Tag Archives: Bodleian

Infinity Under A Roof

The following talk was given on October 23, 2025, at a wonderful storytelling event called The Hearth, in  which members of the community tell stories about a given theme. That evening’s theme was “I Remember.”

The talk can be viewed here (it begins at 34:13)

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“A library is infinity under a roof.” Gail Carson Levine

This quote by the author of Ella Enchanted has always ALMOST summed it up for me. It’s true: libraries contain the stories of the past in all their complexity and the possibilities of the future in all their potency. But that’s not all. Libraries also blow that metaphorical roof clear off the building by housing ideas, concepts, potentialities that go as high as the sky and as low as the core of the earth.

So, if you haven’t figured it out by now, this story is about libraries (and if you know me, you won’t be surprised by that). But borrowing from tonight’s theme of “I Remember,”  I’d like to take an odd sort of path through my story. There’s no narrative arc spelled out, no rising action, no denouement. Instead, it’s a story made of mental snapshots, impressions, and revelations. After all, memories are not always stories.

First vignette: 

I’m a kid, maybe 10 or 12, watching a rerun of The Twilight Zone called “Time Enough At Last.” I’m sure you’ve all heard about or seen it, but I’ll recap. 

Opening narration (imagine me doing a Rod Serling voice): “Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He’ll have a world all to himself… without anyone in The Twilight Zone.”

In other words, Harold Bemis is a man born to read but forced to work. One day, he eats his lunch in the vault of the bank he works in. He emerges to find that nuclear war has demolished everything he knows. Through his despair he spies an intact public library. In a revelatory moment, he realizes he now has all the time in the world to read.

I remember that feeling of elation. Imagine, reading all the Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown and the Chronicles of Narnia–for as long as you wanted, as many times as you desired!

And I remember the despair when, reaching down to pick up the first book on what we would now call his TBR pile, Henry Bevins’s glasses fall and are smashed.

Second vignette:

Flash forward to college. I decide to study in the fancy library, the kind with the green table lamps and polished wood tables. I see in the marble carved above me a quote, “knowledge is power,” by the Elizabethan writer, poet, and natural philosopher Francis Bacon, whose new model of intellectual inquiry sparks the scientific revolution.

Three words. Sixteen letters. A whole universe of awareness. It sticks with me.

Third Vignette:

It’s 2007 and my daughters, ages 5 and 7, are sitting at the Bluestone Cafe drinking hot chocolate. My husband and I have taken them to an election party. On the ballot was a library district–it didn’t pass. Everyone in the room is shocked–what would happen next? Would the library close? I look over to the kids to see my eldest staring at me, tears cascading down her cheeks.

Fourth vignette:

It’s 2009, I think, though the numbers are fuzzy. The nonprofit Josephine Community Libraries, Inc., is reopening the libraries with a ‘soft open’ of the children’s room. Some of us  behind the desk, frantically using the cutting board to make bookmarks to give away. When we look out the front door, we’re gobsmacked to see a line that goes all the way to the street. When the doors open, kids and their people flood into the children’s room and then check out, arms full to the brim. I cry.

Fifth vignette:

My family travels to England and my kids want to tour the Bodleian Library in Oxford because parts of Harry Potter were filmed in the Divinity School, which is on the library tour. We go to the oldest part of the library called Sir Humfrey’s library (or, to the Potter fans, where the Restricted Section is filmed). The tour guide tells us that a unique tradition of Sir Humfrey’s library was that no books could be lent out–even King Charles I had to stay in the library to read. 

I’m struck by this. As magnificent and storied as the Bodleian was in the 17th-century, almost every library in the world today is better because you can take the books home. 

In this, we are richer than kings.

Sixth and final vignette:

Last month. I’m not going to get into the politics or nitty gritty of it (that would take all night), but after ten months of uncertainty and instability, the commissioners vote 2-1 to pass a 5-year lease that allows the library to stay in the building it’s occupied since 1959. There have been rallies, countless letters to the editor, documentaries, articles, and interviews. Meetings and more meetings.

And when it finally happens, where am I? Alone in a hotel room in Grand Rapids, Michigan, watching the meeting online, staring in disbelief as, at a sparsely attended meeting in a conference room, three men determine the fate of the library.

I look around the hotel room and think, “That was it?” 

But then the anticlimactic feeling fades when I think of the library’s history and all the moments just like this that allowed it to continue. I remember all the folks over all the years who’ve dedicated themselves to the library. The people I never met, like Mrs. C.M. Stone, who served as the library board’s first president in 1893, and philanthropist Ben Bones, who in 1962 gave funds for a community meeting room. The couple who gave up their Saturdays for months to table at the Growers’ Market. The volunteers who shelve and check out books and answer a gajillion questions at the information counter. The new folks who bring energy and savvy and the experienced folks who bring local history and wisdom.

