664: The Room of Requirement

Ira Glass

A man walks into the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library one Monday earlier this month. He's a balding gentleman named John Peters, and he's looking for books by the Marxist political theorist, Antonio Gramsci.

Ira Glass

If this is a conspiracy to suppress the 20th century's greatest theorist of cultural hegemony, it is not a very effective conspiracy. It takes the helpful librarian less than two minutes to find, on the shelves of the fourth floor, a book of Gramsci's selected political writings.

Ira Glass

Five of us went to libraries around the country that day, according to the reference desk. And one of the things that we found everywhere were even-tempered, unflappable librarians. Like at the Palo Verde Public Library in Phoenix, a library user named Cindy, in a maroon sweatshirt and fanny pack, broke into song to get the librarian to understand exactly which Amy Grant Christmas album she wanted.

Ira Glass

That same day on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana, at the Medicine Spring Library, a woman asked the librarian, Aaron Lafromboise, if they have anything on the Motokiks, the traditional women's society in the tribe.

Ira Glass

They look for books together and don't find much. The books are written mostly by non-natives and men, which can I say? Good example of cultural hegemony.

Same afternoon, on the other side of the country in the Jackson Heights branch of the Queens Public Library in New York City, upstairs in the children's section, high school kids hide out on the floors of the stacks. A teenager by the computers downloads an immigration form, I suppose, for her parents. This is, everybody says, the most ethnically-mixed neighborhood in Queens, with books in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean Urdu, Hindi, and more. Two happily confident third graders, named Katherine and Adam, friends from the libraries after school program, Stacks, walk up to the librarian with a request.

Ira Glass

Even the chapter books have drawings at the start of each chapter, the librarian explains. The kids let her know that this is acceptable. Not ideal, but acceptable.

Ira Glass

He marches the librarian towards the books for older kids. Best as I can figure out, Adam somehow got it into his head that day that he had just had it with picture books. And as soon as he said this, Katherine was like, oh, me too. Though once Adam walked away, she told me it was her own independent decision.

Ira Glass

People use the library for so much more than books, though. In just that one Monday, the five of us who went out to record, we witnessed a woman printing out fliers to find her lost dog. We witnessed old people getting help with their email. One librarian told me that in her job, you really get in touch with just how many people really do not know how to use computers at all.

We saw a homeless guy research apartments he might be able to afford. We heard about power tools you could check out to do your home improvements when you have a place and lights for seasonal affective disorder you can check out. A library got on the phone and then arranged for a patron to get a new walker and get it delivered to him.

Ira Glass

The librarian from suburban Detroit that I spoke with, Annie Spence, described libraries the best, I thought.

Ira Glass

In the Harry Potter books, there's this place called the Room of Requirement. The way it works is you walk three times in front of this certain patch of wall at Hogwarts, thinking, like, I really need a coffee. And then suddenly in that room a coffee shop will appear. Or, I need a place to make my magic potion in secret, and then a room with all the ingredients for your magic potion will appear.

Libraries are like that. But in real life. That's what they do. And today on our program, we have stories of very unlikely uses for these Rooms of Requirement, all driven by people who want something very, very specialized. Something which, in every single story in today's show, the library is able to deliver. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, In Praise of Limbo. So we start our show today with a library in a very unusual place, and with people who want something very unusual from that library. Zoe Chace explains.

Zoe Chace

The library sits on the border between Canada and the US. I mean, literally on the border. Like there's a faded black line running along the floor to show you which country you're in. The books are mostly in Canada. The front door is in America. So entering from the US is easy.

But if you're coming from the Canadian side, to get to the door, you have to venture for about 20 yards into American territory on an American sidewalk. How can you tell you've crossed over? Flower pots. A row of flower pots. Yeganeh Torbati is a Reuters reporter who was there recently.

Zoe Chace

The place is kind of famous, gets tourists. When Barack Obama was speaking during a state visit from the Canadian Prime Minister, he mentioned the library as this harmonious symbol of Canadian-US ties. A library is an inherently welcoming place. Its whole ethos is this is for everybody. That's the spirit of this library in two countries at once.

That's not why we're talking about it, though. We're talking about something happening inside the library that's making things kind of tense. That's why Yeganeh was there. She covers immigration. She's been writing about the travel ban since January 2017. And the list of countries has changed as the ban has changed. But Iran? Iran has always been on the list of banned countries.

