By the time I reached Hornsby library in the late afternoon, however, I had missed the celebrations. The mayor had left, the ukulele orchestra had tucked their instruments under their arms and left the library to its usual quiet. In fact the library seemed quieter than usual with the knowledge there had been celebrations earlier in the day.

Many of the celebrations at Sydney libraries were held in the daytime, for Library Lovers who don’t have other obligations on Tuesdays. Sadly I was not one of those people. I did, however, receive a report from my spy in Campsie, Simon, via text message:

12:24pm

Campsie library is having a sausage sizzle and free books. Wild scenes here.

12:53pm

There was a giant mouse and a man yelling abuse at the librarians.

1:11pm

I got some books for you about Ice-T and monstrous squids.

At least I could experience library love vicariously, as I had missed the Hornsby celebrations I had hoped I would catch the end of. Despite my lateness, I popped in to explore the aftermath.

Hornsby library is tucked is at the edge of the shopping area, a big brick block of a building with a no nonsense exterior. Just inside the doorway were a couple of mascots, a boy and girl wearing stylish newspaper outfits.

They guarded the triumphal arch over the electronic gates, objects that are fixtures at every library, but rarely blessed with decorations.

There were no librarians at the front desk, but there was a large plate of picked-over snacks among the information pamphlets. Only tiny teddies and miniature Cheezels were left, jumbled up in an unappetising pile on the white plastic plate.

Near the windows, sitting at desks, were high school students, girls with roses so perfect looking and long stemmed they didn’t seem real. Most of the girls had roses, some encased in long plastic boxes, others with bows around them. A few had gerberas, which must represent a different type of love.

On the other side of the library the librarians were examining the wedding dress display that had been arranged on one of the walls.

Each dress was paired with a photo from the wedding at which it had been worn. The pink dress had originally been white, and had then been dyed pink; there were photos of it being worn at the wedding and then in pink mode at a later celebration.

In the centre of the wedding dress display was a board decorated with photos of people reading. When I looked closer at it I realised it was photos of just one guy reading the same copy of Fishing magazine, in front of many world landmarks, Big Ben, the Statue of Liberty and the like. He must be able to recite that fishing magazine from memory by now.

There were forms for you to enter your own photographs of yourself reading. Did I have any photographs of myself reading, or for something a little more challenging really reading, rather than pretending to read? Some investigation through my files at home led me to a photo I believe is authentic:

It was taken in 2007 and I was reading an issue of McSweeneys that must have been very engrossing.

After examining the board I had a quick look around Hornsby library, but was distracted by missing all the library love and didn’t feel like settling down. I left the girls with their roses, busy flirting rather than studying, farewelled the dragon in the Youth Zone, and set off towards the clanking monster of the Hornsby water clock. I remember the controversy when it was built in 1993, captured in this news segment (with fantastic animation of chicken bones) from back then:

Maroubra library, also known as the Bowen library, is camouflaged among the grey, low rise buildings of Anzac Parade. Just inside the entrance is a cafe, one of those mobile set-ups which can be folded up again at the end of the day. As well as the expected tea, coffee and muffins, you can buy drinking coconuts here, if you want to get into a tropical mood before entering the library. I thought about buying a more conventional library beverage, a cup of tea, but was curious to go upstairs first.

At the top of the stairs was a large book sale area and various glass cabinets, one with a display of local area memorabilia, like a tin bucket printed with a photograph of Coogee Beach, another with tiny knitted things, sponsored by the local Rotary Club. Beyond this is the entrance to the library.

The display I noticed immediately upon entering commemorated Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday. It is curious how important people continue to age after they have died, and not a phenomena that I imagine ordinary people get to experience. Someone had obviously enjoyed making the Happy 200th Charles Dickens sign, perhaps the same person who made the signs about food and drink in the library.

Eat your watermelons and drink your coconuts outside, people.

I wondered if this rule applied to mints, as in my wanderings around the library a number of times I passed by a table with books spread out on it, with an open bag of No Frills brand “Extra Strong Mints” on top of them. This abandoned scene remained there the whole two hours I was in the library, unclaimed.

It was peaceful in Maroubra library, although it was busy.  The only major noise came from a woman sitting at a desk surrounded by textbooks, who was conducting a loud telephone conversation in Spanish. Her voice blurting “perfecto! perfecto!” was distracting me so I went as far away from her as possible, to the newspaper and magazine area. As usual there were a number of men in caps, sitting reading. As befitted the beachside area, their caps were for surf lifesaving clubs. Other common cap logos include promotional caps businesses, and car manufacturers. One man was making notes in a secretive fashion, hunched over what he was writing as if he expected it to be read over his shoulder. This section of the library was in the corner of the building that looks over the street, at the prow of the library. If the library was a ship, a newspaper reading man would be a good choice for the figurehead.

I sat for a little while near the rack of magazines, an area that smelt strongly of Tiger Balm. The lounge chairs in this area, and throughout the library, were of 50s design and paired with kidney-shaped glass topped tables with wooden bases, unusually stylish for a public library.

On my way back to the non-fiction section I passed many people using the public computers, all of which seemed to be occupied. People looked up medical conditions and played Mah Jong online, and looked up ads on gumtree. In the lounge area in the centre of the library, near the displays of new and “red hot” books with a one week only borrowing period, a man sat making notes from a book called Nemesis, occasionally glancing up to see if he was being observed.

I ducked into the non-fiction shelves and found myself looking at the clairvoyance and fortune telling section, which featured books about tea leaf reading, pendulum dowsing and face reading. The face reading books particularly interested me, so I picked one out for further investigation. I moved on to look at books about goth craft, then books about how to run book clubs. While book clubs have been around for a long time, in the last five or so years I have noticed them being particularly in vogue, and imagined this to be a recent area of the library’s collection. The face reading books were definitely the opposite, all of them many years old. Things like face reading and book groups are destined to move in and out of fashion. One of the things I like about browsing the non-fiction section is identifying past fads, or what trends are having a resurgence. Very rarely do completely new fads come along, although they are usually given new names.

In another section I found a lot of books about sustainability, including one called Time to Eat the Dog? The real guide to sustainable living. “Sustainability” is a word that has been used almost to the point of meaningless over the last few years, so much so that I’m not sure what it really means anymore.

I gathered up a few books to look at and crossed into the “grey zone”. This was my name for back of the library where there were many desks, and the reference section. In one glass-walled room a woman was studying with a huge book beside her. I walked close by the windows to see what the book was: the cloth-bound tome was called Paediatrics. She had many notebooks and also a packet of textas. The textas were probably something to do with a complicated colour coded note taking scheme, but I liked to think of her taking study breaks by drawing pictures.

I called this area the “grey zone” because the desks were grey, with white, shiny chairs at them. I sat at a desk at the back of the library, near the local history room which was tucked into the back corner. I could see the information desk from here, but in general I felt very far away from the heart of the library, almost unobserved.

The first book on my pile was Physiognomy: The Art of Reading Faces.

“There is something of the physiognomist in all of us,” I read in the first paragraph, the point being that we make judgements of people from their faces often, without realising it. My favourite parts of the book were the pages of faces for you to test you new face-reading skills:

And the notes someone had written in, in fountain pen, on the sketches of different forehead shapes.

The book was from the 70s, which led me to wonder if there had been any advancements in face reading since that time. Do people even study it in an official capacity? Someone must be writing these books.

This book had a great, though somewhat trippy, design, consider this kaleidoscope mouth page, for example.

