In a few days, my wife and I will be heading for western Pennsylvania to rendezvous with friends from DC.  While it’s mostly about old friends getting together, I’m looking forward to visiting the eclectic set of sites the four of us chose in true committee fashion via e-mail several months ago.

Our first stop will be Fallingwater, the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright home designed and built as a private residence during the Great Depression but now open to the public.  Our next destination will be Gettysburg and a guided tour of the battlefield, following which we will visit scenic Lancaster County and wrap things up with a shopping mall excursion.

While I am uncertain where I first learned about Fallingwater, I’m fairly sure I know where I first heard about Gettysburg.  It would have happened in the public library in my home town, Foxboro, Massachusetts.  Boyden Public Library was named for Uriah Boyden (1804-79).  A Foxboro native and a highly successful inventor and mechanical engineer, Boyden received an honorary A.M. from Harvard in 1853.  In his will, he bequeathed funds for an astronomical research center, Boyden Observatory, which is still in existence and currently located in South Africa.  More important, he donated money for the improvement of the Foxboro schools that was used to purchase books for the start of what became his namesake library.

In my youth, the library was housed in a small, octagonal, stone structure located in downtown Foxboro across from the town common.  Originally constructed in 1868 as a Civil War memorial, this distinctive structure eventually became the town library.  This required some creativity given the building’s unusual footprint and numerous, oddly shaped alcoves, whose eccentric angles and irregular dimensions defied the use of anything resembling standard book shelving.

To the small boy who began visiting the library in the early 1950s, however, architectural issues were irrelevant.  What mattered were the books, of which there were a seemingly endless number, their variegated spines sometimes hinting at their content.  After a few visits, I became an efficient browser, having learned where the titles of most interest—books about animals, airplanes, boats, cars, mysterious phenomena like UFOs, and history, including the stories of major battles like Gettysburg—could generally be found.  And so it was that long before actually visiting Gettysburg for the first time some years ago, I read about it in books borrowed from my local library.

It was a print world then, and the search process was so simple even a child could master it.  First you found the section of the stacks with the stuff you were interested in, then you found a book you wanted to read, which led to another book, and another….  It was a simpler world then, smaller and far less efficient than the Internet-driven one we inhabit now.  It seemed more than satisfactory at the time, however, and I don’t think any of us anticipated today’s digital information future.  I know I didn’t. Which makes me wonder what today’s young library patrons will be saying about their early library experiences fifty years hence?  But now, time for that vacation.–IER