While presiding over this month’s meeting of the Sutton Free Library Book Club, Julie Griffiths let it be known that she doesn’t like books very much. And so it was with something like resignation that she accepted her copy of next month’s pick, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, as the gathering broke up.
To be clear, she loves to read. She cares about pacing and dialogue, and has no patience for bloated narratives and underdeveloped characters. A silver “National Book Award Finalist” sticker on a novel’s cover doesn’t mean there isn’t a chunk of literary fat that should have been trimmed from the middle.
Words matter to her, a lot, but she can do without the book itself – all that ink and paper and heft. She prefers Nooks and Kindles. Tablets. E-readers. But the line to borrow a digital copy of Owens’s book stretches for digital miles at the moment, and so she left the library on this mid-May evening lugging an extra 1.3 pounds.
She was grateful nonetheless. Librarian Elizabeth Geraghty had managed to secure nine copies of one of the most popular book club titles around. It took emails to 65 other libraries, a couple of generous local patrons and Sutton’s own copy to get there. Maybe it’s not the kind of quest that will be immortalized in heroic prose, but it was not nothing either.
Sutton is lucky to have her. There’s no worse fate for a public library than a librarian who cares more about books than the people who read them. “Bad libraries build collections, good libraries build services, great libraries build communities,” author R. David Lankes said, and by that measure the smallest of libraries can and do achieve greatness.
It starts with books – infinite knowledge in bound form – but that’s only the start. There are story hours, and art exhibits, and lectures, and film showings. And there are book clubs, where people like Sutton’s Julie Griffiths, Sonja Smith, Lynne Lawrie, Kristin Snow, Marilu Morse and Jan Young gather once a month to talk about what they’ve read separately but together. They are a community within a community that marks the passage of time not by months and years but books read and discussed.
If you ever find yourself tasked with launching a civilization, start with a library.
The Sutton Free Library has been at its current site in Sutton Mills for nearly 80 years and yet it’s one of the newer buildings in the area, as Jack Noon points out in his wonderful town history. Eight decades isn’t a quarter of the book in the story of Old New Hampshire, and Sutton Mills is old.
The first of its settlers found his way here before America gained its independence, drawn by what Noon calls “the tremendous waterpower potential of Lane River,” and a village sprouted from that realized vision. The river is no longer harnessed as it once was, but a historical marker sets the scene with concision. Part I: Moses Quimby arrives in 1773, and saw and grist mills follow. Part II: The dam network grows, providing the power to make things like bobbins and wagon wheels. Part III: The flood of 1936 destroys nearly all the dams.
The epilogue carries a hint of pathos: “The last sawmill remained in operation until 1939.”
A year later, Sutton Free Library left its single, unheated room in the town hall for a brick-and-mortar home by the river. The plaque on a granite bench out front suggests that staff turnover has not been much of a problem over the decades: “In honor of Jeanette Couch / For 50 years as Librarian / October 31, 2012.” From JFK to Obama, she helmed the front desk. She still lives in the village, across the street from the library, and checks in with a phone call every day, Elizabeth says. When it’s warm enough, Jeanette sits on her porch to watch the people – the community she helped build – come and go.
I grew up in Londonderry, the home of Leach Library. The pink, dog-eared card I carried as a child allowed me to go home with Lizard Music by D. Manus Pinkwater over and over again, plus graphic-heavy books about bugs or dinosaurs or archeology – whatever I was obsessed with at the moment.
There was no money exchanged, just an unspoken agreement between me and the librarian on duty: She would give me the books as long as I promised to bring them back.
What a place.
For me, the library consistently did what school accomplished only sporadically – it made me curious, sublimely unsettled.
I bounced around a little over the years, to small towns with small libraries, but the smallest of them still held more books than I could read. And in college, I rarely used the library for class work but spent countless hours among its shelves doing exactly what I had done as a little kid: scratching random intellectual itches.
After settling in Epsom to raise a family, it was the library that provided the first and strongest sense of community. When I moved out of town a little over a year ago, I knew I would miss the family members who stayed behind. And I knew I would miss that library.
I knew, too, that there would be others.
Sutton Free Library isn’t my library, but I went to its book club on a recent Wednesday night. I was there because there was something I wanted to write but also because I had read the book. I called the library in advance to ask if it was okay if I showed up, and Elizabeth made it sound like she couldn’t imagine a better idea.
The group welcomed me, too, and for an hour we discussed The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai. And we talked about the community. And they told me a little about themselves. And Elizabeth said it didn’t matter whether Sutton was or wasn’t my library, that I was always welcome.
What a place.