The main thing that most people want to know from a physiogomist is whether they have an intelligent face, so I present this list:

The next book on the pile was a graphic novel I’d seen in a bookshop a few weeks earlier, The Wrong Place by Brett Evans. I was attracted to the ghostly watercolour images in layers of cool colours, but I was surprised to open the book at a page that showed the stages of a reasonably explicit sexual encounter. On the back cover of the book was a quote saying the book “contrasts life as it is, angst-ridden and awkward, with life as it can be: spontaneous, uninhibited, free”. The last panel of the sex scene was the woman asleep while the man leans against her, holding her cat ear head band and smiling, which could either be sweet or creepy, depending on the story. The man also indulged in some physiognomy:

The final book I looked at was a big book of papercraft I’d picked up from the Quarto section. There was a large quarto section with some surprising books, such as one about the noise artist Merzbow. Papercraft was full of things like cut out lanterns, paper clothes, dresses made of maps, paper Converse all stars, a paper forest, functional paper furniture and paper props, but my favourite paper thing of all was this cup of tea.

This was perhaps because I badly wanted a cup of tea. It was approaching the time I was to meet my local friends Helen and Lauren, so I went to put the books back. I’d forgotten where I got The Wrong Place from, so I just put it at the end of one of the rows where there was a gap on a display shelf.

As I went to go downstairs I noticed one of the librarians collecting up the Charles Dickens books from the Dickens birthday display. Was Dickens’ birthday over so soon?

Downstairs I bought a cup of tea from “Bean King”, where a minor drama was taking place involving an elderly woman who had developed a sudden limp. I realised I would be of little help so retreated to a table, to wait for Helen and Lauren. They soon appeared and we sat at the cafe table while I finished my tea. Lauren told us about her visit to The Fat Duck, and eating snail porridge as part of the four hour degustation menu. I’d watched a few episodes of Heston’s Feasts but the only moment that I remembered was when the 17 tier absinthe jelly was made to sway from side to side by using a vibrator. Apparently you can order these swaying jellies for parties. I wonder if there’s a version you can make at home.

Lauren and Helen escorted me upstairs and into the library, for a group expedition through the shelves. Out of the thousands of books in the library, the first book Helen pulled out was one that I too had looked at, a rather surprising coincidence.

What was the appeal? For me it was wanting to know what S.A.D stood for, and then the 90s teens on the cover.

After we browsed the self help and military history sections, Helen decided she would join the library, so I went with her to the information desk while she signed up. I watched the librarian, a friendly guy with a ponytail and glasses that said Red or Dead on the side, enter in Helen’s address to a screen that had the clunky look of an internal computer program. He lamented this program and its inability to accept email addresses. A few minutes later Helen had her library card and was now a full Maroubra citizen. You really belong in your new area when you join the local library.

Near the information desk was an exhibition of kitchen and cookery paraphernalia. Lauren works at the State Library and told us about scanning and restoring the old books, as we looked at some cookbook covers that had been enlarged and hung on the wall. I owned a number of the cookbooks, which were from the 1970s and before, like the Golden Circle Pineapple Cookbook. The one that got most of our attention was Crock Pot Cookery, with its glistening roast chicken. “It’s a raw chicken you know,” Lauren said, “painted with iodine.” I knew the one about the ice cream made out of mashed potatoes, but not the iodine chicken. Roast chickens are a staple of food photography, someone in the world is sure to be iodining a chicken as you read this.

The cookbooks were labelled as “sometimes showing the humorous side of cooking”, and I saw they were from the collection of my friend Mala, super op shopper and also librarian. I had looked for her when I entered the library, knowing that she works here, but she must have had a day off, or been hidden somewhere in the secret vaults of the library, or perhaps working at another of the branches.

My other favourite thing in the exhibition was the pudding charms:

Rather than having only one lucky person finding a coin in their pudding, the whole family had a chance for a pudding fortune with these, or a chance to make a group visit to the dentist.

Most of the objects were in vertical glass cases, but there was one smaller case in front of them with teacups in it, out of which we all chose one. Helen’s was the most floral, Lauren’s was white with gold trim, and mine was an autumn rose themed design.

Helen and I went to look at the DVDs, which were near the kids section. The kids section was decorated with ropes of bottle lids, making a kind of bead curtain effect, and had cute drawings pinned up on boards.

There was a superhero theme in a lot of the drawings, my favourite was the giant carrot.

As Helen browsed through the DVDs, looking for one to borrow, a baby in a white jumpsuit with a tie printed down the front appeared from under the racks, crawling fast. It was like watching a beetle, industriously moving towards some unknown goal. His mum followed after him, trying to intercept any movement that might cause trouble. We smiled at this, and also the librarian who walked by us, giving instructions to a library user “When you get to the computer, go to the Google…”

Helen picked out The Leaving of Liverpool DVD, and when we went over to show Lauren she told us that she was in it! Her family came from Liverpool to Australia when she was a teenager (but long after the post world war 2 period featured in the film of course) and her family signed her up to audition for it. Helen had to borrow it now.

From where we were standing I could see a guy sitting at one of the computers with one of those fake cigarette inhalers in his mouth, something that always causes me to do a double take. People don’t seem to smoke them so much as suck on them, like they are a dummy for adults, although I rarely see people using them. They seemed very futuristic to me when I first found out about them.

We started searching for a book for me to look at so Helen could take a photo of me, the kind of photo that might sum up my Biblioburbia project. We looked through the Quartos until Helen found one called Camouflage. I took it over to one of the 50s lounge chairs and made an attempt to blend in.

My favourite picture in the book was an illustration of a cooling tower painted to camouflage with the landscape, during world war 2 in England by artists working with the Ministry of Home Security’s Camouflage Directorate.

This reminded me of the Dazzle ships, which were painted in geometric patterns to confuse the enemy in World War 1:

Although I don’t know for sure, I think I camouflage well in the library. As long as you are quiet and law abiding, nobody pays you much notice if you are loitering, or writing in a notebook (although taking photos makes me feel conspicuous). Libraries are designed for loitering, even if, like the gentleman to the right below, you just want to sleep with your feet up on the table.

As Helen borrowed her dvd from the self check machines, I noticed that Dickens’ birthday was well and truly over. His birthday message had been removed and his books replaced by a new display, heavy on the Roddy Doyles.

All birthdays must come to an end, even if you’re Charles Dickens.

I approached the library not from the town square but from the rather grey back alley, where I found a ten of clubs playing card on the ground (meaning “vexation, confusion, a person who drinks a lot” according to What the Cards Foretell) and passed by an intriguing, but closed, gift shop.

Was it the library gift shop? The council gift shop? The signs looked tiny amid the grey walls.

Outside the library is the place where teenagers in school uniform congregate to smoke, yell, and look tough. One boy was holding a clear umbrella which he trained on people, and when they came into range he “shot” them by opening it up.

On the door was a letter to all school children about using the library during school hours. Students now have to show their school timetable to prove they’re not meant to be in class at the time. If they are meant to be in school, the authorities will “redirect” them back there.

The entrance to the library is in the middle of the ground floor. To the left is the non fiction section, and to the right is the fiction and the children’s section. the centre of the library is busy with school students going up and down the stairs that lead to the levels above, and the library staff going back and forth from the desk. I wasn’t sure which way to turn, so the first section I went to look at was the book sale. Books were only 20c, a so far unmatched bargain compared to other libraries. I picked out a biography of G.K Chesterton, a book of 100 treasures of the Mitchell Library, and a book of essays by Gerald Murnane. I had read the Gerald Murnane book before, the essay about him learning Hungarian I remembered in particular, the idea of learning the language of a country you will never visit (he rarely, and famously, has ever left Melbourne).

As I looked through the book sale, a librarian came over and started straightening the shelves of sale books. Was she doing this to check I wasn’t stealing them? I put back the copy of The Urgency of Full Employment which I had been looking at, and decided to move onto another area of the library.

I went upstairs, following the many people who were headed that way. I passed a mezzanine floor which was painted in primary colours and had a reading area for the Community Language newspapers, and the intriguing “Retro Room”. I expected to see a 50s boardroom with Mad Men type characters in there, but it was just a regular meeting room.

