Patti Smith on Libraries and the Transformative Love of Books

On books, bronchitis, and a mother’s “sympathetic exasperation.”

“Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in reflecting on how she saved herself by reading. “A library is a rainbow in the clouds,” Maya Angelou harmonized in recollecting how a library saved her own life. Her contemporary and titanic peer Ursula K. Le Guin located the source of that salvation in the portal to personal and intellectual liberty that opens up between the shelves...