In Praise Of The Spartanburg Library

While the snow is definitely pretty, it’s come at a price. My normally speedy cable internet is out, and I have no idea when it’ll come back on.

For someone who lives and breathes on the internet, that’s a definite downer.

On the bright side, however, I live within walking distance of the Spartanburg County Headquarters Library, right in the heart of downtown. Coming from a town with a decidedly lackluster public library system, I thought I’d take this opportunity to say how impressed I am.

I’m sitting in the front lobby, that broad and open space that opens into the library proper. From where I sit, I can see directly into the knick-knack-filled gift shop. Around me, sad-looking men browse the internet is a haunted silence. One watches movies on a portable DVD player.

I suspect that several of these men are homeless, unemployed, or perhaps on some kind of disability. They don’t type. There is nothing active or seeking in their browsing. They lack the questing faces of students — students of any age — and there’s a certain defeat about them. The air has a slight tinge of discount tobacco when you walk past them.

Another man, dressed in worn, dingy clothes, has just passed by hailing them to “Come on, let’s go eat.” He’s not part of this technology club. They ignore him, and shrug, and soon he walks out into the chill, his body, then his head, disappearing down the winding concrete steps.

The man with the DVD players speaks, slightly hushed, to another sitting on the opposite side of the hall. “There ain’t to helping that guy. If anybody needs to be in the Mission, it’s him.”

I’m not typing this to make some soppy appeal for better treatment of our fellow humans. I just find it remarkable that, for all the bad things one can say about South Carolina, about Spartanburg, here at the Library these men are welcome. They chat with each other, and with one of the employees, who is headed outside for a quick smoke.

Here in the cool, echo-filled lobby of the library, there’s an equality. Technology has become so cheap and available that we can all afford a basic tool like a computer. (The Asus Eee netbook I write this on was purchased for a scant $300 last year, and now retails for less than $175.) Any one of them, homeless or homeowner, could be another blogger.

And what’s more, no one is trying to tell them they shouldn’t be here.

That’s quite a change from some libraries I’ve spent time at in the past. The Main Branch of the Asheville Library system, for instance, is practically waging a war against the homeless. They’ve even gone so far as to remove the public benches outside the library in an effort to discourage loitering. True, the situation there is different — there’s a real panhandling problem in Asheville — but so is the mentality.

I gather that it’s this same mentality of inclusiveness that’s helped to make the Spartanburg Library system exactly as awesome as it is. Every aspect of this place is encouraging.

An example: In the kid’s section, they have a whopping great selection of manga and comics. When I was a kid, that’s all I wanted to read, but the local libraries never stocked any. They weren’t literary enough, I guess. I happened to have other options — my stepfather owned a used bookstore — but a lot of other kids didn’t, and a good number probably gave up on reading to a certain extent because of a lack of access to things that actually interested them.

Here, the goal seems to getting people of all ages to read whatever interests them. All the sections here seem to have a good balance of populist, demand-driven content, as well as the more “literary” kind of stuff. But, thus far in my explorations, I have yet to get the sense that this is anything other than a place dedicated to the encouragement of the mind.

I’d expect that the libraries of larger cities, where the sheer volume of readers and exposure to discrimination law suits make it advantageous to be as benign as possible to all interests. Even if that interest is merely to have a place to get out of the homeless shelter for the day.

But not in a town like Spartanburg. Here, it shines like a beacon.