the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead from its original Broadway run–an ad I found by accident while searching for the book review of Winter’s Tale that ran in that day’s book section.

Governor Livingston Regional High School, 1987 to 1991

I remember being surprised that there were physical, embossed library cards at the high school library, but I loved it. Among my memories of that library are the conversation where Scott Brown said, “I was at that party, and I’m really sorry”; the vertical file and the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, which, combined, pretty much are called the internet now; arguing with Nicole over whether the book Your Erroneous Zones was dirty or not; and writing an off-the-cuff essay about Adlai Stevenson for my AP English entrance exam. The library wasn’t called the library, it was called the IMC, the Instructional Media Center, and people actually called it that. Sandi’s stained glass windows (which I promise I will eventually post about) are just outside this library’s entrance. And over the drinking fountain across the hall was a mural of the Beatles, painted just after John Lennon’s death, which I dearly hope is still there, unchanged except for a reference to George Harrison’s death so many years later.

Virginia Tech, 1991 to 1993

Of course my library card was just my student ID, but it still counts, and this is the only library card I ever had with a magnetic stripe on it. I remember using a computer in the Tech library to connect to a BBS I’d been having problems accessing from my dorm room, and, a couple years later, using one to connect to Delphi, just to see if I could (I could). I remember a particular stack, way up in the back, where there were children’s books, and where the carrels were very, very quiet, and the people who knew about them and used them would look at me quizzically for a moment when they saw me going for books up there. I was looking for Thirteen by Remy Charlip and Jerry Joyner, a book I have had my whole life and always treasured. They didn’t have it, but they had other books by those guys, and I enjoyed those. Until the day before yesterday–and I mean that, September 15, 2007–I had never seen a copy of Thirteen except my own. The day before yesterday I paid a quarter and bought a copy off the discard table at the Franklin County (Virginia) library where my aunt’s paintings were on display. Yesterday I walked past this library for the first time in many years. It looked the same.

Montgomery County, Virginia, 1991 to 1993

I don’t remember what it was that the Tech library couldn’t offer me that I ended up going to the town library instead. Quite probably it was children’s books. I remember the library itself, and obviously this card was used at least once, but I couldn’t tell you what I did with it. I’m still glad I saved it, though, and its 1997 expiration date seems really, really generous. I think this may have been the library at which I sat at a sunny table one afternoon and read 84, Charing Cross Road in its entirety, for the first time, and then checked it out anyway. I think it may have been.

St. Petersburg, Florida, 1994 to 1998

Oh, I loved this one. The book list began while this was my library. This was the first one where there were computers I could use to reserve books. I remember checking out a lot of children’s books, including a whole stack once of Newbery and Caldecott winners, just to catch up. I read The Bridge to Terabithia from this library. Once I left the car running outside the front door when I went in to return some things, and the keys and my wallet were in it, and the doors were locked, and I had to call AAA from inside and I felt like a perfect fool. I became a connoisseur of microfiche in this library, seeking out Mark Helprin stories at length, from 1980s magazines like Omni and Esquire, and I know I read one (and I think it was “Last Tea with the Armorers”) entirely on the screen of a microfiche reader. The microfiche cabinet, of course, was tactile and lovely, and was self-service, which the one in Berkeley Heights certainly was not. I always felt like such a library expert looking things up in the Reader’s Guide and finding the right piece of film in the cabinet (oh, the information density of that cabinet) and finding the right page of it. I love the internet–but I miss microfilm and microfiche. I really do.

Fairfax County, Virginia, 1998 to now

I got this card while I was dating Dan (he was actually at the library with me that day), and I checked out some books I couldn’t name now, except that they’re on the book list of the time and they included a book about managing email spam, back in the day when you could get a book contract for a thing like that. (Apropos of nothing, that 1999 book list also includes the date of my first reading of Stardust.)

In 2003, when I was actively participating on dpchallenge.com, I went to this library and checked out a whole stack of things for an idea I had for a speed challenge called “Freedom,” right around the time of the second anniversary of September 11, 2001. I took ninth place with this photo, which is all library books except Harry Potter, and I did not return those library books until late November of that year. I racked up thirty-some dollars in late fees, and I never paid it.

Last year, when I was working at the IMF, I had a lot of free time on my hands. I discovered that this library’s website lets you do all sorts of nifty things, like download audiobooks (it’s Windows-only, but give it time), but you can only do it if you have a library card in good standing. Which I did not; I couldn’t log in. I decided I would finally see the piper and find out how much he wanted to be paid, and I emailed the library. They wrote back that they had no record of my outstanding late fees and my account was only disabled due to inactivity. They reinstated it, and now it’s free and clear. I still feel like I owe them thirty-some dollars.