The Public’s Library

In 1992, I landed my first job, such as it was, at the public library in Albion, Nebraska, population 2,000. Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the elegant Beaux-Arts library was constructed in 1908, one of sixty-nine in the state supported by Andrew Carnegie. I knew none of this at the time, as I was ten years old.

I had responded to a Help Wanted sign asking for volunteers to digitize the catalogue. As far as I could tell, this was an exciting time in books. Physical card catalogues, with their drawers and cross-references, and physical due date cards, with their date stamps and signatures, were giving way to electronic databases and printed receipts. Madonna had just published Sex, and Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County dominated the bestseller lists, neither of which meant anything to me though I did sense a certain buzz in the air. They were just two of the many titles — coming and going as they did — that...