At the top of the stairs was the large reference section and the HSC study guides, which were housed in bright coloured boxes, and a space with many desks. Walking through this area was the closest I have come to feeling like I was back in high school for some time. All the students were well-behaved, it wasn’t that I was being called names and having paper planes thrown at me, it was that there were so many school students. But I am twice their age, and therefore invisible.

I sat down at the end of the room, in the young adult area. In the room behind me a class about digital cameras was being conducted. I could see the PowerPoint presentation the class were reading: “mirrorless interchangeable lens digital cameras”. The class, I saw on a flyer downstairs, was about “Technology for Travel”. I walked slowly past the door so I could see who was in the class. It looked to be the grandparents of the school students outside, and one younger woman who asked a lot of questions. I didn’t want to make it obvious that I was looking in, so I made my way over to the indoor plant in the corner, and felt the leaves to see if it was real or fake. Fake.

I had a look in the reference section, which had a lot of big, old history books. The biggest was one on Korean history, which was a size usually reserved for dictionaries, at least six inches thick. It was so heavy I needed two hands to lift it.

I went downstairs again and sat in the no man’s land by the side of the stairs, near where the development applications are on display, thinking about what section I would investigate first. While I sat here a man was getting angry with the librarians about how the toilet doors were locked. I didn’t envy the librarians on toilet unlocking duty. I realised that the small desk that was near the book sale with a sign saying it was for staff only was for librarians on toilet duty, as they could see the doors from there. They unlocked it remotely, with a switch or a control  that I couldn’t see. “Turn the handle! Push!” one of the librarians yelled out to the man who was swearing at the toilet doors.

I didn’t intend to write so much about the toilets, but they were quite a dominant feature of this section of the library. Above the toilet doors were old, painted murals of the Parramatta of times past, of convicts, estates, and royal mail coaches. These murals, on wooden panels, were painted in 1958, originally for “The Coach Inn” restaurant, which was in an old convict-built cottage in north Parramatta. They did have the look of another place and time about them.

In the shelves nearest to where I was sitting, a man browsed the junior non-fiction singing “well she’s my babe” over and over, punctuated by a series of grunts. He took out a book about inventions and conversed to no one in particular, and in some detail, how a printing press goes about printing one page. I thought he was reading it from the book, but he was just looking at the cover so must have known the process.

I decided to move to where it was a bit quieter. Along the front windows was a line of red chairs, many of them taken by people quietly reading.

Through the window I could see at the tables outside a schoolgirl was wriggling with indignation as a boy had put something down her blouse, but I turned away from these distractions and looked at the books. Sometimes the books on display side by side amuse me, such as:

I like to imagine the person who might borrow both of these books. I looked at the section of books about cities, and took out a large volume called Endless City. It was from the “Local Government Corporate Library”, which must be one of the library’s collections. This makes it sound rather boring, but there were a lot of interesting books about cities, urban planning and suburbs in this section. As with the History of Korea, this book was a rather large and weighty thing, and I took it over to a vacant desk in the fiction section over the other side of the library to look at it.

In this area a couple of students, a boy and a girl, were doing an assignment about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and destruction of Pompeii in 79AD. This is one of the classic school history topics that I imagine every Australian school student would learn about. I’d never thought about this critically before, but now I stopped to wonder why. I guess it’s because it is an exercise in historical method, as the town was frozen in time, and the everyday life in that time was preserved. When I learnt Latin in high school, one textbook told the story of a family in Pompeii, and ended with the eruption and death of them all. I remember feeling sad about this at the time. I had spent all year translating their adventures.

I returned to the present and looked through Endless City. There were a lot of graphs and infographics, and chapters like “A Taxonomy of Towers”, picturing controversial designs for future towers. It didn’t, however include this one being built in South Korea, which has caused controversy for its resemblance to the World Trade Centre, prior to its collapse:

My favourite graphic was a comparison of the different patterns of the streets and buildings in six different cities, New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin. These were the cities used as examples throughout the book.

The other book I’d picked up was about carparks, The Architecture of Carparks,  by Simon Henley. Sometimes I get in the mood to look at weird buildings, and I was hoping for examples of strange carparks. The best is weird buildings that were never built, like the Zeebrugge Sea Terminal, which I discovered in this book, as well as lots of black and white photos of carparks. Carparks look better in black and white.

In the aisles near where I was sitting, where the fiction books were shelved, I could see a woman who I had encountered earlier in non-fiction. She was one of those people who browses the entire library. When you spend enough time in a library observing you notice the other people who are there as long as you, and what they are doing. This woman had come prepared with a trolley and would stop every now and again and review the books she held in her arms, assessing whether she wanted to borrow them. She had a number of fiction books and a biography of Benji Marshall which she didn’t seem completely sure about.

The girl working on the Pompeii assignment was writing furiously with one hand and eating an apple with the other. As I’d been sitting looking at books she’d kept up a constant stream of snacks, first a sandwich, then a plum, and now the apple. Her study mate had gone out to buy some more food, so now she was sitting there alone.

On the chair behind her was a woman with long grey hair in a side ponytail, wearing all black and a pair of wire frame sunglasses. She had gone up to the shelves, pulled out a book called White Queen and used it to rest a piece of A4 paper on. She smiled as she wrote what looked to be a letter in line after line of curling script.

I went to put my books back, passing a man listening to horse races on a transistor radio and making notes on the TAB section of the newspaper. The man who had been telling the story of the printing press was in the exact same position, still talking, holding the same book. The man who had been angry about not being able to get into the toilets sat in the chair I’d been in earlier, near the stairs, watching everyone from under the visor of his cap, as if everyone was suspicious to him.

As I put the books back an announcement was broadcast about taking your belongings with you. “The library is an open public space…please take your belonging with you when you move around the library”. This message was then repeated in Chinese and Arabic.

There are a lot of warnings in Parramatta library. The final one I noticed, before I bought my 60cents worth of cancelled books, was affixed to a Bon Jovi CD, as it was affixed to all CDs.

What kind of loss or damage could arise from Bon Jovi’s Greatest Hits? I will leave the answer to you.

I bought my books from the same librarian who had come over to check on me when I was browsing the book sale earlier in the afternoon. She was still suspicious of me, as soon as I came close to the desk she was there, asking if I needed any help. I’d hoped to get the librarian man with the bleached blonde hair, flipped over into a rakish style. He had his iPhone clipped to his belt inside a designer leather holder and an air of style a notch above what might have been expected of him. But he was busy welcoming some new members who had just signed up for library cards.

Near the door were some ads for Library Lovers’ Day, which is on Valentine’s Day this year. Most libraries, I have realised since seeing an ad for Library Lovers’ Day at Sutherland Library, are having some kind of celebration for the day, as it is the launch of the National Year of Reading. Many seem to be having morning teas, talks and various local entertainments. The Hornsby library, I noticed when looking up their website, is having the Berowra Ukulele group play, for example. Parramatta library is having book blind dates, poetry readings, and music, and other libraries are having author talks. I’ll be in the library on Library Lovers’ Day for sure, but which one, you will have to wait and see.

The photo of the Avalon library on their website was taken on a sunny day, but I had chosen to visit on the most inclement summer day one could imagine. I would make no beach visit today, but this made it a perfect day to go to the library. Despite the disguising gloom I recognised the building, which houses both the library the Recreation Centre.

The library is upstairs and outside the doors were two trolleys of books for sale. Rather than the usual begrimed copies of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, the books on these trolleys were a cut above the usual. I also liked the polite phrasing of the sign:

I picked out two books, a copy of Prozac Nation and a biography of Catherine the Great. I’d owned a copy of Prozac Nation when I was a teenager, and more interested in things like being “young and depressed in America”, as it says on the cover. I picked it up now as I’d just read a message from my friend Steph, someone who once she starts books has to finish them, where she said this was one of the few books she couldn’t stand to finish. I noticed that there was a bookmark on page 13, from a bookshop in Avalon. The reader of this copy had not got very far either.

