Books of many kinds

We present an unusual motivation to run for public office.

We keep a file of book reviews and other notes on volumes that look interesting.  As we’ve noted, we already have too many books, so we don’t often break out the file; but one of our consultants recently had a birthday and thought that might do for an excuse to get one or two.  We noted that many in our informal listing were histories, accounts of certain times and places about which we’re curious.  Looking at them critically, it appeared probable that most would be interesting to read once but not more.  While we don’t begrudge the cost (supporting good authors is worthwhile), we don’t really have the space for extra books.

The perfect answer, of course, is to patronize a library.  That’s the point: libraries are for books you don’t need to own, or have space for, or want permanently.  And libraries are much more than that nowadays.  Our local one runs many book-club groups, community events, workshops and all sorts of things.  There is a group of “Girls Who Code,” for example.  When someone asked our tutoring consultant how students should avoid the “brain drain” that often happens over summer vacation, he just pointed to the library’s web page.  Librarians also help with many, many things, from selling one’s car on the internet to formatting a resume.  (But if you want to make a librarian happy, ask for something from the deep archives.  Our astronomer located a collection of Maxwell’s papers published before 1900, held in the Seattle Public Library; he needed it for a book he was writing.  The look on the librarian’s face as she triumphantly produced the dusty volume was worth many a day of scholarly labor.)

Alas, our local library doesn’t have the books in our list.  They are just too specialized, or in some way not of interest to enough of the library’s patrons.  Considering the breadth of things the library does, we have no quarrel with that.  But our astronomer dreams of the Cambridge University Library.  Not only is it many times the size of the Alexandria version, it exists specifically to serve readers interested in specialization and depth.  He spent many happy hours there as a grad student, by no means confining himself to the Astronomy, Mathematics and Physics floors.  And he is still allowed, as an alumnus, to borrow books there.  Unfortunately, there are practical difficulties in the way, chiefly the Atlantic Ocean.

But there is a nearby library of comparable breadth and depth: the Library of Congress.  It seems not to be well-known, but any citizen can get a reader’s ticket and thus access to a vast collection of books, photographs, printed matter, information of all kinds.  We have done research there in several obscure areas.  However, there is a catch: in order to check out materials from the LOC, you have to be a Member of Congress.  And while the hushed atmosphere of the reading room is much to our liking, we’d rather not spend the days there necessary to polish off a 500-page tome.

So should one of us run for Congress?  As motivations for elected office, being able to check books out of a library would be an unusual one.  But not the worst we can think of.