The Maida Vale Library:

An Interlude

God bless Ben Franklin. In 1731, he and his friends, called the Junto, formed the first public subscription library, called The Library Company of Philadelphia. Members could purchase shares in the company, which in turn gave them the right to use the library and download—sorry—borrow books. This was the first public lending library in the U.S. and it is still around today.

Being an intensely practical sort of genius, Franklin spent his free time from then on inventing everything else anyone needed to use a library: his almanac a year later and autobiography (1791) to stock it with, the long arm (1786) for reaching any copies that were stacked on high shelves (“because old men find it inconvenient to mount a ladder or steps”), bifocals (1760s) enabling these aged patrons to read into their old age; he discovered cooling by evaporation (1758) to cool borrowers on hot days, and invented the Franklin stove (1742) to warm them on cold days, the lightning rod (1750) to prevent libraries from catching fire during thunderstorms, and the fire department (1736) in case his stove or lightning rod failed to perform up to expectations, as well as fire insurance (1757) if the fire department didn’t arrive in time. He even invented the flexible urinary catheter (1752), presumably for long study sessions and because he hadn’t invented the public toilet.

What I’m trying to say here is that a decade before the American Revolution, Ben had gotten the whole library thing pretty much sewn up, packaged, and sold to the North American reading public as a going concern. But even though he spent 16 years living in London before he sailed back home to help invent a new nation—or perhaps because of it, the Brits just never have warmed to Franklin’s concept of a public lending library.

In London, from what I can tell, they know how to write books better than just about anybody else, but don’t know what to do with those books once they’ve written them. A few very lucky books, swimming upstream to make their way to the vast open sea of readership, make it into the British public library system. There they are housed in what are often very elegant buildings featuring carefully undertrained staff who await—though rarely wait upon—an underutilizing public.

The city of Westminster in London has twelve branches of public libraries. Like the twelve tribes of Israel, that equates to about one branch per half-million people. And one of those branches, the Maida Vale Library, was just two short blocks from our front door on Sutherland Avenue.

The Maida Vale Library is one of the finest in London. This means that it is Edwardian and inadequate. Yes, I am being judgemental. But man is a judging creature, I am a man, ergo.

Being in London, which is for me the center of the printed world, I expected that the libraries would somehow mirror the wealth of literature there, a dazzling yard globe reflecting the garden of English prose. What I found was a slightly shabby inner city branch library. Unheedful that a library is, at its heart, a house of ideas, the librarians seemed to have little idea of how to run one.

The first time I realized this was when I entered with a book I’d just finished, a fat, black doorstop called Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel. There was no drop box for returning books. Not outside, not inside. Instead, patrons waited in the long, slow checkout line, removing their coats as they overheated while they waited, a line that changed by so gradual a process it seemed to moult rather than move, a monstrous snake shedding its Burberry skin as it slithered its way forward. Once at the front of the line, the patron would look down at their book swaddled in their overcoat and either check out the book or return it. In the latter case, the bookholder would announce, “I’m returning this.” The librarian would then relieve them of their book, respond with a slightly befuddled, “all right,” and place the book in an unmarked box on the floor next to them.

I once asked a Maida Vale librarian, an émigré with tea-colored hair and a soft slavic voice, “Why don’t you have a ‘Return Box’ by the front door? That way patrons could drop off their books without waiting in line or interrupting you from checking books out.”

“Ve don’t have zhat,” she responded, her brown, sad eyes gently adding, “you goddamned smug American.” She needed no reason why there should not be a return box. There was no return box. There had never been a return box. There could never be a no return box. There was no thinking about, let alone outside of, the box.

In place of the box was waiting in line, the most recurrent, humanizing, equalizing, shared experience in London. Waiting, in the british mind, is a kind of morality play, where every man is Everyman in the journey from Southwark Cathedral to Canterbury. A pilgrimage from the back of the line to the front of the line is a linear expression of destiny. You don’t reason destiny and you don’t shorten it with a box called “Book Returns.” Destiny for Londoners is something you abide patiently, overheating in your jacket as you wait your turn at the checkout desk.

That was when I realized what’s wrong with me. I am an American, and we are efficiency experts. We know, innately, with Franklin’s blood produced in our American marrow and pulsing through our American brains with every heart beat, how to invent a better way to do things. Right here, right now. For Americans, invention isn’t simply a challenge, it’s our way of calling out a problem to a fight.

Doubtless, though, my improvement would only have been better in an American sort of way. To the librarian, a European well on her way to becoming Anglicized, perhaps there was only the sympathetic thought, “Vhat’s ze hurry? Vhat do you have better vaiting for you zan vhat you have standing right here in zis line, in zis library, in zis varm Edvardian building zhat is kinder and more humane zhan ze black vet crush of ze streets outside?” To her it wasn’t waiting or time lost, it was a respite among words.

Perhaps her eyes were not disappointed with me after all, but only urging me to take my ease among Keats and Rushdie for a while, to join the great snake of line-waiters, the procession of holy book-pilgrims gaining or returning their knowledge. I could achieve enlightenment with a new book, handing off the old ideas for new ones. It was only the waiting, it was only the slow journey, it was only a very English sort of life.

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