The Catherine the Great book was safer, at least it was certain not to mention prescription drugs or Mommy, Daddy and Harvard on every page.

Avalon library is a Community Library, which means that it is staffed by volunteers. There were plenty of volunteers, mostly woman, clustered at the front desk, chatting. It seemed like a very pleasant place to work. As soon as I entered I noticed a poster above the photocopier:

There were a few unexpected touches such as this. Another one was the basket of puzzles available for loan:

Near the entrance was a display of “New and/or interesting Fiction”, as well as New and/or interesting Non-fiction and Large print, each of which had an individual sign on the corresponding shelf. A few people were browsing here, but the part that I found interesting was the collage of the covers of new books, which were stuck onto sheets of red cardboard and affixed to the windows of the office area.

It was an unusual approach to a new book display, but actually a rather good one, as it was much more informative than reading a list, and also had a pleasing appearance, like shingle tiles. Behind this I could see into the office area, where a man was covering a book in soft plastic. On the same desk was a box of stickers for the different genres and the stamps and stickers that make a book an Avalon Library book.

Because the staff were volunteers, the library had a much more cheerful atmosphere than at a regular library. There was a lot of tea and coffee making going on, and plenty of coming and going of volunteers. “I’m off to my creative writing course!” one woman announced to the rest, and went on to explain that it was through the Avalon Active Seniors’ Group when another woman expressed interest. The woman who asked about it then said she wasn’t sure if she was active enough to be a member.

I went off to look at the shelves. One of the books on display was in the style of old girl’s annuals and was called The Girl’s Book: how to be the best at everything. It included how to make your own lipgloss and how to cross Niagara Falls on a tightrope, as well as many more projects, both useful and ridiculous. While there was no doubt some good information in this book, I was worried about the message that “how to be the best at everything” sent to the teenage girls this book was obviously marketed towards. Girls get told they have to be good, and good at things their whole lives. It can be quite liberating to do something badly but enjoy doing it nevertheless.

While I was looking at this book one of the volunteers came up with a young woman who I noticed had been instructed on the ways of the library a little earlier. I knew from this conversation that she was starting university this year, so she would have been at least a third of the age of most of the volunteers. Her job was to tidy up the shelves. “These books are quite heavy, but you’re young and strong,” said the woman showing her how to do it. Most important was pushing forward the books that had slipped towards the back of the shelf.

I was looking in the art and craft section, and pulled out a book about Bottle Collecting.

The book went into a lot of detail about digging for bottles, and the resulting dangers, such as having your “search hole” cave in on you. I liked that it was a practical guide, rather than just being about searching in antique shops. The book gave many examples of different bottles and different collections, such as this collection:

And this bitters bottle from the 19th century in the shape of a pig.

I had taken this book over to a desk by the window to look at it. On a clear day  you would be able to see the beach from here, and I could make out just a little of the blue grey water in between the palms and Norfolk Island Pines. Below, on the street, people rushed to the safety of their cars and sheltered under umbrellas.

When I took the bottle collecting book back, the girl was still shelf straightening her way through the Dewey Decimal numbers. I opened a book about jewellery making and noticed that on the date due slip, the last number to be stamped there was 2011. This was unusual, most libraries did away with date stamps a long time ago, and if date due slips remain in books they stop sometime in the early 2000s.

A few minutes later I heard it, the crunch of the date stamp as a man waited for his books to be checked out. Avalon Library does indeed still use the date stamp!

The conversations among the volunteers were still going. A new volunteer was telling the others what she was good at. “I can’t cut straight, I can’t draw a straight line but I’m happy to clean shelves,” she said. It was heartening that so many Avalon residents wanted to work at the library.

While it was a jolly atmosphere, in order to concentrate I had to go back to my spot by the window over the other side of the library. Here people sat at computers, looking things up on Ebay or writing emails. One very well dressed girl whose outfit was strangely matched with a pair of ugg boots, sat with a book open on her lap but her phone inside the book, sending messages.

I settled down to look at a book of symbols, in particular the Hobo Signs section. These signs were developed in the 1930s in the USA and were a language for the many homeless and itinerant people on the move, looking for work. This is a good idea and could be adapted for the more privileged, and used for things like parties (a warning symbol for “just 6 people sitting on milk crates” for example) or op shops.

Near where I was sitting was a long, panoramic photograph of Avalon from 1921. It was hand coloured, and this gave it the look of a painting. I only realised it was a photograph when I got close to it. Since I’ve been visiting libraries I’ve paid more attention to what hangs on library walls. Sometimes they’re in the community art genre, other times they are of some historical note. This painting was 90 years old and I imagine it moving from place to place, to finally come to rest here, in this bright, modern building. It looked like it needed leather arm chairs and bead-fringed lamps to really be at home.

The last book I looked at was called What Should I do with my life? I opened it to find out if there were any answers to that and the page I looked at put forward the scenario of receiving, at age 17, a letter telling you your destiny. I found this very hard to imagine, but when I looked up and saw the young woman straightening the shelves near me, and the volunteers behind the desk talking about John le Carre to a man borrowing a pile of novels, I knew that if I lived in Avalon, it would be simple. My destiny would be to work at the library.

The Adyar library is run by the Theosophical Society, and has a collection focussed on “metaphysical, spiritual and philosophical subjects”.  It is housed in Theosophy House in Kent street, an appropriately Victorian building.

When we got to Theosophy House, a grey-haired woman dressed  in mauve was unlocking a box that contained a noticeboard near the entrance. She saw us at the door, which had a sign saying the lift was out of order stuck on it, and asked if we wanted to go upstairs. She said the library was open for about ten more minutes and we were welcome to visit it, as long as we didn’t mind climbing 5 or 6 flights of stairs. We struggled up the fire escape stairs until we reached the third floor, where we found the library.

The library was very neat, with wooden shelves decorated with indoor plants and pottery. In order to borrow from this library you have to be a member, but it is open to the public for browsing. As we only had ten minutes it was hard to know what to do, so we quickly looked around the shelves. There was a small fiction section and on top of these shelves were a series of pamphlets about Theosophy. The most popular was “The Theosophical Society. What is it all about?” I took the last copy, as I this is something I have wondered for some years.

If asked what I knew about Theosophy before reading this pamphlet, all I could have told you was that it was founded by a woman with the excellent name Madame Blavatsky, in the nineteenth century. From these basics, the pamphlet told me that the society was established in New York City before moving its headquarters to India, to a place named Adyar.

My confusion about what Theosophy is came down to not knowing whether it was a religion or not. The pamphlet assured me that it was not, it was a philosophy that emphasises unity, interconnectedness, and a holistic world view. This made things a little clearer, but only a little.

I didn’t have time to sort out all my questions about Theosophy, so I went looking around the library. As you’d expect there were a lot of books about spiritual and philosophical matters, and it is perhaps the only library in Sydney where there is a whole section on Atlantis.

Lemuria, which I had discovered the existence of at Waterloo library the week before, was the subject of a number of books also. I concentrated on looking at the nearby art section and took out a book called Sensitive Chaos: Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air by Theodor Schwenk.

“Look at this book!” I said to Simon, who was browsing nearby. A woman who was looking at books nearby, who was also wearing purple, peering across, over her glasses, to see the book I was so interested in.

I sat down at one of the nearby tables and looked through Sensitive Chaos. I’d picked it out because of its name and cover design, the kind of 70s textbook appearance that usually means good pictures lie inside. The zinemaker in me has a good radar for interesting black and white pictures. I was not disappointed. I flipped through all sorts of weird pictures of whirlpools, smoke, shells, ears, woodgrain and jellyfish, any of which would have made a great zine or 7″ cover. All the swirly, fluid shapes was slightly perception altering; I could have looked at the book for much longer to discover its secrets. Many others had, it had been borrowed at least a couple of times a year, I saw on the card at the back.

