imagine a bookstore where everything's free
It'd never work, sure, but what if I told you it...already has
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‘s Friday’s post about the one and only idiot Alex Dobrenko. Big ups to and the rest of the substack team for putting up w me.
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Anyways enough blabber, chatter, and jabber — here’s today’s piece. Give it a read and idk maybe if you love it consider becoming a paid subscriber lol idk nvm its probably dumb.
imagine a bookstore where everything's free
You ever have that feeling of reading a book when you’re tired but the book is so good that you keep reading and finally, there in the hazy periphery, you see a half-nude page aka the end of a chapter or even just some stars or a line to indicate a section break, so you say to yourself “I’m going to stop reading once I’m there,” but then you just keep reading like you whizz right past it because you’re so into whatever it is you’re reading that you forget you were supposed to stop?
I love that feeling.
I’ve been having that feeling lately with this book called Who Will Run The Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore.
It’s a physical book, which means all the text is printed out onto these pieces of paper and then those papers are all folded, hamburger style, then bound together and put inside a thicker, more robust paper that feels sturdy, like armor for the book itself.
I never get this feeling reading books on my kindle or articles online. Or maybe I do but it doesn’t feel romantic. Efficient, sure, a little cheap, but not romantic.
This is how things are in the land of the digital, our home away from and also within home. We live here now, this bastion of the infinite scroll where, remember, it’s not a marathon, it’s a sprint, but you’ll hafta keep running it your whole life.
Doesn’t even matter what you’re scrolling through - the article becomes the feed becomes the text becomes the email becomes the article - the point is simply to scroll, scroll, scroll. That’s how the astronauts at NASA designed it, and they worked hard and Google and Facebook gave them money and coffee too, so yea it makes sense that we can’t stop scrolling and reading and scrolling.
But to keep reading a book? That’s a goddamn miracle. To cruise past the point you planned on stopping and to just…keep…reading? Even getting to that stopping point is impressive, because why would you? All around you is the most realistic, addictive MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) ever made. Create your identity, accrue social capital and money too, make jobs find love go on a hike, feeding it all back into the game that you can play anywhere there’s wifi, across devices, through time, infinite horrors and delights, there’s even nudies on the screens big and small and yet, somehow someway, the book proves victorious?
PITCH: A superhero movie about a lil book named Paperback Jack who somehow defeats the empires of google and facebook and those other fuckers. Oh and he’s a bit of a putz so we’d often see his butt aka Paperback Jack’s Ol’ Buttcrack (this would be merch sold at mcdonalds happy meals).
Back to the frog book
Anyway, back to my copy of Who Will Run The Frog Hospital. It’s not actually mine, you see. It’s from the library, which is a place that stores a ton of books and magazines and even movies.
You can walk in and take literally anything you like. Well, not so fast - there is a catch. You need to first get a free card from the front desk which they’ll give to anyone with an ID.
Oh, also you hafta bring back what you took before a certain date. Unless you want to keep it longer. In that case, you just renew it.
Or don’t - you can keep it anyways, though the library will hafta charge you a few dimes or dollars because you kept it past the date they asked for it back. But even with that, you can just wait for a ‘late fees forgiveness day’ where all your debts are forgiven. Fun fact: Jesus, a library freak, loved this idea so much he put it in his big book of ideas called the Bible.
You probably think I’m talking about a fairytale or a classic pixar film or perhaps even a place maybe in Europe but no, I am in fact saying that under your very nose are libraries aplenty. Below is a map of the USA. I had no idea it looked like that either I always assumed it looked like the letters USA why else would they name it that but anyways, see all those dots? Those are libraries.
Imagine if someone pitched the idea of a library today.
Much like a chicken, it would never fly.
You wanna spend our tax monkeys on what?? Can’t schools just do that why don’t the schools just do that? There’s no budget we need to give another five trillion to the war efforts did you see we shot down those Chinese balloons recently. Can you shoot down a balloon with a book??
I mean. Maybe, could be fun.
Rememberories
Many of my earliest memories in America take place in a library. A lil scamp of a seven-year-old boy, I’d sprint through the downstairs children’s section of the Sharon Public library in Massachusetts, grabbing as many books as possible. I’d stack them all on top of one of the leathery padded bright orange chairs. Higher and higher, like I was playing a game of solo reverse Jenga.
I remember so distinctly the anxiety I’d feel whenever I’d walk in: “there’s too many books here, I can’t possibly read them all.”
Thinking about how I’d probably never be able to consume all the world’s knowledge would fill me with an existential fomo panic that I still feel to this day. I didn’t wanna miss out on any of it, so I would bring home 20-30 books each time we’d go. Big ass picture books about dinosaurs or whales, all those wayside school is falling down chaos math books, goosebumps books of course, etc.
Did I read them all when we got home? Fuck no. Who's got time to read all the books, especially with every weekend fully booked up (TGIF on Fridays w Boy Meets World and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, One Saturday Morning cartoons including most importantly Recess, lunch and a nap, SNICK (Rugrats, All That,Kenan n Kel, Are you Afraid of the Dark), and Sunday spent eating and thinking about how yes, I was afraid of the dark.
