If you don’t happen to live near a college or a bookstore, if your relatives aren’t bookish, the public library is literary culture in its entirety.
Steven Kurutz's longish memory piece (about 12-15 minutes to read) is a love letter to his small-town Pennsylvania library and how it made him the person and writer he became.
The first public library I remember visiting was the one-room Garner Public Library on Main Street, with I think a smallish room to the side where the magazines were. I remember it as large, though that is probably childhood memory playing a trick.
I remember first seeing The Maltese Falcon at a movie night there, with one of those loud reel-to-reel monstrosities on a small white screen. It was wonderful. When I got into the Doc Savage pulp adventure novels in my early teens, this little library -- incredibly -- had Philip Jose Farmer's strangely uber-serious fictional biography of Doc Savage. How did those small-town librarians know what I wanted when I wanted it?
A tiny place, but a dear one. They moved into a much nicer metal-and-glass building beside Town Hall, with more room for more books and a community room, and it became a place for the bookish and introverted among us to hang out. But it was never as cozy.