Does the “R” mean returned? I’ve seen it on other cards like this so I guess it does.

I could see through the internal windows into an office where a man sat at a desk, talking to the small lady in purple we had seen downstairs. The offices of the Adyar library seemed a nice place to spend one’s days, cosy among the shelves and the plants and posters of the Three Objects of Theosophy.

Simon beckoned me over to the reference section to show me a big, old book of Occult Chemistry, bound in green cloth. There were a number of books on this subject, with strange diagrams inside and an alternate version of the periodic table.

I understood almost nothing of what the book was about, but I imagined myself in another kind of life where I was an occult chemist and this book made sense to me. It was an appealing kind of daydream, in which I worked in an alchemist’s den and went home to my unusual pets every evening.

Near the reference section were more pamphlets and a magazine section, and there were a number of nooks here and there in which bundles of cassettes with typewritten labels were piled. But I didn’t have time to look any further, the librarian was starting to tidy up the desk and a cleaner had come in to empty the bins. The emblem on his shirt was for a cleaning company, and I imagined he spent his evenings going around offices, like the people you see vacuuming the bank after hours. It must be an easy job cleaning the Adyar library, it didn’t look like anything too messy would ever happen there.

“Have you got what you need?” the librarian asked us and the woman who was still looking at the shelves.

“Oh, we were just having a look,” I said. I would have to look at the books properly, and discover occult knowledge, another day.

It was a grey day but there were still people on the beach and in the nearby park. A woman with her white hair in a beehive sat knitting a pink jumper, the handle of the lead attached to her terrier looped around one of her feet. I stepped around the discarded remains of picnics and went to the kiosk at the beach to buy a can of cola. I asked for permission to enter the kiosk from the small guardian on the steps.

I had a desire to sit staring at the ocean, sipping Diet Coke through a straw. “Do you have any straws?” I asked the woman in the kiosk. “No,” she said, surprisingly forcefully, as if she was sick of the question. I remembered talking to a man in a pub once, years ago, who was vehemently against straws, and said they did nothing but went to landfill and were completely unnecessary. Maybe this woman was of the same mind. I went and sat on a bench and looked out over the grey waves. Seagulls flew in and landed at my feet, looking hopeful. “No crumbs here,” I said, “only phenylalanine.”

After I’d finished staring at the ocean I made my way up to the road, and stepped out across the pedestrian crossing. When I was halfway across, I sensed the van approaching me was not going to stop so I waited for it to drive through the crossing. The man at the wheel looked as if he was trying to hide the fact he had seen me. My brush with death over, I looked at the van as it drove up the street and read the words on the back of it: HOME LIBRARY SERVICE.

I’d picked up a pamphlet in Engadine library, which had the addresses of other libraries in the Sutherland area. The pamphlet had come to my attention because of the absurdity of the cover graphic:

What is in it for you, human-sized cockatoo? The pamphlet listed the address of the Cronulla library as Surf St, and I was pleased to see I was on the corner of Surf St. It was a short street, and by the time I reached the end I’d noticed no library, so I carefully walked down it again. I didn’t find the library, but I did find the Old Library Restaurant, bar, and “social”:

Ah, the future! I thought, peering in the windows. There were no books in there, just restaurant tables. What with my encounter with the home library van and this new setback, I wasn’t feeling hopeful about my Cronulla experience.

The Cronulla library has relocated to the Cronulla Central shopping centre, which you can access off the mall, although I walked the long way round past the vast carpark. The sign pointed to all the necessities of life:

All that is missing is a gravestone at the end.

While I’m no fan of shopping malls, I have to admit they are a good place to locate libraries, as they are where people tend to congregate. The library entrance is a surprise among the cream surfaces of the shopping centre.

The tables near the entrance were busy with people reading magazines and drinking coffee bought from “Cream”, the tiny hole in the wall cafe at the end of the room. A television was on, which seemed a bit ridiculous as no one was watching it. Like in an airport, the sound was down and the captions on. The show was an English drama set around a high school, with dialogue such as “We’re going to be in deep trouble if our A-levels go tits-up”. I watched as, above the library patrons’ heads, a drama involving a schoolboy with a large bunch of “I love you” balloons played out.

I had sat down at one of the tables, next to a guy and a girl who were working on laptops and chatting. The syrupy scent of Red Bull floated over from the open cans they had beside them. The boy had a big, ugly pirate ship tattooed on his upper arm, designed in such a way so it looked as if it was about sail out and attack. As they discussed the difficulty of the assignment they were working on I wondered at how they could concentrate with the cafe noise going on. The coffee machine was working at a thunderous volume. The cafe was more appealing than the coffee machines that are at some libraries, such as Auburn with its “beverage with the taste of soup” option.

On the other side of me was an old man reading a copy of The Leader, the local paper, as the woman who was looking after him told him there was still an hour and a half to go before his appointment. Would he like to look at some picture of Chloe? Oh, that would be interesting he said, but then was confused by the fact they had to go to a computer to do this. They set off to book a computer and I got up too, to look at the library.

In among the shelves were woven seats resembling sea urchins. They were arranged in clusters all through the library. A few people sat on these, reading, but the desks along the side of the room were more popular. Here people sat working on laptops and leaning over notebooks.

Astute observers will have noticed in the above photograph that the carpet is alphabet themed. Among the jumble of letters, the red ones spell “Cronulla”.

I browsed the non-fiction section for a while, with no particular aim. I flicked through 1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die concentrating like I was choosing a tarot card. The song that I opened at was “Wood Beez (Pray like Aretha Franklin)” by Scritti Politti. Is my life really the poorer because I haven’t heard this song?

In another area I found myself looking at books about memory. I took “Memo” by Oddbjorn By off the shelf just because I was curious what someone with that name might look like. He is a World Memory Champion and the back of his book had this amusing graphic:

The next book I noticed on the shelves had a designer who had been similarly inspired by domestic life:

The library barcode obscures it, but the title is What’s Wrong with Eating People?

The book I chose to look at from this section was Total Recall: How the e-memory revolution will change everything by a duo of ardent Microsoft employees. In this book they write a lot about technologies to enable you to remember everything you have ever done. While this is an interesting idea, the book suffers from its tone of unimpeded optimism. What about things people don’t want to remember, for example? Well, they say that having photographic records of everything that has happened to you could be useful if you are a woman who has been raped, as you can show the images in court. This is perhaps not the example I would have chosen if I was them. One of the authors wore a device called a “sensecam”, which he wore around his neck for a period of time and it recorded photographs at short intervals, thereby creating a visual record of everything he did. An example he gave for why this would be great was that a guy could show the first time he met his girlfriend, without knowing at the time, of course, that she’d become his girlfriend. While I would be interested to see spy camera footage of me meeting my partner for the first time, I can also just remember it – I can “see” it in my memory. Would anyone else in the world be that interested in seeing those images? I don’t think so. The Sensecam is a step towards a completely solipsistic existence.

Perhaps I felt a bit adversarial towards this book because I have read similar ideas before, in the concept of the “Lifebox” by Rudy Rucker, a science fiction writer, mathematician, and all round interesting human being. I liked that the Lifebox asks you questions in order to construct the story of your life, so you are active in the process, rather than just wearing a camera. In his book The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, Rudy Rucker combines his ideas with illustrative cartoons. I like the mixture of complex technologies combined with sketchy drawings: in this scene, kids enjoy asking rude questions of one of their long-dead relatives, whose memories persist in a Lifebox.

