Anecdotal Evidence: `Trembling in Front of the Shelves'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Trembling in Front of the Shelves'
Excerpt:
Of the libraries I have mentioned the most important for me was that first one...It’s a hunger that never abates, one that Alfred Kazin shared. In A Walker in the City (1951) he writes of growing up in Brooklyn:

“On those early summer evenings, the library was usually empty, and there was such ease at the long tables under the plants lining the windowsills, the same books of American history lay so undisturbed on the shelves,...that whenever I entered the library I would walk up and down trembling in front of the shelves. For each new book I took away, there seemed to be ten more of which I was depriving myself.”

It’s a reassuring hunger because I’ve always understood it would never go away but there was always another book to read. On Friday I was in the basement...the T’s, U’s and Z’s, books about cooking, bibliographies and military science. This is largely terra incognita, ripe for exploration and deployment of the library’s most reliable reference guide – serendipity. I returned with treasures:
:)