On libraries

I’ve lived in Madrid for several years now, and the city still continues to surprise me. Sometimes it’s in wonderful ways, like discovering acorn liqueur, and others times it’s in horrible ways, like the other week when I tried to return a library book. I should start by saying that I briefly worked in what is supposedly one of America’s best public library systems, so maybe my expectations were a little high. But surely a city the size of Madrid could do better. The library branches here are quite small, with a collection that would easily fit in, say, a large two-story house. You can only take three books at a time and they're due three weeks later. You cannot ask to place a hold on a book or renew it after its due date. To return a book, you have to stand in line at the circulation desk until a librarian physically takes the book from your hand and checks it back into the system. If you return a book overdue, there's no fine; however, your library card is suspended for the amount of time you had the book past the due date, and there is nothing you can do about it. I was informed of these rules one by one until I slowly began to suspect that... psssst..... maybe they don’t really want you to use the library...

But back to my adventure. I woke up early one recent Sunday and hopped on the metro to return my books, all three of them. The libraries normally aren’t open on Sundays, but I had read in the newspaper that there would be special hours to accommodate high school students who needed to study for a college entrance exam. I tiptoed through the open door to find two stocky security guards sitting idly at the circulation desk. The rest of the library was dark and silent, the hallways cordoned off with velvet ropes. “You wanna study for the college entrance exam?” the younger guard asked me, jerking his head toward the chairs in the reading room.

“No, I just wanted to return these books,” I answered. He shook his head.

“The library’s not really open. It’s only open for study.”

“The door’s open and you’re sitting at the circulation desk,” I protested. “Can’t you just take these books and put them in the return box?”

The guard shook his head complacently. “I told you, the library’s closed.”

With Herculean self-control, I managed to nod calmly, as though this were a perfectly reasonable response. “Okay then, I guess I’ll just leave them in the book drop.”

The guard shook his head again. “There is no book drop.”

And that's when I lost it. I snatched my books off the counter, staring at the guards as if perhaps they were joking. “What do you mean, there’s NO BOOK DROP?!" I heard myself screech. "What kind of library IS this?!”

The young guard pursed his lips, while his companion fixed me with a stern glare. “It’s a library with a fixed timetable, which is clearly posted on the outside of the building,” he informed me icily. “You can return the book sometime during opening hours.”

And that was that. As I stalked furiously back to the metro, books in hand, I thought about the library in my hometown, easily four times the size of the one I had just left. I thought about the neighborhood branches of the Indianapolis library system, where you can borrow up to 75 items and renew them indefinitely, unless another patron requests them. If that’s not enough choice, you can request that an item from another branch be sent to your neighborhood library, free of charge. Most of all, I thought of Andrew Carnegie and the hundreds of public libraries he financed across the United States. “There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library,” he is supposed to have said, “this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.” It’s a noble idea, one that can only be realized by a public library system that tries to make its patrons' experience easier, not harder. Madrid's public transit is outstanding. Its public health system is enviable. But its public libraries could stand to take a page (ha, sorry!) from Andrew Carnegie's book.