The next book on my pile was History’s Worst Inventions and the People Who Made Them. On the front was a drawing of  a square-wheeled bicycle, and I though it was going to be like the books of Victorian and Edwardian inventions I’d seen around, which have strange, strange home inventions in them. Instead it takes a broader approach, and has chapters such as “The Discovery of LSD” (is it really one of the world’s worst inventions?), and plenty of war-related things. I wouldn’t argue that a landmine was a “bad” invention, looking at it morally, although in the sense of being successful, they are not bad at all. Other entries were more lighthearted, such as Crinolines and Zeppelins. For each entry there was a rating of why it was a bad invention:

The perils of the Crinoline, for example, included their flammability, the fact they swept ornaments off tables when women walked through cluttered rooms, and they could get caught in factory machinery. I liked reading about the failed pneumatic railways but didn’t agree that karaoke should have been included in the book for “crimes against music”.

I was reading the books near the row of computers and the front desk. From here I could see the librarians gather and disperse as they worked, and at some point I noticed that they all had similar hair, the same cut but different colours.  I paid most attention when I overheard a man come up to the desk and announce “I have some minor, inconsequential information,” to the librarian with the blondest version of the hairdo.

His information was about the book Playing for Pizza by John Grisham. The book was marked with a detective fiction sticker, according to the key:

“It is not a detective story,” the man said. “It is a slightly black romantic comedy, not a detective story at all.” I wondered if he had borrowed it and was disgusted at finding it too romantic.

The librarian thanked him for his comments but said that this was “outsourced”, and so the library couldn’t change it unless it was a major problem, such as it being an adult novel classified under children’s fiction. Outsourced? I wonder at this factory where people put stickers on books.

For some light entertainment I looked at Extreme Face Painting. Use this book carefully, your children may not thank you.

A smash rang out and everyone looked up from what they were doing in the direction of the cafe. A glass had fallen off the counter, smashed on the floor, and time had stopped in the way it always does when a glass smashes. A moment later, seeing there was no crisis, everyone settled back into what they were doing.

I could see the old man and the woman who had been at the tables when I came in looking at pictures of Chloe, who, to my surprise, seemed to be a dingo. Also at the computers was a girl in a school uniform looking up information about Hiroshima. A black mini-hat was sitting perkily on her head. Near her sat a man reading a job ad for Mad Mex.

A lot of people were browsing the library shelves. One woman had been in the library as long as me, and was sitting cross legged on the floor, examining a book. This is my kind of style too, though sometimes I wonder if I am too old to look normal sitting on the floor cross-legged. A man strolled past me, shoeless, holding a can of Coke, like he was at the beach.

Distracted from my books I went for a final trip around the library. I hadn’t sat on one of the sea urchin chairs yet so when I found 500 Cameras: 170 Years of photographic innovation by Todd Gustavson I took the book over to one of them and browsed through it. I didn’t find the sea urchin chair very comfortable, but I was distracted by the cameras. I realised that a book that has the pictures and stories of 500 cameras in it is my kind of book.

I put the book back and again walked past the man who I had noticed earlier, watching Korean tv on his laptop. Earlier he had been watching a man playing hacky sack with pom poms made out of tinsel, and now there was a billiard table with the balls inside champagne glasses arranged on it. The object of the game seemed to be to hit a white ball around the glasses and not knock any over. It was curious, but I didn’t want to stare so moved away.

I could hear a woman talking to one of the library staff, who was showing her something on the shelves.

“Did you have a fire here?” she asked.

“Yes, back in September,” the librarian said.

“Gee, you’ve done well,” the woman replied.

The fire was perhaps the reason why the return chute at Engadine has been locked, as the Cronulla library fire was apparently caused by someone throwing a lit item into the book return chute. Curse these vandals!

Then, once you are in the Engadine shopping area it is more like being in the 1970s. This is not to do with the nature of the shops, which are fairly normal suburban retailers, but more to do with the layout of the streets, the style of the buildings and the odd remaining detail. Engadine Palace Chinese Restaurant, for example, had bead curtains in every window.

I had expected the library to be obviously positioned, but I forgot my Sutherland Shire curse: once I’m over the Georges River my sense of direction becomes scrambled. I found the library eventually, set back from the street and housed in an 80s brick building with a heritage green roof.

I noticed that the returns chute had been retrofitted with locks, due to “vandalism”. There would be so many other places you could vandalise in Engadine before the library chute, I thought, but I guess the attraction of putting objects through a chute is irresistible to some. Now the chute serves little purpose, apart from saving you a few extra steps into the library itself.

The library entrance had a sign for the Sutherland Library Open Day, which happens to be Valentines Day. Lucky door prizes! Sausage sizzle! It could be a good place for a date, although you’d have to make sure your Valentine was enthusiastic. I can imagine overhearing a conversation in which the Valentine was relating to their friends how they were taken to Sutherland library instead of somewhere more traditionally romantic.

Inside the library I could not help but notice something that made Engadine library stand out from other libraries I have visited:

The walls were pink! At least half of the walls were painted this colour. Other areas were painted mauve and the kids’ area had yellow walls. How does a library get painted pink, I wondered. I was curious about what emotions the colour pink triggers, so I went over to the computer catalogue and typed in “colour theory”. What I really should have typed in was “colour psychology”, but I had confused the terms (maybe pink makes you confused). All the books on colour theory were borrowed anyway. Most of these books were guides to being an artist, and I imagined people at home in Engadine, wearing berets and mixing up paint on easels, or sketching their fruit bowls.

As I sat at the computer I could hear the librarians talking at the front desk. One was discussing a relative or friend who was “going into the city”. She said this as if it was a major undertaking. Engadine is at the edge of the city, but probably only an hour or so on the train from the centre. Her friend was going into the city to have something done to her “Pandora Bracelet”, which I imagined as being some kind of Pandora’s Box concept jewellery, or perhaps some form of gastric banding. I looked over at the silhouettes of the librarians  which were visible through the striped mirror glass behind the information desk, but didn’t like how they could see me but I couldn’t see them. I don’t think they were looking, they had gone on to discuss their jobs for the afternoon, in particular, the large pile of CDs that needed to be cleaned.

It was around midday and the library was occupied by retirees browsing the popular fiction section. As it was no long school holidays, the kids’ section was deserted. This section had some lovingly constructed paper mushrooms stuck to the walls.

Back out in the pink section of the library, the old folk were happily browsing. A man looked through biographies, whistling through his teeth while I examined a book about writing in cards. Yours Truly: Everything you Need for Writing Cards. It can be hard to write in cards, and once you’ve written it in there you have to stick with it. I noted some of the suggestions in the romance section. I couldn’t imagine writing “I watch people smile as they encounter you, as if the weather has suddenly improved”. As far as romantic sentiments go, it seems kind of prosaic, yet also unusual.

I like the reminder that you need to change the descriptions of specific situations to something appropriate for you, just in case people copied the whole thing out. Imagine if you got card with the same wording from two different people who had both read this book.

I put the card book down and looked through the non-fiction section. There was a section of car repair guides, for the kinds of cars that once were regular sights on the road but now look surprisingly old. I picked out the guide for the Ford Meteor. The pages were grubby, especially in the middle, from where oily hands must have flipped through them while trying to fix their Meteors. I like the look of these books, with the photos of the cars on the front, like this Laser, pictured on a gloomy day in a paddock.

All around men with pulled-up white ankle socks, holding their glasses cases in one hand and paperbacks in the other browsed the shelves. Many were wearing belted shorts with their shirts tucked in, the kind of outfit that makes them look ready to go out to the shed and slowly start sanding something down. But really they were going to go home and get stuck into some novels. The signs on the fiction section were arranged encyclopaedia style:

Though at first I read it as a word and wondered what’s BURKDERS? The combination of pink and green I found particularly pleasant. Still curious when I got home, I looked up the psychological response to pink. It is meant to be a calming colour, so much so that it has been used in some prisons. Sources vary as to the reasons for this, some saying that pink is used to deter people from committing crimes and thus having to return to the pink walled prison. Pink everywhere, all the time would perhaps make you feel unbalanced, but so would any strong colour I think.