There are a lot of Iranian students in the US here on single-entry visas. Single-entry means if they leave, they can't just turn around and re-enter. They can't go home to see their families. And because of the travel ban, their families can't visit them here, so there's no way for them to see each other. But Iranians can get to Canada, and this library is in Canada. And Iranian students in America can get to this library because this library is also in America.

So that's what they've been doing, meeting at this library in two countries at once. Yeganeh went up there and waited outside the library on a Saturday morning.

Zoe Chace

They spoke in Persian. Yeganeh is Iranian-American, actually. Her parents came here as students.

Zoe Chace

Around this family are kids with headphones on, on computers, parents with kids in the children's reading room. All the library stuff is happening. The librarians stay out of the way, which seems like an acquiescence to these meetings, but there are these new signs up around lately. No eating, no packages, and no family meetings.

Yeganeh heard that the US and Canadian authorities had threatened to shut the library down, and she asked them about it. The Canadians denied it. The US had no comment.

In the library, Yeganeh sees families ignore the signs. This student flew from Michigan. Her family came from Iran for only a few hours together. It seems crazy.

Zoe Chace

It's been three years since this mother has seen her son. She and her husband come in with their other son, who lives in Canada now. He and his brother look like twins.

These parents have been visiting their son in Canada for weeks. And all this time, they've been trying to figure out, is there any way we can see our other son who lives in Ohio? They couldn't solve it, but just before the parents were scheduled to fly back to Iran, they heard about the library, and everyone rushed there for a few hours.

Zoe Chace

A lot of these families talk every day, multiple times a day. Like they know exactly how the other person is doing, what's going on in their life. But still, they fly, rent a car, drive to the border. Shirin Estahbanati, another student, drove up from New York to see her parents who'd flown from Iran. Reuters put up a video of her interview about the visit.

Shirin is this glowing, young face. Her emotions are just written right across it. Her dad had had a heart attack recently. She was so anxious to see him.

Zoe Chace

I'd been thinking of the idea of this show, of libraries as the magical Room of Requirement from Harry Potter. I think this is exactly that. Like imagine these Iranian students in America, thinking, I need a magical place that is somehow in America but also outside it. It seems like an impossible one. It's like a very particular only at this time in America would this exact requirement exist. And a room appeared, a reading room.

Ira Glass

Zoe Chace, who's one of the producers of our show.

Ira Glass

Act Two, Book Fishing in America. OK, so our program today, of course, is about people who want libraries to satisfy some very deep, and sometimes, very idiosyncratic desires. And the people in this act, they wish for a library that can give them something that only ever existed inside the pages of a book. Sean Cole, tell us what happened.

Sean Cole

There's this book I've always really loved, a novel by Richard Brautigan. If you haven't heard of him, he was a really funny, almost surreal, hippyish writer in the '60s and '70s, probably best known for the book, Trout Fishing in America, a very short and deeply experimental piece of fiction, part travelogue, part fever dream. It's what made people cultish about Brautigan. A kid who went to my college legally changed his name to Trout Fishing In America.

But the novel I'm talking about is lesser known. It's called The Abortion, subtitle, An Historical Romance 1966. And it's not so much the story that gets me. It's the setting. It takes place in a library in San Francisco. But instead of coming to take books out of the library, people come to submit unpublished books they've written to the library, forever.

The books are there to stay. They can bring a book in anytime. The library never closes. And the librarian-- there is only one-- is always there to greet them. He lives at the library, and he's the narrator of the story.

This is from the first chapter. The librarian says, "We don't use the Dewey decimal classification or any index system to keep track of our books. We record their entrance into the library in the Library Contents Ledger, and then we give the book back to its author, who is free to place it anywhere he wants in the library, on whatever shelf catches his fancy.

It doesn't make any difference where a book is placed because nobody ever checks them out and nobody ever comes here to read them. This is not that kind of library. This is another kind of library."

The librarian is reflexively polite and effusive. He might say to someone, "I don't think we have a book like this in the entire library. This is a first." He puts people at ease. He says, "My clothes are not expensive but they are friendly and neat and my human presence is welcoming."

