Written By: Belinda deKay, Assistant Director

Adjective – Lost: 1) Not made use of: 2) Absorbed in a reverie Verb – To Browse: traced in Webster’s Dictionary from the Old Saxon for breast, and from there to Old French, Middle English and so on to mean “grazing on tender shoots and twigs” and thus, in the wondrous ways and byways of language, has taken on a secondary meaning of “to skim through a book, reading at random passages that catch the eye ….. casually, especially in search of something of interest.” (A long journey from that Old Saxon word, but then, may be not so very far…)

Noun – Card Catalogue: virtually extinct library artifact – A place where people could browse while searching for a book, like rummaging through an attic or closet and coming on the unexpected and forgotten.

Verb – To search: as in search for a book on line,(using your library card) to order a book on line from your own or any other library in your state and even beyond, to ask the circulation staff, again on line, to retrieve a book from the stacks and bring it to the circulation desk (which they are more than happy to do) where it can be picked up.

Of course, card catalogues, like dial telephones and darning socks, are time consuming and inefficient, and, anyway, are no longer with us, and on line searches and computerized libraries have enriched and broadened our lives in immeasurable ways, as have books on CD and tape and on Playaways, and the ability to download whole books. But just as the ancient roots of words remain, just as the scagliola marble pillars in the lobby still show the marks where the gas lights once were, we can still browse in the stacks, get lost in the stacks, enjoy the serendipitous discovery, meet the new and reacquaint ourselves with the old – as Robert Frost said of poetry –“it reminds us of things we did not know we knew.”

Oh, and, well, talking of poetry, where better to browse than up in the Gallery, among the acanthus leaves at the top of

the pillars, walking across the sea glass floor with its odd opaque and aqueous light, to the north end where the 800s, the ‘literature’ of Library parlance, are found.

Here is a true attic of the mind. Here we find writers on writers and writing – not just T.S. Eliot’s classic ‘On Poetry and Poets,’ but the contemporary novelist J. M. Coetzee’s essays on literature and a first edition of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Granite and Rainbow,’ – titled from her description of biography as being “a fusion between the hard and solid granite of truth and the elusive beauty of a rainbow’. My eye lights on an oversize book turned sideways on the shelf - “American Writers at Home”, edited by Sandy McClatchy with seductive photographs and absorbing essays, suddenly I am truly lost in a book, spending time with old friends in a new setting – ‘solid granite of truth and the elusive beauty of a rainbow’? Here, too, are the great Norton Anthologies, the ultimate browse! Especially the “World Masterpieces” anthology – your own Great Books Course right there in your hand - and there will not be a test! There are Poetry Dictionaries, Dictionaries of Quotations, and William Safire’s “Great Speeches in History.” True Library treasures. This is the realm of American Literature – the Dewey Decimal System is a sort of painting by numbers, or perhaps like the grids on a map – 811 translates into American poetry. Among the collections of Merrill and McClatchy, Dickinson, Frost, Bishop, Billy Collins, Stanley Kunitz, Adrienne Rich –are two Library of America volumes of American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century –Whitman and Whittier, the well-known and the little remembered – the story in poetry and verse of 19th Century America, Casey at the Bat and Paul Revere’s Ride, Evangeline and The Defence of Fort McHenry – and, unexpectedly, comic verse by Oliver Wendell Holmes. This is company that is good to keep. Ninteenth Century voices that still speak to us in the 21st Century, telling us our story – are their voices clearer up here in this beautiful late 19th Century Gallery – a place to pause and listen perhaps?

The Stonington Free Library

I see a new edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, letters and essays, and then Henry James’ travel writings tempt me, (interestingly, unlike our poets, a spirit very uncomfortable in his native land, thus a great traveler!) as do the writings of Henry Adams, not just his ‘Education’ but his glorious studies of Mont St Michel and Chartres, but another day perhaps, for two books have caught my eye. They look old. They are; the dates on the fly leaves are 1888 and 1889. One is selections from Thoreau’s Winter Journal and the other is from his Summer Journal. Further along the shelves is a less old but quite worn and mended copy of Walden. Thoreau would approve of such frugality in preserving his book – the paper is good and the print is easy to read – what more do you want in a book? I am so content to be reacquainted with my old friend. And then, I pull out another rather shabby volume – curious because the title on the spine is illegible. It is a collection of essays by E.B White and as I idly turn the pages I suddenly read: “Thoreau is unique among writers in that those who admire him find him uncomfortable to live with – a regular hair shirt of a man… Hair shirt or no, he is a better companion than most, and I would not swap him for a soberer and more reasonable friend even if I could”. I had stumbled on an essay by one of my favorite writers about one my favorite writers. Tender shoots and twigs – enough indeed to graze on for a happy while.

Are these wonderful and various books lost in the stacks? – I don’t know, and may be not really – was I lost in the stacks? – For a few hours on a cold January afternoon, beautifully so.