A couple of people have been blogging about librarians and libraries they remember.

I've been puzzling on this today. I've spent an inordinate amount of time in libraries over the course of my life. If I'm not mistaken, my mother began taking me to the John Gould Fletcher branch in Little Rock sometime around the age of 4. It might have been 3. Either way, I know that by the time I was four I was checking out 12 books at a whack, which was the maximum allowed. I kept this up until sometime in my teens, when I stole an out-of-print cookbook from the downtown library. (This is the sole incidence of thievery in my history. I quit going to the library and started buying my own books out of sheer guilt. Nowadays, I'd just buy it off the internet and be done with it.)

One of the things I liked about these libraries was the fact that the librarians left me alone. They did not recognize me, as Liz's favorite did. They did not offer help. If I had a question, they were pleasant and helped me figure out the answer, but that was that.

The only librarian I remember at all was an ancient woman who ran the tiny library at the Southern Baptist Private School. She had been there since God brought in the first load of dirt, but she left after the end of my first year, which was sixth grade.

The only thing I remember about her is rather terrible. She was approaching her 70's and, as befitted a very proper woman of her generation, she wore skirts every day. Even though we were sixth graders, she made us all sit on the floor in a circle around her while she read to us. The chair she was sitting in put her knees right at our eye level, and we all stared in fascination at the heavy, service-weight stockings she wore. The longer she read, the more her knees drifted apart, and the more we saw. There were garters involved, and that strange old-lady crotch smell. It was more than any mortal eleven-year-old should ever have to bear.