Eventually, a woman comes in with a book, and she's very beautiful. They fall in love. She gets pregnant, but they're not ready to have a child. So because this takes place in 1966, the two of them travel to Mexico to get an abortion, which is why the novel is called The Abortion. But just the spectacle of this library, it's hilarious, and heartbreaking, and democratic, and other-dimensional all at the same time.

Brautigan imagined a great anonymous wash of humanity marching through, with a lot on its mind. Kind of the Utopian ideal of the public square, except completely silent, all written down on rows and rows of unread books. The librarian says the main purpose of the library is, quote, "to gather pleasantly together the unwanted, the lyrical and haunted volumes of American writing." And when you talk to other people who've read The Abortion, the conversation usually winds its way to this one chapter.

Sean Cole

This is Todd Lockwood, a photographer and music producer in Burlington, Vermont. I'll tell you why I got in touch with him in a minute. "The 23" is essentially a list of all 23 books that came into the library this one particular day, by little kids, old people. And the chapter's made up of just little descriptions of the 23 books that the librarian wrote down in his ledger.

There's one called It's the Queen of Darkness, Pal, a science fiction novel written by sewer worker. There's a book called Leather Clothes and the History of Man, which is somehow entirely made of leather. Not just the binding, but the pages. Richard Brautigan himself comes into the library with a book called Moose. And a doctor comes in looking, quote, "doctory and very nervous," with a book entitled The Need for Legalized Abortion.

I asked Todd what some of his favorites were, and he pointed to this one.

Sean Cole

Todd first read The Abortion when it came out in the early '70s. A friend of his gave it to him with a little inscription that said, "This book will change your life."

Sean Cole

He ended up reading it about once a year for the next 15 years.

Sean Cole

A real life library for unpublished books submitted by their authors. A home for anything anyone felt a burning need to express, or explain, or somehow get off their chests. Todd dreamed for years about one day creating a place like that. And there was clearly a desire for it.

In The Abortion, Brautigan gives an address for his fictional library. 3150 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, California, 94115, which is the real life address of the Presidio branch of the San Francisco Public Library. So for a while, people were actually sending their unpublished manuscripts there and had to be informed, this is not that kind of library. This is a normal kind of library

Anyway, Todd kept putting off his dream, thinking, I'll put that library together someday. And then two things happened, the first one being very tragic.

Sean Cole

And there was this movie that had come out earlier that year that Todd hadn't seen yet, a Kevin Costner vehicle about an Iowa farmer who plows up his corn to build a baseball diamond.

Sean Cole

Which, if you remember, is exactly the way Kevin Costner's character felt in the movie.

Sean Cole

Todd immediately started calling around, putting a board of advisors together, appealing for funding. It took about half a year. And then finally--

Sean Cole

--the library opened its doors in Burlington, Vermont in 1990. This tape is from a BBC Radio story that aired a few years in. Todd led the producers past The Vermont Institute of Massage Therapy--

Sean Cole

--to a modest wooden building, outfitted with comfy chairs and shelves for the books. A swinging placard out front said, in capital letters--

Sean Cole

And underneath that, the words, "A Very Public Library."

[DOOR CLOSING]

Now it's one thing to adapt a piece of fiction into a movie. It's another thing to adapt a piece of fiction into a library. As soon as they started talking about how The Brautigan Library would work in real life, Todd and his advisors and volunteers realized that they were going to need to make some concessions, such as whereas in the novel, there's just one librarian, in real life, there were many. All volunteer, and none of them lived there. Certainly never impregnated anyone there, or not to Todd's knowledge.

And unlike in the novel, the books were almost exclusively submitted by mail. And the authors had to kick in a little money, $25 or so, to cover the cost of binding their manuscripts. And people actually came to read the books, from all over the country.

Sean Cole

Probably because of the barrage of media stories about the library. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, a wire story that got picked up by hundreds of papers across the country. Everyone treated it as a quirky human interest story. The first and, at the time, only library for unpublished books, which started off as a piece of make-believe in a weirdo novel written 20 years beforehand.

There was a ledger the librarians used, but they didn't write down descriptions of the books that came in. Rather they wrote down descriptions of the people that came in. This is from that BBC story.

Sean Cole

A lot of people have asked that question-- why? And over the years, Todd has tended to give a pretty short and well-honed answer, almost like an artist statement. In fact, he used almost exactly the same words with the BBC producers in 1993, as he did with me in 2018.

