Traveler of Worlds: Conversations With Robert Silverberg by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

Author:Alvaro Zinos-Amaro [Zinos-Amaro, Alvaro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Conversations, Literary Figures, Non-Fiction, Sci-Fi Authors
ISBN: 9781933846637
Amazon: 1933846631
Publisher: Fairwood Press
Published: 2016-08-15T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Libraries

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro. I’d like to talk about libraries today: ones you’ve visited, and your own personal collection.

Robert Silverberg. “Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide… “

Zinos-Amaro: That sets the stage nicely. What were some of the public libraries of significance when you were young? Harold Bloom, for example, has written about his fond childhood memories of the Melrose branch of the New York Public Library, as well as the Fordham Road Library, and then of course the central New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.

Silverberg: The Melrose branch? He must have grown up in a different part of the city from me.

I had two libraries when I was a boy. I lived almost equidistant between them. There was my local branch, and then there was the main Brooklyn Public Library in Grand Army Plaza, I think in New York second only to the Fifth Avenue library in Manhattan, which is one of a kind. Both of these were within walking distance for me from the time I was seven or eight years old, and I frequently went to them. I was allowed to take out an astonishing number of books at a time—I don’t think they had a limit, and I would come home with as many as I could carry. Because this was in the 1940s, these libraries had books going back to the turn of the century, which wasn’t that far in the past. I had access then to all of the great 19th-century children’s classics, with their wonderful illustrations, particularly in the main Brooklyn branch, which had a separate children’s library that was a major library in its own. Many, many years later I went back to Brooklyn and I went to the children’s library to see if I could find any of the books of my childhood, but they’d all been thrown out, of course, and replaced with the skinny picture books that are children’s books now.

I was allowed great privileges at those libraries. The local branch, the Schenectady Avenue branch, had a complete Oxford English Dictionary. It was, I don’t know, ten or fifteen volumes, whatever the full print edition was at that point, but it took up a vast shelf behind the librarian’s desk; it wasn’t on public access. I said to her, “Is that a dictionary? It’s so big! Could I look at it?” She handed me a volume of it and I sat down and looked at the OED. I was ten years old.

There was in that library a bound file of St. Nicholas Magazine, a now totally forgotten children’s magazine that went back into the 1870s. Even the 1870s weren’t that far away in 1944. It’s comparable now to 1945, which seems like yesterday to me: I remember the day Roosevelt died and the dropping of the atomic bomb very clearly. Well, that’s how far back these magazines went then. But I didn’t go to the library primarily to look at the OED or St. Nicholas Magazine.

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