Support Your Local Library

Luke Robertson (aka Professor Bookman’s) resides in Los Angeles with his wife Sarah. He is a tremendous resource for all things pertaining to children’s literature.  We are so fortunate to have him as a regular contributor!  I highly encourage you to visit him at www.professorbookman’s.com as well as on Facebook. ~ TommyMom

…It Supports You Too, You Know.

This week, I’ve started a new enterprise as a school librarian in Los Angeles. The school itself is truly beautiful, housed in a 1931 Spanish Colonial Revival building designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986. The library is located through grand arching hallways lined with wooden paneling, frescos adorning every wall and ceiling… it feels a little like working at Hogwarts, I should think- simply magical.

Finding myself in awe at this library’s grandeur rekindled an old and dear feeling inside of me… I recall the first time I walked into the simple and sparse library of my childhood. Even though it was one small, dim room cramped with shelves, I was in awe. It seemed like every book on every shelf was just waiting for me to take it home.

When I was a teenager in high school, I would often have to wait for a ride home when school let out. I would walk over to the Palm Springs Public Library, a beautiful building with a large indoor fountain at its center… I would walk the aisles, exploring each section, running my hands over each awaiting treasure. Again, I felt an awe for this sacred place…

As a young man in my early twenties, I worked at UCLA’s Royce Hall, which sits directly across a grassy expanse from the grand Powell Library. Many times I arrived early to work in order to spend hours not just looking through the library’s books, but admiring the rooms themselves- the architecture, the atmosphere, the sheer awe the building itself inspired.

Libraries have played such an important part in my life and in the appreciation I’ve developed for books and the precious treasures they hold. A library is so much more than a place to rent books. It’s a temple, of a sort. Walking into a library has always felt very much like walking into a church to me. There is a quiet reverence; you feel as though you are in the presence of something great and inexplicable. It’s almost as if you can feel an adventure ready to begin. It’s an overwhelming and excited feeling, full of optimism and anticipation.

I suppose my point is this- developing an appreciation for the written word, a true love of literature, comes from more than just the act of reading. It comes from the attitude we have towards books, the role they play in our daily lives, and the presence books keep among us. Did you know studies have shown that the number of books in a home directly relates to a child’s academic success and the years of higher education that child will go on to pursue? It’s a fact- the more books a home contains, the farther a child in that home will go with his/her schooling. Surprisingly, this relationship has nothing to do with how many of those books the child reads, or how many of those books the parents read, or what the parents do for a living or even their economic status. The study found that only the number of books in the home is consistently significant.

Why? Why should the mere presence of books have such a dramatic influence in a child’s academic success? It is because the presence of those books embodies an idea that there is something important, something significant, something to be treasured inside of those books. After all, why else would someone have taken the time and effort to collect all of them?

Reading and books are a culture unto themselves. We inspire a love of books in our children when we display our own love for books, whether we collect them or read them regularly or take family trips to the library. These simple acts convey this message so much more than merely saying, “Look, kid, reading is important, so try to do it often, okay?”

If you want to inspire your children to be readers then start making those family trips to the library a regular occurrence. Go once a week, or every two weeks. Go to your local library’s story times, or author events, or just to see what’s new. Investing the time in your library yields a return that lasts a lifetime. So what are you waiting for? Go find those treasures waiting for you and your loved ones! Enjoy!

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