In Iowa: In praise of libraries

I am an unrepentant bookworm and have been for as long as I can remember. My sister and I read the same books as kids, and we reread our favorites so often the covers fell off and the page edges tattered.

Waiting for the school bus in the morning, I could dive so deeply into a story I wouldn't hear the bus approach.

Maybe what I loved was escaping into the varied lives of the characters I read about, characters who didn't let being as socially awkward as I was stand in the way of going on heroic adventures. I often have wondered if the wanderlust that goads me to travel in my adult life has its roots in the explorations I read about as a child. Escapes can broaden horizons.

My childhood library was a Carnegie library, built, like almost 1,700 other libraries across the United States, by Andrew Carnegie in the early 1900s. Once one of the richest men in the world, he gave away the vast majority of his fortune to spread public libraries across the country.

Cedar Rapids also had a Carnegie library - the building still stands, part of the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art.

Carnegie's philanthropy is part of America's long tradition of public libraries, beginning with the Peterborough, N.H., town library in 1833. It was a rather novel idea (forgive the pun), to have books accessible to anyone who wanted to read them, not just those who were part of a certain group or who could afford to buy them.

Before public libraries took hold, many places had subscription libraries, available only to those who could pay a fee to join, and many towns had libraries available only to members of certain groups - church parish members, for example, or faculty at a university.

I love the ethos that popularized public libraries - the idea that equal access to books - in effect, access to information, ideas, arts and culture - is a public trust, one we as a society should invest in.

In that spirit of equal and public access to information and ideas, many modern libraries are more than a repository for books. We should be proud today's libraries take their mission beyond the books, to computers and community classes and gathering spaces.

That means Internet access for children who need it to complete their homework but whose parents can't afford it at home. That means computer classes for seniors and coding classes for teens. That means story times for young families and chess club for adults.

It means resources for young parents, for entrepreneurs looking for small loans, for non-profits looking for grants. It means a place for small clubs and community organizations to hold meetings free of charge.

When the Flood of 2008 destroyed the old downtown library, the loss of those thousands of books and the community space that housed them was a tragedy. But Cedar Rapids, with the help of flood recovery funds and generous donors, brought the library back better than ever.

I'm proud to live in a community with such a beautiful public library. But, to me, investing in the library is about more than a nice building. It's investing in the community as a whole.

'There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.” - Andrew Carnegie