Why We Can't Have Nice Things

[kevin_standlee]

A business a couple of blocks from our house put up one of those Free Library kiosks. While most of the books in it were not to my taste, I did take one once (and took it back when I finished reading it), and I also have contributed a few books to it. Last night, I found that it was closed.



Someone smashed out the glass in the box for some reason and the owner closed it down. There's no indication whether it will reopen.

I wonder what motivates someone to vandalize a free library. Sheer cussedness, I guess.

Comments

[clothsprogs]

Sadly it's not just vandalism that caused such ventures to fail.

The one in the waiting room at the staion here started out fine, dozens of bopoks on a little book-case all ready to be borrowed. But people didn't return the books or donate others so the last I saw of it, there were just three extremely battered and dog-eared books on the windowsill of the waiting room and the bookcase wasn't even there any more.

Teddy

[kevin_standlee]

That I understand. It wasn't a problem for this particular one. (There's actually a pair of them facing each other.) They were always full of books, and I think the person who made it was a book lover, because I could see a whole bunch of shelves of more books inside their building.

Last winter, I was walking to the Wigwam Restaurant in the snow and I stopped to deposit a book. A teenager trudging through the snow asked what this thing was. I explained how he could borrow any book he wanted, although he should either bring it back once he was done with it or deposit a different book or both. He was excited at the prospect of free books. That made me feel better about people, since I've encountered people for whom graduating from high school meant, and I quote, "never having to read another book ever again."

[clothsprogs]

When Tom's parents started volunteering at the local primary school some years back, they were horrified to encounter children who only had access to books at school, and parents whose attitude was that their children had "better things to do with their time than to waste it reading."

Teddy

[kevin_standlee]

Horrible! I'm so grateful that my grandparents who raised me valued education and reading, as did my mother, who introduced me to science fiction) and was jazzed to be able to hold an actual Hugo Award trophy.

My grandfather was barely literate (my grandmother, who did attend some college before the Great Depression intervened, taught him), but he valued his children and grandchildren getting a good education. He could easily have been one of those people who didn't see why anyone should be educated, but he actually wanted his descendants to be better than him.

I've been very lucky. I had the talent, the family environment that encouraged it, and a government that subsidized education. I flatter myself that I've let none of those people down who made my success possible.

[clothsprogs]

My father never went to school and my mother left as soon as she was old enough to "go into service" as a housemaid in a big house (which didn't last long as she was a day-dreamer, and it was the very tail-end of that sort of thing anyway), but both of them were readers so I grew up in a house with lots of books. My father, taught to read in the army, was a reader of Science Fiction and Murder Mysteries, both of which I inherited (although I'm more of a Fantasy fan than Science Fiction - my eldest sister used to borrow my Fantasy books), and I was bought books and given book tokens (my favourite form of present once I learned to read). Books were where most of my pocket-money went too - my mother taught me to get the most out of it by seeking out second hand books, so I haunted the charity shops, house clearance places, and jumble-sales thoughout my childhood, and still have most of the books I accumulated then.

I can't really imagine a house that doens't have books. It's a horrible thought.

Teddy