Sean Cole

It's what I liked about Todd's library, and it's what I'd always loved about the library in the novel, the fictional one. It wasn't just illogical. It was impossible. And I loved sitting with the librarian in that impossible place, surrounded by books that only he and the people who wrote them knew about.

So for someone to transform an imaginary magical place I loved into an actual location I could maybe visit one day, it was like finding out there was a real life chocolate factory, like the one Charlie visited, or a wardrobe that opened up unto a forest with talking animals in it.

But there was something else, something stranger, that The Brautigan Library had in common with Field of Dreams. The story goes like this. In 1991, about a year after the library opened, the Bumbershoot Arts Festival in Seattle asked Todd if he wanted to set up a mini version of the library at the festival, an exhibit. So Todd, his wife, and about 100 of the books they'd amassed up to that point got on a plane, flew out there, and set up shop in this indoor event space.

Sean Cole

It just so happened that Bill Kinsella, or WP Kinsella is what it says on his book jackets, was a featured speaker at Bumbershoot that year.

Sean Cole

This is the part of the story that when I tell it to people, their eyes get really wide. The part where one twin in a fairy tale figures out why she's been wearing half a locket around her neck the entire time. Todd hadn't known it, but no other writer had as much of an impact on Kinsella's life and career as Richard Brautigan.

In 1985, Kinsella published a book of weird, vignettey short stories that he called his Brautigans. He dedicated the collection to Richard Brautigan, including, in the dedication, a fan letter he'd written to Brautigan, in which he said, quote, "I have just written a novel about a man who drives from Iowa to New Hampshire, kidnaps JD Salinger, and takes him to a baseball game at Fenway Park. He was talking about Shoeless Joe. That was part of the plot.

Sean Cole

Or haunting it somehow, like he was saying, playfully, better not forget me. I wanted to talk with Bill Kinsella for this story, but he died in 2016 on September 16, the same day Richard Brautigan had died in 1984. Both of them chose that day to end their lives. Kinsella was terminally ill and opted for doctor-assisted suicide, which is legal now in Canada, where he's from. Brautigan shot himself with a revolver.

The Brautigan Library chugged along in its original location for about six years. But as Todd once wrote in an issue of the library newsletter, reality can be so clankingly real at times. By 1996, fewer and fewer manuscripts were coming in. Money was tight. Here and there, Todd had to make ends meet with funds from his own bank account.

And finally, the entire Brautigan Library was moved to a room in the Fletcher Free Library, the regular public library down the road in Burlington. It stopped accepting new books but people could still come and read the ones that existed. 10 years went by, and then the Fletcher Library decided it needed the space for other things. So all The Brautigan Library books, more than 300 of them, found themselves shrink wrapped on a wooden pallet in Todd Lockwood's basement.

And this is the moment in the library's history when I first heard about it. I've been wanting to tell this story and see the books for myself for about 10 years. But way back when Todd and I started talking about this, he said he needed to wait, that he was in negotiations with a couple of academic libraries that might be interested, couldn't do an interview until something was finalized, et cetera and so on. Certainly the books weren't available to look at. I said I'd keep checking in, but I didn't.

And then this past summer, I started thinking about the library again. So I looked it up, and the library had finally found a new home in Vancouver, Washington, about 3,000 miles away from where it was born.

Sean Cole

And it had a new librarian, John Barber, a professor at one of the universities in town. He led me down into the basement of the Clark County Historical Museum.

Come to find, the manuscripts have been housed in this building since 2010, and John Barber was instrumental in making that happen. If there's such a thing as a Brautigan scholar, it's him. He may know more about Richard Brautigan than anyone else alive. He was a student of Brautigan's and hung out with him.

So naturally, he was a big supporter of the library from early on. And when the library shut down, he was sad to think of all the books being mothballed in Todd's basement. Until finally, he just got inspired and organized to have them all moved to this place. And he's taken on the mantle of the librarian.

Sean Cole

This was in 1982, two years before Brautigan killed himself. Brautigan's friend, Nikki Arai, had just died of complications from cancer.

Sean Cole

After dinner and another bottle of whiskey, they went out to the yard and burned the note in a kind of ritual to send those words to Brautigan's friend.