For example, there was almost too much pink in the Mills and Boon section.

I escaped the pink for a little while by entering the Quiet Zone, an enclosed study room which houses the reference section. There was no one in here, although a few books were left out on the tables, as well as a half drunk bottle of Passiona next to a pile of atlases and a folded-up striped singlet, a tableau I stared at, trying to construct the story behind it.

On the reference shelves were collections of newspaper clippings photocopied into booklets of environmental issues and social issues, for school students. I looked at the most recent social issues booklet:

Sexting is something that didn’t exist ten years ago, that’s for sure. It is one of the many new things to worry about in the world these days which make me glad I am no longer a teenager.

Before I left the Quiet Zone I noticed an old poster for libraries in the corner of the noticeboard.

The poster’s stark text coupling with the impressionistic drawn-in-pastels look of the image creates the particular feeling of 90s-ness which is being lost in a graphic design desert. It must have been on the wall for at least fifteen years, poor forgotten thing.

I left the Quiet Room and went out past the librarian sitting with a large pile of CDs, polishing them with a cloth. It looked like not unpleasant work if you had something good to think about while you were doing it.

Outside I walked down along the building to the street behind, past the entrance to the toy library and then past a kind of graveyard for broken and unwanted library equipment, which was in a fenced area that would have looked more natural as a playground. This is where old shelves come to die.

At night time the Forum picks up a bit, but it is ghostly in the daytime, and has been so consistently the many times I’ve passed through it. Leichhardt library was my local library for years, a five minute walk from my house. I’d go there often, and every day in summer, to work away on things.

I used to visit the previous Leichhardt library too, which was off Marion st, a somewhat damp and dingy building with the atmosphere of a dark, book-lined maze. It moved from there when the Forum was built, and despite the large sign (shown here with some bored tourists), the library itself is poked into a corner, next to a ramp to the Norton St level, and on the way to the toilets.

As unpleasant as this sounds, the library itself is a haven of refreshingly cold air conditioning and, as it runs down one side of the Forum, is lined by windows and full of light. The windows must be double glazed, as you can see the planes flying low overhead but not hear them. This was another reason I would leave my house and come here, to escape the regular planes that shook my house as they screamed in to land.

As with any place one visits regularly, I got to recognise all of the staff and develop favourites. When walking there I’d wonder if I’d get the guy with the beard, or the pink haired girl, the serious man with the shifty look, or the woman who always wears the white cotton gloves. Would I get the woman who once detained me for fifteen minutes, blaming me for a cataloguing error for some Werner Herzog documentaries? I hoped not.

I returned the books I’d read over Christmas, The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño and Reading by Moonlight by Brenda Walker. I had intended to read Great Expectations but then got caught up in the Bolaño, which was long enough to take me a good month to read. At first I wasn’t sure about it, did I really want to read the story of a young, male poet’s sexual awakening? But the book quickly diverged from that tack, and I felt pleasantly lost in it. I’d invested a lot of time in the Bolaño, I was a bit sad to return it. It was immediately claimed by the serious man, who was on the other side of the return chutes.

Closest to the front desk is the magazines and newspapers, and a long, red seat on which people were sitting reading. A girl in a black dress and cloven-hoof shoes sat reading an issue of Wallpaper, while I stared at the cover of TIME magazine, which had a cover with “2012 User’s Guide – Everything You Need to Know about the Year Ahead” on it. I felt like I should pick it up, but I didn’t. I will go blindly into this year.

The busiest part of Leichhardt library is around the centre, where the DVDs are. The library has an excellent collection of DVDs, with lots of horror films that are hard to find, so Simon tells me. There are always a few people browsing in this section, no matter how quiet the library is. Today a man with a scar on his cheek clasped a copy of Vincent, while he looked through the racks for more movies. Vincent van Gogh looked sadly out at me above the man’s hand.

While the DVD section is good, I usually only glance over the DVDs on display. I will more often flip through the CDs though, which, while not being quite as comprehensive as the DVDs, can sometimes have something interesting. My attention was drawn towards this explosive bear cover art:

I’ve not heard of the band, and it was hard to imagine what a CD with this on the front would sound like, beyond explosive.

The CDs are near the information desk, where you are sent when your card expires, when you have a complex enquiry, or when you’re in trouble. On the other side of this desk is the screen where you book a computer to use the internet, and there is usually someone standing there frowning at it. The computers are in a glass-walled room which has the miserable atmosphere of any public internet terminal. Sometimes there are classes for seniors and I like to look in at them learning how to use Word, or to send an email.

I was on my way to visit my own book, which is part of the library’s collection. When I was younger, and long before I had a book published I would imagine the book I might write on the shelf and the books it would be next to. I assumed I’d write a novel, so I imagined myself in the B’s, rather than the 920s, in between a book about Johnny Cash and Twentieth Century Women of Courage. I could tell that the most read story in my book was the one about the Olympia Milk Bar, as the book opened to it straight away and there were stains on the page, tea stains perhaps. I stopped examining my own book and put it back on the shelf. I perhaps could have been worried someone I know was going to come along and catch me at it, but in the years I’ve been visiting Leichhardt library I have never once see anyone I know in there.

When I emerged at the other end of the shelves, near the windows, I noticed two people working on the indoor plants. They were dressed in identical jeans and blue shirts and were briskly watering, trimming and dusting the indoor palms. This caught my fancy and I sat and watched them work. The man was the faster of the two, flicking a feather duster over the leaves of one plant while the woman watered another and checked some kind of monitor poked into the soil. She smiled at me when she saw me looking. Perhaps she had seen the book I was holding. I’d picked it up just before I sat down. Grow Your Own Drugs is of course not what you would first suspect, it is how to grow and use medicinal plants, how to make hair rinse out of nettles and cholesterol lowering concoctions using hawthorn berries. Of course I will make none of these, but I like the idea that I might.

As I sat there, a tough little girl stomped past. She would have been about 4 years old, and had short cropped hair and a gold Christmas bauble on a green string around her neck. Rather than look cute, it looked tough, like she was daring you to say she looked ridiculous. She stomped down to the kid’s section at the back of the library and started to boss around a giant teddy bear that was slumped against the wall.

I decided I’d borrow Grow Your Own Drugs. I liked the idea of perusing herbal potions at home. I’ve been to so many libraries for Biblioburbia that I haven’t been a member of I almost forgot I could borrow items from Leichhardt. On my way out I looked over the new books, as I always do, hoping to find something interesting. I don’t have much luck with this section, though:

The self check machine that has been out of order for years had finally been removed, and replaced with a stack of local papers. I don’t like going up to the counter, for fear of fines. Even if you owe 50c you are seriously informed of your debt here, with the suggestion of payment hovering like a cloud. The serious man checked my card and I had a feeling of nervousness, like I was at the doctors awaiting results of a test. I’m usually pretty good with library fines but I resent paying them. This time I was in the clear, and was allowed to borrow my book.

I went out the back way, rather than through the Forum, which is down the alleyway that runs behind Parramatta Rd. There is an old sign above a carport here for the Riviera Coffee Lounge, a secret message I always look for.

The building was once the Waterloo town hall, but has housed the library since 1972. Today the front door had notices announcing the library’s closure on Australia Day, in English and Russian.

I know from going on the Tour of Beauty that there is a Russian community in Waterloo, many of whom live in public housing. More than a third of the citizens of Waterloo live in public housing, and it’s one of those suburbs where the very poor live alongside the privileged, who move into new apartments as gentrification sweeps through the area. It was a surprise to see a sign in Russian, though, in otherworldly Cyrillic script. Deciphering the first word, “Biblioteka”, I felt I had deciphered a code.

