Missing the Mystery: Loving Libraries, and Why I Have a Beef with the Internet

I recently walked into a library for the first time in quite a while (he confesses, shame-facedly). What I saw surprised me—I didn’t see people perusing the stacks or sitting in comfy bean bag chairs with a book balanced on their laps; I saw were people staring at computer screens and happily double-clicking their way through terabyte after terabyte of data.

It made me feel strange, like I’d walked into an ice cream shop and saw people eating kale.

Millennials, I’m about to blow your minds. Once upon a time, the interwebs did not exist. To learn stuff, you needed to go to a library. When you were in a library, you were surrounded by more information than you could possibly access anywhere else…except for a bigger library. Sure, there were computers, but the computers didn’t house the data—they were just fancy indexes that told you how to find the book that held the information you were looking for. It was highly inefficient, but spectacular.

I should note that this is not intended to be an anti-technology screed, or a crotchety “Back in my day…” piece. The Internet is fantastic (are we still proper-nouning “Internet”?). I mean, Goodreads, right? I love the giant tubes that provide whatever information we need, no matter how pointless or obscure, whenever we want it without us having to get up or even get dressed. The unwashed masses having access to so much information is, by and large, an exceedingly good thing. Nice work, Al Gore.

But, I do miss going to a library in the pre-Internet days. Now, I realize that not all kids were as laudably hip and awesome as I was, but hop in the Wayback Machine with me, if you will, and let’s pop back to 1989. Bush the Senior is president, Van Halen is riding high with Sammy Hagar (OU812, anyone?), and a little movie called Ghostbusters II hit the big screen. Even at the tender age of 5, I’d loved the original Ghostbusters (though I can neither confirm nor deny that I buried my face against my mother in terror when the library ghost made her true face known), and as a 10-year-old, I was fully ready for the Boys in Gray to come back and slug it out with more pesky poltergeists. What, I hear you asking, has this got to do with libraries? Hush. I’m getting there.

After seeing Ghostbusters II, I became obsessed with becoming a Ghostbuster myself. I knew that Messrs. Spengler, Stantz, Venkman, and Zeddemore held PhDs, so I knew that I needed to hit the books. That, of course, meant spending hours in the library, because where else could you possibly find more books?

Every weekend, I pestered my mom to take me to the local public library, where I spent hours poring over every book I could find on supernatural phenomenon, psychic powers, ghosts, and anything else I could think of that might one day prepare me to be a Ghostbuster (I also began plotting how to get my PhD in parapsychology, just like my heroes…yes, there was a time when such a discipline existed at respected universities). Now, my local library was by no means massive, and it wasn’t particularly grand or gothic, but it did have some dark corners. For obvious reasons (namely, that only weirdos wanted to look at them), the types of books I sought out were, of course, buried in those corners, and it wasn’t hard to convince myself that some spectral presence hovered over my shoulder, afraid that I might learn the secrets to busting it (and, thus, feeling good, if Ray Parker, Jr., is to be believed). Wandering up and down those aisles, running my fingertips across the spines of those books, drinking in the scent of their pages…it was intoxicating (that sounded waaaayyy more sensual than intended…I promise that I only used books in a gentlemanly manner). It felt like I, and I alone, had gained access to some arcane archives, a repository of knowledge where, with persistent scholarship and dogged determination, I might unlock the mysteries of the universe.

Libraries did retain their aura of mystery in the nascent days of the Internet, back when it was just used to generate a bunch of listservs and to look at porn (Wait, what? There’s still porn on the internet? And it’s even better than it was in 1999? WHY DIDN’T ANYONE TELL ME?!). During my junior year of college, I spent a semester in Scotland at the University of Aberdeen. A school founded in 1495? You’re gosh darn right it had a fantastic old library. I’m a huge fan of Dracula, and I recall stumbling across a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories. I could have checked it out and brought it back to my room, of course, but I chose to read it in the emptiest corner of the library I could find on a dark (albeit not stormy, sadly) night, and damned if it wasn’t one of the creepiest experiences I’ve ever had (and I mean that in the most delightful way possible).

Look, I realize that the Internet has irrevocably changed the world, and largely for the better. But, the experience of being in a library isn’t one of those ways, and I felt like I needed to memorialize what it was like to hang out around books when they were the only way to get info, if only for the sake of future generations.

And, of course, I’m doing so by using the Internet.

Sigh.

Oh well…we’ve still got porn, right?