Libraries by Sharon Dean

LUCY BURDETTE: Today we welcome Sharon Dean to the blog with a subject I bet we can all agree on--our love of libraries!

SHARON DEAN: When I was in elementary school, I devoured a series of biographies bound in orange. I read now that they were published by Bobbs-Merrill and that there were over two hundred of them. I could still lead anyone to the shelf where they sat waiting for me to select enough to keep me busy for the week. 

My first job was shelving books in that little library that I still associate with orange-bound biographies. When I was about thirteen, I'd walk the half mile to my job and walk home by myself in the dark. Those were days when we weren't as fearful. The biggest fear my parents had was that I'd go to my job and find the librarian dead. Her name was Bertha and I remember her as a shriveled old lady, though she probably wasn't much older than fifty. But she was ill with cancer. A strange smell often filled the library. I think that it was the smell of death. And, yes, she died while I still worked there, but thankfully not in the library.

I gave Bertha's name to the elderly, former librarian in my novel The Barn. I based that library not on the one of my childhood but on the one in the town where I raised my children. There's a wonderful story about that library. It had once been a church. When the church closed and joined the other Protestant church in town, there was a stipulation that the building had to be used for church purposes or income. My kids went to youth group there and they roller skated around the former, now pew-less, sanctuary. My daughter took her first dance classes there. 

When the town needed a new library, this old church seemed a perfect place. It would absolve the other church of the financial burden of its upkeep and provide the town the space it badly needed. But there was that clause in the will that related not to the building, but to the land the building was on. It took years, but two women eventually tracked down the heir, who was, I recall, a librarian himself. He gladly gave permission for the church to become a library. 

Bigger libraries are now available to me. The library at the college in the East where I taught, the library at the college in the West where I now live, the Carnegie town library in my town, the many libraries I researched in when I was an academic: the Beinecke at Yale, the Hay at Brown, the Houghton at Harvard, the Morgan Pierpont in New York City. But my heart is with the small libraries of my childhood and my young motherhood and of that little library that Charity Royall is in charge of in Edith Wharton's Summer. 

When I was researching for The Wicked Bible, my forthcoming novel featuring Deborah Strong, librarian and reluctant sleuth, I read two books on the history of libraries: Wayne A. Wiegand's, Part of Our Lives: A People's History of the American Public Library (Oxford UP, 2015) and Matthew Battles' Library: An Unquiet History (Norton, 2015). What an interesting history it is. Big or small, libraries deserve to be labeled "sacred spaces."

In this age of easy downloads, how important are libraries to you? What stories about a library would you like to share?

About the book: In 1990, Deborah Madison and Rachel Cummings, both seventeen, are enjoying a bicycle ride on a beautiful September day in New Hampshire. They stop at a local barn that no longer houses cows but still displays a wooden cow’s head that peeks out from a window in the rafters. Sliding open the door, they find Rachel’s boyfriend, Joseph Wheeler, dead on the barn’s floor.

The case lies as cold as Joseph for nearly thirty years until Rachel returns to New Hampshire to attend the funeral of Joseph’s mother. The girls, now women, reopen the cold case and uncover secrets that have festered, as they often do, in small towns. Against a backdrop of cold and snow and freezing rain, Deborah and Rachel rekindle their friendship and confess the guilt each of them has felt about things that happened in the past. The Barn is a story of friendship lost and recovered, secrets buried and unburied, and the power of forgiveness.

About Sharon Dean: Sharon L. Dean grew up in Massachusetts where she was immersed in the literature of New England. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of New Hampshire, a state she lived and taught in before moving to Oregon. After giving up writing scholarly books that required footnotes, she reinvented herself as a fiction writer. She is the author of three Susan Warner mysteries and of a literary novel titled Leaving Freedom. The Barn, the first novel in a new mystery series, features librarian and reluctant sleuth Deborah Strong as she and her friend solve a thirty-year-old cold case. Set in the depth of New Hampshire’s January, The Barn is a story of friendship lost and recovered, secrets buried and unburied, and the power of forgiveness.