Today is international Book Lovers Day, and because we fall into that category — and we know a lot of you do too — we couldn’t let it pass without a nod to the wonder of books.
Today also brings to mind a funny yet heartwarming thing that happened on Twitter, of all places, earlier this week.
On Tuesday, a #bookstagram influencer (translated: someone who posts about books and reading on Instagram, and who is often contracted by publishers to do so) tweeted about discovering, of all things, her local public library. Her takeaway: After doing the math, her new free library card will save her close to $100 a month because now she can borrow books instead of buying them.
Twitter being Twitter, the comments to the post proved most entertaining. But rather than ridicule the world’s newest library patron (okay, that did happen a little bit) folks chose to celebrate all that is wonderful about public libraries. People talked about visiting the library as children, and taking their own kids for story hours. One commenter praised her library for letting people check out cake pans in dozens of shapes and sizes; others sang the praises of interlibrary loan services, digital downloads and libraries as voter registration sites.
One biblio-fan summed it up like this: “I go to the library every other week and I still get f***ing jazzed about it every time.”
That patron shares the same love that D.W. Read (remember her from PBS’s “Arthur”?) felt about her library. She and her brother even sang about it in the classic episode, “D.W.’s Library Card.”
“Having fun / isn’t hard / when you’ve got a library card!”