I can't explain how wonderful it is, not to mention motivating, when a non-librarian writes passionately about libraries. Granted Kate Carraway is all the way up in Toronto and I'm all the way down here in Oklahoma but still...it just warms my heart to read this stuff.

The public library is among the last real democratic institutions. The Holds shelf is an exemplar of the social contract. A library applies systemic order to cacophonous wilds of ideas, and the librarians who make it happen are eternal sex symbols. "Quiet" and "books" are intoxicating signifiers, but more than that, the library loves its patrons with Aslan-calibre benevolence. It wants to help you. It wants to enrich you. It will indulge your fiendish relationship with the Gossip Girl novels, and when you need some Joseph Conrad, it's there
for you, too. Such wholesome majesty is rarely found in a governmental, community-oriented kind of place.