Sean Cole

After all, John, for all intents and purposes, now inhabits a physical manifestation of an idea Brautigan had in his head. And what's a little startling when you meet John is that he is the librarian from the novel. Like he's just like him. His clothes are not expensive but friendly and neat, and his human presence welcoming.

Sean Cole

He's reflexively polite and effusive. I had all three meals with him the day we spent together. And each time, he said to the server, in all earnestness, "Thank you for your hospitality." Same as when the museum's director let us in early before it opened.

Sean Cole

In fact, it's just two long sets of bookshelves at one end of the museum's research library. And all of the books have the same plain black, brown, gray, or blue bindings. The host of that BBC piece said they looked like body bags for whatever was inside of them. I really wonder how many of them were ever read cover to cover.

I wanted to see if being in the library gave me the same feeling I had as when I read The Abortion. And I have to say more and more, it really did feel like I had climbed into the pages of that novel, with its messy expanse of humanity marching through. Some of the books were silly. Others were mournfully nostalgic. Still others were deadly serious.

Which is about the lives of two teen girls in World War II Vienna. Others promoted radical ideas.

Almost 50 poetry collections. I opened up one called I'd Be Your Roadkill, Baby. The poetry reading.

Instead of using Dewey Decimal, the books are organized according to what they call the Mayonnaise System. It's a Brautigan in-joke. He ended Trout Fishing in America with the word "mayonnaise." And it goes by category. So there's adventure, family, future, humor, love, meaning of life, poetry, natural world, social political cultural, spirituality, street life, war and peace, and my favorite, all the rest.

Sean Cole

And instead of the summaries being in a big library contents ledger, there's a summary printed out on the first page of each book. Of course, almost all of the books are offbeat. Like this is the summary of a novel called Did She Leave Me Any Money?

This is something a bunch of the books have in common. It's like their authors are gushing forth with everything they've been wanting to talk about their whole lives. And with a lot of them, there's this sense of, this is important. I alone have the answer. Just like with a lot of the books in Brautigan's novel. For instance, there's the most prolific contributor to The Brautigan Library, Albert E. Helzner.

He's got 19 books here, three under an assumed name. And they're mostly comprised of his own personal scientific theories and observations. Titles like A Revolutionary Way of Looking at the Earth as a Planet, or, more to the point, The World is Wrong. The only way I can think to describe it-- and I do so admiringly-- it's like PhD-level stoner thinking. Everything and everyone in the Helzner-verse is interconnected and impactful.

In his book, October 6, 1990, Helzner said that every year on October 6, he'd go to the maternity ward of a hospital, look at a newborn baby through the glass, and ask himself, how did this birth come about? What is the long-range effect? And what is the significance of any birth? Addressing the baby he went to see in 1990, he says he wants to tell her what transpired on the day before she was born.

"I spent the whole day thinking about you," he writes. "On that day, the moon was shining on my town of Marblehead, Massachusetts. It was a bright full moon sitting in a clear sky. My wife and I drove to Seaside 5 Corners for a bite to eat. We saw the moon as we drove along. We saw the old buildings. You'll see the same moon and the same old buildings when you grow up."

Albert Helzner died in June 2016, but his books are still at the library. God knows where that baby is now.

I asked John if there were any books in particular that he wanted to show me. And he was really enthusiastic about this one that he thought gave a sense of what the library was there for. It's called--

Sean Cole

It's mainly the story of her growing up during the Depression in Altoona, Pennsylvania, eating onion sandwiches and, quote, "wearing coats that belonged to women who had just departed this life." Except it was in the humor section, intentionally so. There's a cartoon horse in a red union suit on the title page, tears cascading from behind its blinders.

Sean Cole

In Brautigan's novel, a guy in his 50s walks into the library with a book he wrote when he was 17. "'This book has set the world's record for rejections,' he says. 'It has been rejected 459 times, and now I am an old man.'"

Sean Cole

This is Todd Lockwood again, the founder of the library.

Sean Cole

It's funny to think about, but in some ways, The Brautigan Library is more like the library in the novel now than it ever has been. The books are housed in a building that looks more like the Presidio branch. They aren't often read by anyone. And it has one librarian, who actually is available at all hours of the day and night to accept new books, but only digitized ones, PDFs submitted online.