But reading them all wasn’t the point. It was enough just to know that I’d brought them home w me, that I’d leafed through them enough to know of their existence.
Libraries remained a constant through all of life’s ups downs and all arounds, or as they are more colloquially called, puberty.
In college, they were my favorite place, especially the 24/7 library where I spent many a night pretending to work. I loved the feeling of being around so many other people, all doing their own thing, tryna figure something out but mostly just gChatting. It was nice.
And the goofs we’d have. One night my friend Quinn and I wrote a strongly worded treatise on how to update the keyboard. For example - there is an @ symbol, sure. But why no On symbol? Why is @ better than On?
These temples of books were all across the country, I soon learned. Los Angeles, especially! The LAPL system has 86 branches in total! Including that most classic badass - the Central Library downtown! And that doesn’t include all the ones in Glendale, Burbank, Pasadena, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, and all the other incorporated cities that you think are part of LA but aren’t really.
Nowadays, I spend 3-4 days a week working in libraries. They’re like coffee shops with tons of books except you don’t need to buy anything to be there. It’s all free. This is not marketed enough.
Whenever I’m working and need a break - about every seven or eight minutes - I’ll walk through the stacks and grab random books. Here’s one about cooking Jewish food like your bubby did. There’s a thick-ass tome about the history of ‘debt.’ And over here is a script for Five Easy Pieces, a movie I haven't seen but I know is Important and Good!
So I grab them all and bring them back to my computer, just like I did as a wee lad. It’s still comforting, knowing that I’m surrounded by all that knowledge I’ll never have the time to take in. At least I’m trying, my mind says, as I scroll online about what mischief and hijinks the Zany and Relatable Elon Muskers is gonna get into today.
And now, the full circle
I thought I’d experienced all the splendors these book emporiums had to offer, but no. There was one more level to this, a part of the library I’d not dared to enter as an adult on my own. The children’s section.
About a year ago, when my son was like 20 months old idk, I started bringing home huge pancake stacks of books taller than my head for us all to read, and Wilder would go nuts. We’d read like eight books each day. After every one, I’d scream Neeeeeeeext and then he’d scream Neeeeeext and it was heaven.
I remember once morning, he and Lauren were reading books and after every one he would still scream Neeeeext, and then Lauren would sorta-scream Neeeeext (she’s not a big fan of screaming). And then I’d scream Neeeext from out here in the kitchen, and finally, Robert would bark “Neeeeext.” Heaven’s heaven.
He’s two years and some months old and he asks to go to the library now. He knows when we’re there and screams LIBRARY. He loves running around and making a huge pancake stack of books and bringing them home having no intention to read them because in his case I read them to him. It doesn’t usually feel like he’s paying attention but just yesterday, we we were returning two trader joes bags worth of books, and he name checked each one —“buhbuy Bear Can’t Sleep, buhbye smelly dog, buhbuy Paperback Jack wait dada why are you trying to sneak your book into the library that’s no good dada.”
Except I’m not sneaking it in I’m just suggesting they give it a whirl, relax kid.
And it’s not not buhbye either.It’s just see ya later, because here, at the librarfree, the books will always be here, whether you ever actually read them or not.
Everything is free here too, but…
I’m a writer and this substack is how I make money to support my habits like eating dinner with my family. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber today, and hell I’ll even throw in a 24% off discount code just for today because I can tell it’s all you need to Take The Leap and also to celebrate the hit tv show 24 with Jack Bauer who never slept or ate or pooped but always killed whichever terrorists the US government was trying to make look bad that week.
ALSO: I ran a lil poll in the Chat asking people what they’d need to see more of in BAT to become paid subscribers and do you know what a lot of them said? Money. If they weren’t broke as a joke, of course they’d support BAT. I get that. I wish I could throw moneybags at every artist I love but I can’t because then my family would say “we can’t eat Substacks for dinner” to which I’d explain that actually a lot of them do in fact teach you to eat stuff like
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Shhhh this is a comments section
Do you have a favorite library you still go to?
did you go to oNe as a kid?
What’s the craziest thing that ever happened to you in a library (I did sex in one but I didn’t wanna write that above cuz my parents would read it but I doubt they read this part who knows tho).
hi
I’m taking pre-orders for Paperback Jack - are you in? Minimum of 3k orders so I can afford to print the dang books on silk paper which is a)expensive and b)non-negotiable.
What do you think of the ON symbol? Does it have legs or massive legs?
Heaven for me as a ten year old was going to a nearby Manhattan public library (parents were much more liberal in 1972 NYC than NYC today about letting their kids out on their own), taking out a volume of "The Great Brain," my favorite series, and reading it at a Baskin Robbins while eating strawberry ice cream.
I recently discovered a beautiful library in the central part of the city i live in. I have walked past it thousands of times but never entered it. Until recently. I was contemplating whether or not I should get a membership but after reading this. I will. Thankyou for writing this. When I am not broke, I'll definitely subscribe. Much love to you.