I must have been four or five years old when my mother started taking me to the local public library.  A pattern developed in those early visits.  She would sit and read the newspaper or a magazine while I wandered around the shelves, collecting an armful of books to borrow, treasures for the week ahead.  On one occasion she lost me in the library.  Increasingly panicked, she asked the staff and borrowers to help search for me.  I was found safe and well a little later sitting in the chief librarian’s office.  The story goes – and I’ve been hearing it consistently from my mother for more than fifty years – that I asked for a job.  The librarian was kind enough to treat the precocious boy with greater seriousness than he deserved and gave him an application form.

A lifelong love of reading, books, and libraries was born in that small, modest, public library in London.  A journey was started in those days, a journey into other people’s imaginations and my own, and into other worlds near and far.  The journey has never ended.  I cannot begin to describe the part books have played in my life, how they have shaped who I am.  Neither can I express my gratitude to public librarians who were my earliest navigators around the printed world.

It’s rare for me these days to visit a public library, though there’s an excellent one in the village where I live.  My reading tastes have settled and the reading paths I now follow are mostly well-trodden and familiar to me.  Although I’ve less need of expert guides, you’ll never convince me that public libraries are obsolete.  They’re no less essential than they ever were.  In fact, they’re more important, and will be for just as long as there are curious, hungry explorers like that little boy I was more than fifty years ago.

I discovered me in the library.  I went to find me in the library.  Ray Bradbury.