On Friday after dropping off MM at a medical appointment, I asked S where he wanted to go after La Bonita supermarket — to walk along the Las Vegas Strip, to visit the Atomic Museum, or to go to the library. Being our child, he immediately rejected the Strip. We ended up at the museum, but only after we swung by Tropicana and realized the library was closed for Juneteenth.

Libraries have always been there for our family.

Since last summer I’ve been to libraries in some of the places I visited. Downtown Reno is filled with so much greenery that it feels like being in a terrarium. Pittsburgh‘s South Side holds a fantastic board game collection, and Homewood still feels like my local even though many familiar staff members retired during COVID. The Vancouver branch has an extensive shop. The Juneau branch is on the water, with a marvelous stained glass window depicting salmon, and restroom signs in both English and Tlingit. The National Library of El Salvador in San Salvador is brightly lit and brand-new and open 24 hours, and has a spectacular overlook of the plaza. The National Library of the Philippines in Manila devotes an entire floor to historical and cultural manuscripts, and the staff helped me find the best available digital scans of Rizal’s work. I stayed only long enough in the Bangkok City Library to appreciate the quiet setting. The National Central Library in Taipei is across from the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall and has a convenient 7-Eleven on the lower level.

To my surprise, the library in Taipei allowed me to encode my transit card so that I could tap in anytime, after filling out a short form. (I had chosen a transit card with Winnie the Pooh when I arrived, only later realizing that it could be construed as a dig on Xi Jinping.). At the library in Manila, for a nominal fee I purchased a photo ID to show instead of my passport at the entry. In addition, I bought a T-shirt there, as well as in Juneau. I figure that if I’m going to buy a souvenir, I’d might as well support the libraries in the local community.

Of course I’ve also visited various college libraries for work and on tours with S, including at Bard, Allegheny, Chatham, Pitt, and UNLV. Last month I also saw the medical library attached to the Műtter Museum in Philadelphia, although I don’t think of it as a proper library, since the stacks were locked away.

For all of this, I hadn’t visited any of the local public libraries here in Henderson for a very long while, until last weekend. These days I mostly read in digital format. Furthermore, since Marissa changed schools and doesn’t drive in that direction during the academic year, I no longer frequent the Paseo Verde, Gibson, or Heritage Park branches, and as a snowbird I’m usually not here at all during the brutally hot summer months.

I’ve severely slowed my purchase of physical books in the past couple of years, because I already have shelves and stacks and boxes. But last weekend at Paseo Verde I couldn’t pass up a hard copy of A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish, in its third edition from 2000, though I already have an electronic copy of the sixth edition from 2018. I have always enjoyed the sweet combing through reference books in hard copy — grammars such as this one, lexicons like the Big Liddell, dictionaries including for rhyming, the CRC handbooks for math and for science, thesauruses, atlases both real and fictional, concordances, manuals — in retrospect who could be surprised that I married an encyclopedia editor.