Third time makes a meme
Nov. 18th, 2014 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceSo Alex Hurst posted about her first library.
And then Mrissa did the same.
So I thought, okay, I can do that too.
Except that when I do it it's almost like boasting, because, y'know. I grew up in Oxford. I have Library Privilege. If we disregard the mobile library that came to the health centre in East Oxford every Wednesday afternoon (actually maybe we shouldn't disregard it, because it was like an ambulance full of books - actually, I'm fairly sure I thought it was an ambulance full of books - and that is inherently cool, even if you don't jump forward thirty-some years and discover my best friend Helen being a doctor in that very health centre, which was only just over the fence from the house that I grew up in, twenty years and two hundred miles before I ever met Helen), then my first library was Oxford City Library. In its original Victorian incarnation, which was an adjunct to the Town Hall. It was a good mile from our house, probably a little further, but we walked it stoutly every Saturday morning: two parents, and four kids in descending order (him, her, me, her), with about two and a half years between each of us.
The library was up a flight of steps, through brass-bound doors; and you turned left in the hallway for the adult library, right for the children's. And you weren't allowed to progress from right to left till you were twelve. Which, when you've been reading since you were three (my big sister taught me, when she must've been all of five at the time - thanks, Viv!), is a very long time to wait. And when you're allowed to take half a dozen books a week out of the children's library, and you have three sibs who are doing the same, it's not just possible but entirely likely that you're going to read everything but everything that library has to offer, before you're let move on.
Happily, I had that elder brother, five years ahead of me. He got into the adult library when I was seven; and I'd already established the tradition that I just read everything that everybody brought home. Which is how I read my first serious SF - Silverberg's Nightwings, Pohl & Williamson's The Reefs of Space - when I was too small to remember either titles or authors, and the books were just yellow-covered with black type (yay Gollancz: easy to find, tho' impossible to identify beyond "it's yellow, it must be SF or crime"; no helpful illustrations for little kids who couldn't remember title and author). I spent much of my teenage assiduously reading all the SF available in the UK, picking off those early encounters one by one, "Aha! Found it!" (For there always was something I did remember: "Roum is a city built on seven hills", or the living criminals being cut apart for organ donation, or...)
And the adult library when I finally got in there had an issue system that used a camera to photograph your ticket and the book's ID, which was the coolest thing ever; and talking of cameras, up in one of the galleries was a collection of photographs of historic Oxford, which you could go up and look through. And that wasn't the whole of our Saturday mornings, because we'd always do something cultural and/or fun, going up a college tower or feeding the deer in Magdalen Deer Park or visiting the Ashmolean or the Natural History Museum or the Pitt Rivers or or or. And having a sticky bun in the Cadena and spending our pocket money in the shops, that too. But the library was at the core of the day, always.
Later they moved it to a shopping centre down towards the station, and then it was all modern and really not the same; so I count that iteration as my second library, and, y'know. You always remember your first.
And then Mrissa did the same.
So I thought, okay, I can do that too.
Except that when I do it it's almost like boasting, because, y'know. I grew up in Oxford. I have Library Privilege. If we disregard the mobile library that came to the health centre in East Oxford every Wednesday afternoon (actually maybe we shouldn't disregard it, because it was like an ambulance full of books - actually, I'm fairly sure I thought it was an ambulance full of books - and that is inherently cool, even if you don't jump forward thirty-some years and discover my best friend Helen being a doctor in that very health centre, which was only just over the fence from the house that I grew up in, twenty years and two hundred miles before I ever met Helen), then my first library was Oxford City Library. In its original Victorian incarnation, which was an adjunct to the Town Hall. It was a good mile from our house, probably a little further, but we walked it stoutly every Saturday morning: two parents, and four kids in descending order (him, her, me, her), with about two and a half years between each of us.
The library was up a flight of steps, through brass-bound doors; and you turned left in the hallway for the adult library, right for the children's. And you weren't allowed to progress from right to left till you were twelve. Which, when you've been reading since you were three (my big sister taught me, when she must've been all of five at the time - thanks, Viv!), is a very long time to wait. And when you're allowed to take half a dozen books a week out of the children's library, and you have three sibs who are doing the same, it's not just possible but entirely likely that you're going to read everything but everything that library has to offer, before you're let move on.
Happily, I had that elder brother, five years ahead of me. He got into the adult library when I was seven; and I'd already established the tradition that I just read everything that everybody brought home. Which is how I read my first serious SF - Silverberg's Nightwings, Pohl & Williamson's The Reefs of Space - when I was too small to remember either titles or authors, and the books were just yellow-covered with black type (yay Gollancz: easy to find, tho' impossible to identify beyond "it's yellow, it must be SF or crime"; no helpful illustrations for little kids who couldn't remember title and author). I spent much of my teenage assiduously reading all the SF available in the UK, picking off those early encounters one by one, "Aha! Found it!" (For there always was something I did remember: "Roum is a city built on seven hills", or the living criminals being cut apart for organ donation, or...)
And the adult library when I finally got in there had an issue system that used a camera to photograph your ticket and the book's ID, which was the coolest thing ever; and talking of cameras, up in one of the galleries was a collection of photographs of historic Oxford, which you could go up and look through. And that wasn't the whole of our Saturday mornings, because we'd always do something cultural and/or fun, going up a college tower or feeding the deer in Magdalen Deer Park or visiting the Ashmolean or the Natural History Museum or the Pitt Rivers or or or. And having a sticky bun in the Cadena and spending our pocket money in the shops, that too. But the library was at the core of the day, always.
Later they moved it to a shopping centre down towards the station, and then it was all modern and really not the same; so I count that iteration as my second library, and, y'know. You always remember your first.