And then I don’t feel so alone.

So to close, I’d like to modify Gail Carson Levine’s quotation just a bit. Yes, the library is “infinity under a roof,” but it is also a multitude under a roof–and out on the streets, and in the halls of power. 

The library is us.

Ex libris

“King Charles I at the Bodleian Library,” by William Gale

I believe that most people (or at least the people I want to know) have a special “library place” in their hearts. It’s what causes the smile that breaks when entering a new library; the shiver on catching the familiar whiff of old books; the frisson of anticipation after realizing that stacks and stacks of books can be taken home and savored.

Libraries have been a big part of my life for the last five years.  In 2007, my community’s library was closed for lack of funds, leaving 82,000 American citizens without access to any public library whatsoever.  Unthinkable, right?

Long story short: a group of very cool folks got together and fundraised and fundraised some more and re-opened the library as a nonprofit.  There are hopes that we can pass a library district in the near future so that the library is again sustainably funded, but in the meantime we all work like crazy to keep the doors open (more here: www.josephinelibrary.org).

So last year, when I planned my first solo trip to England—sans husband and kids, free to direct my steps wherever I wanted without worrying about potty breaks, snacks, or pending soccer matches—it was only natural that at the top of my must-visit-or-else-what-the-hell’s-the-point-of-going list was Oxford’s storied and magnificent Bodleian Library.

The Bodleian, built in 1320, was Oxford’s first university library (meaning it wasn’t attached to one specific college). That original library, smallish and uninspiring, expanded when Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, donated over 200 valuable manuscripts in the 1440s, so the university constructed a new room over the Divinity School. (Harry Potter fans: note that the hospital wing scenes with Madame Pomfrey were filmed in the Divinity School, and all of the Hogwarts library scenes were filmed in Duke Humfrey’s library.)

Duke Humfrey’s library, finished in the 1480s, lasted about 60 years until, under legislation passed under King Edward VI meant “to purge the English church of all traces of Roman Catholicism,” the library was stripped of all books and manuscripts containing “superstitious books and images.”  (Why do I include this in my short history of the Bodleian?:  it is perversely of some comfort to me to know that my town’s library is not the only victim of shortsighted thinking on the part of autocratic politicians.)

The Bodleian was resuscitated in 1598 by an injection of funds from Sir Thomas Bodley, after whom it was renamed. Bodley established three guidelines that have shaped the Bodleian’s character:

1)      He established an agreement with the Stationers’ Company of London that would direct the mission of the Bodleian to this day: a copy of every book registered with the Stationers’ Company was to also be deposited at the Bodleian. This agreement transformed it into a critically important repository of learning in England for the next four centuries.

2)      He determined that scholars from all universities should have unfettered access to the holdings of his library, a generous and liberal policy that allowed the Bodleian to transcend the relatively parochial constraints of English scholarship. (While all scholars were welcome, however, they all had to swear the following oath: “I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; nor to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.” I know this because I couldn’t resist buying the tea towel with the oath printed on it.)

3)      He ordained that no books were to leave the building. No borrowing of books or materials, period.  This policy is in place to this day for the majority of the collection.

I find this last policy fascinating, because in the early days of my library’s resurrection, we faced a critical decision: invest in the (rather expensive) software that would allow us to circulate books or just house the collection for patrons to view in the library. A very sage and experienced librarian decided the point by declaring that if books and materials didn’t circulate, we would have a reading room, not a proper library. If we agree with that definition (and I do), the the Bodleian, one of the most famous libraries in the world, is technically a reading room.

Even King Charles I, facing a mutinous parliament in London and escaping to the relative security of Oxford in 1642, was denied borrowing privileges at the Bodleian (though in order to appease His Majesty, the librarians had a little stall built inside Duke Humfrey’s Library so the King could taste the fruits of scholarship in privacy). By the doctrine of the divine right of kings, this was the man who was, in Shakespeare’s words, “the figure of God’s majesty/His captain, steward, deputy-elect,” and yet even he was denied check-out privileges.

After my tour of the Bodleian, marveling at the majesty of most influential books and manuscripts in history, I stopped by a pub (as I am wont to do). It occurred to me, as I re-acclimated to the noise and smell and colors of everyday life, that the American library tradition–begun by Benjamin Franklin and brought to fruition by Andrew Carnegie and countless American communities–of enabling every citizen to have free and unfettered access to information is one of the most radical movements in history.

In Oxford, at the Bodleian, I could gaze at magnificent books chained to the shelves, marvel at the scholarship contained in the august buildings, and admire the history of the furniture, the paintings, the architecture.  But in little Grants Pass, Oregon, I could walk into my community’s library and check out almost any book in the building.

In this, I am richer than kings.