Here is a little book I found through interlibrary loan in prep for my Shenandoah National Park residency.  What is this little book doing at the Portland, Maine Public Library, and how long has it been sleeping in the stacks? 

Remember the magic of opening the back cover of a book to see just how many people checked it out?  You could tell by the long list of due dates stamped unevenly on that thin sheet of paper.  The dates were stamped mostly in black ink, and occasionally in red, like a teacher correcting your papers.  Or, written by hand. 

Some of the dates were older than you were or even before you were born!  And sometimes you felt bad for a book because hardly anyone took it out.  Or mysteriously, the book was taken out once and then abandoned until you checked it out ten years later. 

This book has only two due dates: May 23, 1995 and June 07, 2000, not much for a 1937 publication.  Handwritten, in what looks like a ballpoint pen and a very determined penmanship of old, is the call number, the title and the author.  Above it in contrast is the cold, rectangular bar code.

On the inside cover is an old logo from the Portland Public Library, incorporated in 1867, and under this, in handwritten script, are the words: The Philip G. Brown Fund.  Did Philip G. give this little book to the library?  And if so, what was he doing in Virginia?

Instead of walking through the narrow aisles and dusty floors of a library, I order my books through interlibrary loan.  But I do miss looking up to see if the complicated call number written in pencil on a tiny piece of paper falls between this aisle or that. 

And finally, finding the book but it’s too high up.  So, you locate the step stool and roll down the aisle with a racket, waking all the readers from their papers.  And trying to be ever so quiet, to find what you are looking for.            

Or best of all, having a book find you, because you happened to be at that aisle, on that day, looking at all the books around you.

This little 1937 historical book is in fact, very dry reading.  But the age of the book, the shape, the smell of the pages, the way it feels in your hands when you open it up and the forest green tape holding it all together, are the best.