I'm looking outside on this sleety, chilly, miserable February morning and thinking—what a great day to curl up with a book. Indeed, if it didn't entail a trip to the car, then a sloppy, awkward, potentially frightening and fatal drive to the library it's a great day to go there. Libraries have fireplaces, too, and books. Lots of books.
Libraries are the airports of the mind. They allow us to take off, explore, cruise through realms of imagination and adventure, just by opening a book.
Recently, a librarian in Oregon contacted me. She'd discovered my book, The Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life and she was intrigued by it. I guess inside its covers she'd found a runway open, ready to launch her into a world she'd never explored, the world of helicopter aviation. So she read TSBM way out in Oregon. Then she had a question: her library needed renovation work. In Jefferson Oregon, the drive to modernize the library is in full swing, and she wondered if, as an author, I might be wiling to contribute whatever I could? I said I'd see what I could do. As I wrote the (very small) check to Friends of the Jefferson Library, it occurred to me that this is something all authors ought to do. Not write checks; we do plenty of that. Authors should adopt a library. We should individually & collectively create a kind of Adopt-A-Library program, a place we send copies of our books, a place we go on a regular basis, use the stacks, do research, and take advantage of the resources there. We should also adopt this library to do readings and signings of our own work, promote them there and make a kind of symbiotic covenant with that library. All over America libraries struggle with budget cuts, ebbing interest in printed books, low visitation rates. Authors have a stake in promoting books, of course, so stealing a page from the infamous outlaw Willie Sutton, authors should go to libraries because, 'that's where the books are.' So if you're an author, and you're reading this on a sleety, chilly February morning, why not adopt a library? Just book on over there and do it. You'll be glad you did.