But the more I think about it, it's not about how perfectly or imperfectly Todd or John turned a fictional place into a real one. That's not the point. It's that Richard Brautigan in his novel predicted with perfect accuracy what would happen if you did create a library like this. That being there would give you a feeling like you're walking down the street and noticing that everyone has a book they've made tucked under one arm, a jumbled woolly individual transcription of how the world feels to that person.

It's the feeling of being able to read everyone's mind for a moment and being startled by their unedited thoughts because they're nothing like yours, but they're just as weird. It's like the librarian says in chapter two of the novel, "There just simply had to be a library like this."

Ira Glass

Sean Cole, who's one of the producers of our program. Coming up, a woman who went to the library every day for a while as a child suddenly realizes one day as an adult that the way she was remembering it was not right at all. That's in a minute. From Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, "The Room of Requirement," we have stories of how libraries function like a real-life version of that room in Harry Potter, the Room of Requirement. Where when you need something, the room just makes it appear for you, just like librarians try to do. Seriously, all over the world. Whatever your request. We have arrived at the third act of our program. Act Three, Growing Shelf Awareness.

This act is about somebody returning to the library that she went to as a kid, wanting something very specific and very personal out of that experience. One of our producers, Stephanie Foo, went with her.

Stephanie Foo

Lydia Sigwarth walks into her childhood library in Dubuque. It's this huge stone building with Roman columns, built over 100 years ago. And as soon as we pass the front door, Lydia stops dead in her tracks, looks up at the large, echoey rotunda above us, and gets quiet.

Stephanie Foo

This was her favorite place growing up. She only lives half an hour away now, but she hasn't been a patron here in nearly two decades. Back when she was six, Lydia, her mom, and her six siblings used to spend a lot of time here. Like a lot of time. They spent all day, almost everyday here for about half a year, while they were homeless.

We walk past a World War I exhibit into an airy space filled with nonfiction books and people working on computers.

Stephanie Foo

We go around the crafting zone into a quiet area by a big floor-to-ceiling window that looks out on the street.

There's some cushion chairs here. Those are new. Back then, they'd sit on the floor.

Stephanie Foo

This used to be next to a big shelf, where they kept all The Boxcar Children books. They were free to run around unassisted, without parents hovering over them, to do whatever they wanted. If you think about it, libraries are kind of one of the only public spaces where kids have freedom like that. And so Lydia ran through the stacks, and crawled around on the play rug, or just stared out of this big window, her favorite, near where her baby brother used to sleep.

Stephanie Foo

Lydia came from a stable family, but when they moved from Denver to Dubuque, they had a tough time finding a place they could afford. So they crashed with friends and family, moving every month or two. Lydia remembers all nine of them, crammed together in someone's basement. She and her five sisters all slept together on a big L-shaped couch, with blow-up mattresses in the middle. And every morning, Lydia's mom would pack up all the kids and take them to the library.

Stephanie Foo

Her parents did such a good job pretending that they were just on a fun adventure, that Lydia didn't register any of this as painful or difficult. She didn't even really understand that their family was going through anything, until she was having a conversation at work about a year ago, talking about homeless people coming to the library.

It came rushing back to her. Wait a minute, that was me. She honestly had never thought about it for almost two decades.

Stephanie Foo

Mrs. S was the children's librarian. Lydia's favorite spot in the library was by her desk.

Stephanie Foo

Every morning, all seven kids would run in and spread out over her library. But every day, Mrs. S would greet them warmly. She'd stroll the stacks with Lydia, helping her find something to read. They had conversations about books and about life. Lydia remembers this one day in particular, when Mrs. S came up to her with a recommendation.

Stephanie Foo

It was the first book that felt perfect for her. The youngest princess in the book was the heroine, and she was also the youngest sister in her family. She was sure Mrs. S was telling her that she was special.

Lydia wanted to find Mrs. S for a few years because she had such great memories of her, but who exactly was she? Lydia had no idea what the S stood for, like what her real last name was. She visited the library once to ask, and they said they weren't sure. It had been decades. But there was a Mrs. Stephenson who had worked here a long time. Only problem was she couldn't talk to her that day because she was on vacation. So Lydia just went home.

Then about a year ago, when all of the memories of her being homeless came flooding back, she wrote a long email to say thank you and sent it to Mrs. Stephenson. But she never got a response. Lydia thought, it's probably not the right Mrs. S, or maybe she doesn't remember me.

