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The Oneironaut’s Diary

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Michael Bassey Johnson

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“I believe in your ability to heal, grow, and live as your full, true self. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been or what you’re going through right now.”

“Bookshelves stood against the four walls. They were shapely and well made, but were all second-hand; Hetty had picked them up on visits to Chesterbourne. She liked her shelves to have personality, as well as the books on them, and thought it would have been simpler to order shelves to be fitted around the room, or to buy those bookcases that grow with the growth of their library, she had stood firm against the amusement of Victor and the irritation of her aunt, and had the shelves she wanted.”

“I paused at the top of the spiral staircase, and soaked in the view. In the daylight, the bookstore took on a new life. Motes of dust danced in the sunlight that streamed through the windows. It looked a lot cozier, as the colored glass window ornaments threw rainbows across the bookshelves and pirouetted across the hardwood floors like flecks of dappled sunlight on sand. Bookcases, filled to the brim, reached up to the ceiling, cluttered with so many colors and kinds of books, short and fat, long and wide, that it almost felt like an assault on the senses. The center of the bookstore was open to the second floor, where tall bookshelves towered so high you had to reach them with ladders. Heavy oak beams supported the roof. Planetariums and glass chimes and other ornaments hung from the rafters, catching the morning's golden light and throwing it across the store. The shelves were made from the same deep oak as the ceiling beams and the banisters on the second floor, signs hanging from the eye-level shelves detailing the different sections of the store: MEMOIR, FANTASY, SCI-FI, ROMANCE, SELF-HELP, NATURE, HOW-TO... This place was beautiful. I wondered, briefly, what it would be like to own a place like this. It was magical. A shop that sold the impossible inked onto soft white paper.”

“In the mid-twentieth century it became the fashion in library architecture to design buildings as open-floored structures in which furniture, including bookcases, could be moved about at will. The Green/Snead Library of Congress bookstack that six decades earlier had been declared 'perfect' was now viewed as disadvantageously locking a stack arrangement into the configuration of its construction. In the new approach, reinforced concrete floors carry the loads of bookshelves, so that they can be arranged without regard for window placements. This apparently has the appeal of flexibility in the light of indecision, for planners need not look at the functional and aesthetic requirements of their space and its fittings with any degree of finality; they can always change the use of the space as whim and fashion and consultants dictate. It is unfortunate that such has become the case, for it reflects not only a lack of sensitivity to the historical roots of libraries and their use but also rejects the eminently sensible approach to using natural light as a means of energy conservation if nothing else. There is little more pleasing experience in a library than to stand before a bookshelf illuminated not by florescent lights but by the diffused light of the sun. Direct sunlight can be an annoyance and have a downright blinding effect, of course, but it has been the challenge to architects and engineers since Vitruvius to orient their structures--and the bookshelves in them--to minimize such problems in institutional stacks and in private libraries alike. Let us hope that not all future librarians lose their heliotropic instincts nor lose sight of the bookshelves for the forest of bookcases in which they rest.”