The light comes in at a long angle when October starts in earnest
The reading room at the Allegheny Branch faces almost due east, which means by the time I usually arrive — somewhere between three and four in the afternoon — the windows are no longer doing any of the work. The shadows have crept up onto the long oak tables, the green-shaded lamps have been turned on by whoever stopped at the front desk on the way in, and the room takes on that particular library hush that I do not think exists anywhere else in the world. A quiet pencil. A page being turned by someone three tables over. The squeak of a wheeled cart in the next aisle. Nothing more.
I came in today to return a slim paperback of Wendell Berry essays that I had renewed twice already, and to pick up a hold I had placed weeks ago. The hold was an out-of-print history of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad that the branch had quietly pulled out of deep storage and put aside for me with a paper slip taped to the cover. I should know better than to start reading it standing up in the lobby, but I did anyway, and a full chapter went by before I noticed someone politely waiting to pass me on the way to the children's section.
A small library's gift is not its collection. Its gift is the permission to read slowly, in public, without explaining yourself.
I find myself coming back to that line whenever I try to explain why this branch matters to me. The big downtown branch on Forbes Avenue has every research database, every literary journal back to the 1920s, and a beautiful Beaux-Arts reading room that always feels like it belongs to someone else. The Allegheny Branch is smaller, older in the bones, and feels like it belongs equally to anyone who walks through the door. People come here to read magazines and not buy them. People come here to print a single page. People come here, sometimes, just to sit in a chair with their coat still on.
· · ·
Recent notes from the carrel by the window
On returning a book late and not being scolded
I returned a poetry collection three weeks past its due date earlier this month. I had reason to believe the system would have something to say about it. The librarian at the desk — a woman whose name I have learned to be Margaret, though I admit I had to ask twice — scanned the cover, glanced at the screen, and said, "It is back. That is the part that matters." She slid the book onto a cart behind her and reached for the next item in the return bin without making it any more of a thing than that. I think about this often. There are very few transactions left in adult life that go the way this one did.
On the children's-section beanbag chairs
The branch has, in its small back corner near the picture books, four beanbag chairs in faded primary colors. Two of them are leaking small white pellets along one seam, and a strip of clear packing tape has been applied to slow the bleeding. I have watched the same tape get reapplied at least twice over the past year. Nobody is in a hurry to throw the chairs out. A child of about six was reading a book about deep-sea fish in the red one when I walked past today. Her mother was reading a book of her own in a regular chair nearby. Neither of them looked up.
On the cart in the lobby marked "FREE — TAKE ONE"
The cart usually has cookbooks that nobody wants, dictionaries from publishers that no longer exist, and the occasional copy of a self-help title from the 1990s with the cover scuffed off. Today, sitting on the top shelf as if it had been left there by accident, was a clothbound edition of The Wind in the Willows, the kind with color plates and a marbled endpaper. I almost took it. I left it for someone else. I will probably regret that for a week.
About this log
This is a personal reading log. It is not affiliated with any library system and does not speak for any branch, librarian, or staff member. The Allegheny Branch in the title refers loosely to the kind of small neighborhood branch I have spent most of my reading life inside of. Names have been adjusted, hours have been politely fudged, and one or two beanbag chairs have been fictionalized to protect the dignity of the originals.
I started keeping the log because I noticed that I was forgetting most of what I read within a week of finishing it. The notes are short on purpose. The point is not to write a review or to recommend anything. The point is to slow down enough to notice what stayed with me, and to put it somewhere I will come back to. If you stumbled in here looking for something else, the front door is on the left and the children's section is in the back, and you are welcome to stay either way.
· · ·
The reading desk, this week
On the desk at home — which is not, strictly, a desk; it is the smaller half of a dining table I bought used in Lawrenceville eight years ago — there is a pile of three books that I am rotating between. One I am reading carefully, marking up with a pencil. One I am reading in the bath, and so it has wrinkled pages and a slightly warped spine. One I keep meaning to start and have read the first page of perhaps a dozen times. I will not say which is which. Anyone who has tried to maintain three simultaneous reads at once knows the configuration is not stable. By the end of the month one will be finished, one will be quietly abandoned, and one will surprise me.
I have begun a small index card system, which I suspect is the kind of project that will outlast my interest in it. Each card holds one passage I want to remember, with the book, page number, and date copied at the bottom. The cards live in a wooden box from a thrift store on the North Side. The box has a small brass clasp that does not quite close, and a previous owner has written a single word inside the lid, in pencil: recipes. I have not crossed it out. It would feel like correcting the handwriting of someone I never met.
Colophon
This log is set in IBM Plex Sans and IBM Plex Serif. It is composed in plain text and updated whenever a notable book passes across the reading desk, which is to say, irregularly. Older entries may be reorganized, lightly edited for clarity, or quietly removed if they no longer hold up. New entries arrive without notice. If you would like to be notified when one is posted, the best way is to walk past your nearest small library and check the bulletin board. I will probably have pinned something to it by then.
Comments are not enabled here. If you have an observation you would like to make about a passage, or about libraries, or about a beanbag chair you remember from your own neighborhood branch, the proper place for it is on the back of an index card, in pencil, to be filed in a small wooden box of your own choosing.