Stephanie Foo

So I'll just tell you. I called ahead, and yep, Mrs. Stephenson was Mrs. S. And yes, she totally remembered Lydia. So we went to see her in the staff only area. It was the first time Lydia had seen her since she was a little kid. Mrs. S was sitting in a big, warm office, decorated with paintings of cows and pink monsters. And when she saw Lydia, she rushed out with her arms wide open and grabbed her into a huge hug.

Stephanie Foo

Try to think of the last person you've met who used the word "golly" with all sincerity. I can see why Mrs. S made her feel cared for.

Stephanie Foo

It is, of course, a copy of The Twelve Dancing Princesses.

Stephanie Foo

Then Lydia asks Mrs. S, did she read her letter? Turns out Mrs. S never got it. We figure it probably got caught by her spam filter. And so Lydia starts to explain everything about that moment recently where she realized she'd been homeless.

Stephanie Foo

That's the sound of a hug.

Stephanie Foo

Lydia starts nodding effusively to what Mrs. S is saying. She knows exactly what she's talking about because Lydia works with those kids everyday herself. She's a librarian, a children's librarian.

Stephanie Foo

Yes, the girl who lived at the library grew up to become a librarian, helping other kids like her.

Stephanie Foo

The two women swap numbers in their phones. They make a date to get fried pickles in Platteville and to talk shop about disenfranchised youth and best practices at story time.

I visited the Platteville library, where Lydia has been a children's librarian for eight years. And I have to say she's really great at her job. She pinballs from one side of the room to another, helping one kid fix her computer, making sure others are safe as they walk out.

Stephanie Foo

She brought in her parents' scale and used some old x-rays to make a fake hospital and has a fish named Fishstick that the kids help take care of.

[RUNNING FAUCET]

Stephanie Foo

The windows have little reading nooks in them and a giant bear to cuddle with named Sir Fluffy Puffy McBearson. On April Fool's Day, she set up a self checkout line. It was just a mirror at the counter. Get it? She also holds her monthly book club, where she and a bunch of kids talk about their readings, but also build things out of stacked books, and create funny videos, and play games.

I talked to a couple of kids who said they used to hate reading, but now they love it, all because of Miss Lydia's book club.

Stephanie Foo

Lydia has one girl at her library who is there all the time, every day. We'll call her Anna. Anna reminds Lydia of herself growing up, but she's had it harder.

Her living arrangements aren't stable. She's often hungry. Lydia worries about her when she disappears for a week. One day about a year ago when Anna was 9, she had the same impulse with Lydia that Lydia had with Mrs. S. Anna wrote her a letter.

It says, "Lydia is really nice. She's a really nice person. She's an intelligent, rememberative, and fast young woman. Sometimes when I'm at home, I just want to go to the library, just to see Lydia."

Ira Glass

Stephanie Foo.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Stephanie Foo. The people who put our show together includes Zoe Chace, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Jared Floyd, Michelle Harris, Chana Joffe-Walt, Jay Kang, David Kestenbaum, Anna Martin, Stone Nelson, Nadia Reiman, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, Christopher Swetala, and Matt Tierney. Our senior producer is Brian Reed. Our managing editor is Susan Burton.

The reporters who went to libraries for us at the top of the show. Jude Joffe-Block was in Phoenix. Liza Veale was in San Francisco. Rachael London was in Florida. And our producer, Anna Martin, was at the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana. Thanks today to Eric Klinenberg, who spoke about libraries as palaces for the people. It was helpful to us as we thought about this week's show, as was Susan Orlean's book, The Library Book.

Thanks also today to Ianthe Brautigan, William Steele, Elizabeth Jensen, William Hartston, Ashleyanne Krigbaum, Brian Belfiglio, Annie Proulx Marcia Popper, Brad Richardson and everybody at the Clark County Historical Museum, Michael Fast Buffalo Horse, Joe Rutherford, Bridgit Bowden, and Zach Goelman. Also thanks to the staffs of the Phoenix Public Library, the Queens Public Library, the Sumter County Public Library, the San Francisco Public Library, and the Medicine Spring Library.

Our web site, thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our archive of over 600 episodes for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. We had the biggest fight the other day, him and me. I told him, look, it's like you think you're God or something. He didn't deny it.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life.