GOULD BOOKS IN THE LIBRARY

SEPIA SATURDAY #152

It never fails: I see Alan and Kat’s Sepia Saturday prompt, and start to scramble! I’m into closets, cupboards, old photograph albums, cardboard boxes, slide carousels (remember those?) – all in search of something that will stick to the theme...

I love this week’s prompt from the New York Public Library! It looks like an entire prep school class doing research, but it all boils down to three basic elements: boys, library, books.

I found something that represents two out of three, and that’s not bad – books and a library.

Or, to be more precise, books in a library.

This photograph was taken in the Adult Fiction section of the Curtis Memorial Library (which opened in 1904) in Brunswick, Maine. My novel (Household) is on the left, and my brother John’s novel (The Greenleaf Fires) is on the right.

We think we’re the only brother/sister act in Brunswick with published fiction sitting side-by-side on a shelf in our hometown public library!

My family has a long and dear relationship with Curtis Memorial. John and I both had library cards there, and we both spent a lot of time in that library when we were students at the local high school, back in the early- to mid- 1960s. We did homework there, worked on research projects, met our friends after school for study groups. I, for one, got into trouble in that library (there used to be a reading table into which I tried to carve my initials); I even kissed a boy in the stacks! I’m not sure that John behaved much better, but his secrets are safe...

Later on, my father sat on the Board of Trustees of Curtis Memorial. After he retired, he also spent a certain amount of time there every morning reading the library’s supply of local and national newspapers – he was a newsprint junkie – and met up with a group of his friends for their daily “meeting,” during which, of course, they solved the world’s problems.

When he died (1998), my mother established a trust in his name; the money earned by the Gardner S. Gould Family Trust still buys books on tape and CD. My mother, who had inoperable macular degeneration, listened to them regularly, and I still borrow them for listening in my car.

So, after more than 50 years, I still go there a couple of times a week: I find my father in the reading room, my mother in the audio book section; my brother John and I settled peacefully next to each other in Adult Fiction.

It feels right, feels good; it’s home to me.

NOTE: Be sure to visit http://sepiasaturday.blogspot.com to see what themes others have followed this week!