Topic 8: Haunted Libraries

Carol:

God Bless Andrew Carnegie

“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world." (Ray Bradbury)

I suppose the assumption is that the topic “haunted libraries” refers to creepy old, dingy libraries where ghosts hang out. I’ll leave that interpretation of the theme to Megan. The word “haunt” only has one meaning related to the supernatural; the other meanings refer to places where people hang out. In fact, I am a haunter of libraries and have been since I was a little girl.

My first recollection of a public library is the old Carnegie library in Calgary, Alberta. My family went there often, and I especially loved going with my father, who introduced me to the science fiction of Ray Bradbury at that library. Itt wasn’t the books that caught my attention then but the “ghosts” of library users past. When I looked down at the surface of the long oak library table, I could see the names surreptitiously carved into the wood by 80 years of library patrons. My imagination would kick in as I read the inscriptions, thinking someday I would write the story of that tabletop and its ghosts.

One of my favorite library haunts was the Linonia and Brothers Reading Room (L and B for short) at Yale University. While Marc was studying at the Law Library in the early 1970’s, I would hang out at the L and B, which had a collection of popular and travel fiction that weren’t deemed “worthy” of the grander academic libraries on campus. Curled up in a big bottle-green leather chair in one of the L and B alcoves, overlooking a beautiful inner courtyard, I could read in complete privacy all the great works of Mickey Spillane, including My Gun is Quick. My favorite book was a history of circus freaks. Such was my Yale education. Each time I left the library and looked at the plaque over the door, I was reminded that Yale ghosts of L and B were mostly men (founded in the early 1700’s, Yale began accepting women undergraduates in 1969).

Frankly, I never met a library I didn’t like and I have haunted a lot of them. That humble Carnegie Library in Calgary was one of over 2500 built with donations, beginning in 1881, by Andrew Carnegie, then the richest man in the world. The Waukegan, Illinois Carnegie library built in 1901 fed the imagination of a young Ray Bradbury and the library built to replace it after sixty-some years houses the “Ray Bradbury Meeting Room.” Thanks, Mr. Carnegie. Thanks, Mr. Bradbury.

L & B Reading Room, Yale University

Megan:

Most people assume that the most popular section in a prison library is True Crime. That’s probably true, but at the prison I worked in, modern True Crime was banned. We had plenty of books about Jack the Ripper, and other famous, long dead killers, but there were no books by or about any currently incarcerated prisoners. I didn’t know that was unusual until I visited another prison library and found book after book about the people I worked with every day.

Prison libraries in the UK are meant to be a mix of public and school libraries, and censorship is unusual except for security reasons. It makes sense not to have books on martial arts or how to build bombs. And, it was explained to me, that books written by inmates were not allowed because they should not be able to profit from their crimes while they are in prison. Also included under this mandate were books about current inmates. After I had been working there for a while, an officer explained to me another, more disturbing, reason.

In 1993, not long after the prison opened, and before the infamous IRA escape, a Whitemoor prisoner was murdered by two other inmates. His name was Leslie “Catweazle” Bailey and he was a convicted pedophile and child killer. According to the officer, the subsequent investigation revealed that the prisoners learned about Bailey’s crimes in a book they had checked out from the prison library. Then, all books that mentioned any prisoners or their crimes were removed from the library.

The Security Department at the prison periodically tried to ban books and I always challenged them to demonstrate an actual risk. Sometimes I got the book re-instated (in the case of a book about military helicopters), and other times I acquiesced (in the case of a book on chemical warfare). While preparing for this essay, I searched online for information about this murder. Although I was able to confirm that a prisoner by that name was murdered in Whitemoor prison, I could find no mention of a library book being to blame. That information may not have been released to the press, or it may not even be true.

Under normal circumstances, I would argue that freedom of information is a human right, no matter what a small minority might choose to do with that information. But a prison library is not a public library, the minority is the majority, and sometimes safety and security, even for murderers and rapists, takes precedence over censorship quarrels and access to information. So, I never challenged this rule, because I didn’t want the library to be haunted by another murder.