They Are All Children's Books

And the story's never ending

Ronald Clark had a storybook childhood. A real one. That’s because he grew up in a New York City library where his father was a custodian and his family lived in the library’s upstairs apartment. At night, the stacks were Ronald’s to explore. “My father was the keeper of the Temple of Knowledge,” Mr. Clark says in a brief and beautiful video available at Aeon (the image above is from the video). “Nobody else had as many books as I had,” he said.

I didn’t grow up in a Library, but I might as well have. My parents loved books, and many a night Dad took me for adventures among the books at Houston’s Meyer Neighborhood Public Library, the Westbury Square Bookstore, the wonderfully named House of Books on Stella Link close to Alfred’s Delicatessen and Madding’s Drugstore Soda Fountain.

Those nighttime journeys were magical. The next time you drive or walk by a library or bookstore at night, look closely. The light from within is different, softer but brighter and more inviting than the light from, say, a shoe store. And, once inside, the mundane world outside disappears altogether. For the most part, folks among books, at least in libraries and indie bookstores, still honor them by remaining silent or speaking in quiet voices, like we do in church.

One day I rode my Schwinn Stingray to the House of Books where I stuck a paperback novel into my winter coat pocket and left without paying. Of course, everyone knew everyone back then, and the clerk, rather than collar me, called by parents. My father reacted by opening a charge account at the bookshop so I could charge what books I wanted and remain on the right side of the law. On the scales of justice, books will always prevail.

All books are children’s books in the sense that their worlds of wonder are imperishable, like memories of childhood trips to the library with one’s father. This can cause books trouble, of course, as envious censors and book burners seek to destroy what they cannot themselves create.

In his book, The Library at Night, Alberto Manguel tells the story of the “children’s library” at the Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. This “family camp” was a lie, of course, intended to fool the world into thinking “that Jews deported to the east were not being killed,” as Manguel puts it, adding that the children “were allowed to live six months before being sent on to the same fate as the other deported victims.” Still, within that prison humanity prevailed. Manguel writes:

Although eight or ten books made up the physical collection of the Birkenau children’s library, there were others that circulated by word of mouth alone. Whenever they could escape surveillance, the counselors would recite to the children books they had themselves learned by heart in earlier days, taking turns so that different counsellors ‘read’ to different children every time; this rotation was known as ‘exchanging books in the library.’”

Ronald Clark gives his home in the library credit for helping him become the first in his family to go to college. “The library gave me a thirst of learning,” he says, a thirst that led him to become a university professor. I can only imagine what his memories of his library childhood are like, his late-night adventures among stories that belong to the world but that he could take back to his bed and devour until he fell asleep and dreamed of the worlds he had discovered in his books and of worlds of his own that he would one day teach to others.

I wrote of some of my other childhood memories of encounters with books in an earlier piece, “Books Guide Us Through the Fire.” It’s not that my memories of those books are all that, but my memories of myself with books are bright and clear. I give books credit. I think they are reminding me to know books now as I knew them as a child, as pathways to the never ending story.