The hallway is hung with honour rolls, the names of notable citizens and war dead listed in neat golden letters. The hall also had many boards and tables with pamphlets, calendars and announcements. All libraries have a lot of pamphlets and I usually cast an eye over them quickly, but here I became quite involved in the pamphlet table, collecting pamphlets for upcoming events and local history information. Something about collecting pamphlets makes me feel like I am an involved, organised person. There was a pamphlet for the Past in Print ephemera collection, requesting donations of ephemera. “Today’s junk mail is tomorrow’s historical detail.”

On a chair next to the pamphlet table was a box for donations of ephemera. I peeked into it and saw various pamphlets inside (but different pamphlets to the ones on the table). I would like the job of ephemera sorter, although you would get sick of ads for plumbers with free fridge magnet attached, and real estate ads. All this junk would make it all the more satisfying when you found something interesting. I have dozens of tins of paper ephemera at home, various personal bits of paper that I’ve picked up along the way. My favourite item of ephemera from the last few years is stuck on the wall in my kitchen:

Simon and I were ready for Pretty in Punk, excited about the fruit tingles and seeing the old men. But when we got to Erskineville that day there was just the usual people with their kids and dogs, and not a punk in sight. We had been tricked! I’d picked up the flyer from Revolve records on Erskineville Rd, and when we made further enquiries there, the man working there said he’d been fooled by it too. I’ve spent hours staring at this flyer as I sit in the kitchen. There is always more to notice on it.

The library entrance is at the end of the hall, and I walked through into a lofty space with a high ceiling made of pressed metal, patterned like snowflakes. The high ceiling and the whirring ceiling fans made it seem very airy inside, like I could lift off above the shelves and float up to the ceiling like I was a balloon. I stuck to the front desk at first, like it was a life raft. At the back of it was a section which had recent newspapers and recommended books next to a sign that said “The Reader’s Bucket List”. These included:

How many have you read? I’ve read only three. My bucket is still heavy. I don’t like the term “bucket list”, whenever I hear it I feel depressed. I picture it literally, a big plastic bucket, and can’t connect it visually to the concept of listing the things you want to achieve before you die. While I like making lists, I don’t like the idea that life can be reduced to one big list.

As for the books I loved the Ali Smith novel Hotel World, but have struggled to read her other books. I had a look through There but for the but the title puts me off. While it isn’t as bad as “The Delicate Nature of the Hibernating Woodlouse” or something like that, it makes me nervous that the book is going to be a theme park of literary pretensions.

Next to the bucket books was a laminated ring bound booklet, with a popular fiction guess who theme.

Near the desk there were two aisles of Russian fiction, dvds, kids’ books, and magazines. At the end of one of the rows were containers of well-read Russian fashion magazines and Russian versions of Good Housekeeping. While I was in the library the Russian section was consistently busy. The first person I noticed looking through the books was a woman who was dressed with extreme colour coordination: everything she wore was either red or blue, down to her glasses frame or the thin, red trim on the hem of her blue skirt. She had red hair too, the kind of brassy auburn that gets called “red” and is proudly from a bottle. She had collected a pile of Russian children’s books and was examining them seriously.

The newspaper reading area of the library was a long table with a laminate top, patterned like a kitchen floor. I picked up the Sydney Morning Herald from the rack at the end of the table. To allow them to be hung on the rack, the papers had been clipped into long metal spines, which made the usually pliable newspapers cumbersome to read. I sat at the table, across from a Chinese man wearing a cap. Caps are a common look for newspaper reading men. He had his trousers pulled up high, secured with a belt with a statement enamel buckle of a big star and two guns underneath. He was reading  a Chinese newspaper.

Next to me sat a couple who muttered to each other in low tones, like they were at home conversing in front of the tv. The man was doing the sudoku in the Australian, filling in the squares with a blue biro. His wife was flipping through Vogue while keeping an eye on everyone in the library. She had a censorious expression for everyone, no matter their age or appearance. Old men were as suspicious as children through her eyes. They slipped into an argument about whether the woman was laughing at someone. “You were laughing at her”/”I wasn’t laughing at her”/”You were laughing at her”… as if they were stuck in that one moment.

I looked down at the newspaper and read a bit of an article about how people were renting furniture rather than buying it, in order to “refresh” their homes. There’s an interesting story about furniture and Waterloo. It occurred during the Queen’s visit in the 1970s, when she came to Waterloo to open some of the public housing towers. On the day of the queen’s visit trucks full of furniture came and replaced all of the furniture in the 4 flats the queen was going to visit, taking the inhabitants furniture away, only to return it all later that afternoon once the queen had departed. There’s a video excerpt from the 1981 film about Waterloo by Tom Zubrycki  showing the Queen inspecting the units, which tells this story.

A man wearing a felt cap shuffled up to the table with a couple of Daily Telegraphs. He sat down, checked the dates on the papers and opened one from last Friday. He had a piece of paper with a name written on it in capital letters, Albert and a surname I couldn’t decipher. At first I thought he was looking for the name in the racing results, but then he turned the page and started to look through the Death Notices.

I was as bad as the woman flipping through Vogue, watching everyone who came in intently. A skinny girl in tight, high-waisted jeans was being escorted to the photocopier by one of the librarians. The girl was wearing a tight black singlet with her iPhone poked into her bra, and wore her hair plaited into a crown on the top of her head. She was photocopying her birth certificate.

As I was looking in that direction I noticed that the computer area at the back of the library was full of people. They were so quiet that I hadn’t noticed they up until now. Many of them were kids, playing games, and after the librarian set up the photocopier for the girl she went into the  computer area and stood looking over the shoulders of everyone there, checking for inappropriate internet use no doubt.

I looked back down to the Sydney Morning Herald and read an opinion piece about caffeine poisoning from energy drinks, before closing it and returning it to the rack. It was then I noticed there was a whole other floor to the library, accessed by a grand double staircase near the library entrance. I had noted it before but thought it wasn’t part of the library. I passed through the Russian collection, then past a cabinet with a display of graphic novels and the CD racks where a woman was kneeling down examining Back to Black by Amy Winehouse, and set foot on the stairs. No one stopped me.

From the top of the stairs I could see over the library. It looked neat, like a model, and I could have stayed there and enjoyed observing people browsing the shelves and reading newspapers in the same way it’s nice to watch people walking past when you’re sitting in a restaurant. Except that you look like a creep if you stare too much at others in the library.

The room upstairs was similarly lofty and contained the non fiction collection and a big desk where a few people were sitting. One woman had a pile of books about soup cookery and was typing on an iPad.  A few others sat on a table off to the side and worked on laptops. My favourite area was the reading nook at the front of the building, and it was here I retired to once I’d collected some books to read.

Browsing the shelves I discovered the first book about zinemaking I’d browsed my way upon so far in Biblioburbia.

I got a jolt seeing it there, like my other life had been discovered.

The section I was most interested in today was the 800s and 900s. I picked out Bread and Wine, a book of prose by Kenneth Slessor (known best for the poem “Five Bells” and its evocation of Sydney Harbour). I read little poetry but I enjoy prose written by poets. The first story in the book was “A Portrait of Sydney”. It was first published in 1950 and as much as I enjoy reading it, it is a voice from another world:

When I wished to sleep at night, I found it necessary to cover the window of my bedroom with a canopy of shirts, or with a dressing-robe, to shut out the viridian green moonlight streaming from the largest and most illuminated bottle of beer in the world. This was fastened to the wall of the building, and although, when at home, I could not see it, its reflections gave the human face, particularly my own, the perpetual aspect of a Demon King.

Another section explains how in Sussex street, carpet snakes were used to control the rat problem, “because an energetic young carpet-snake can and will devour more rats and mice than a cat”. The more conventional methods of rat control, cats, were also to be found in abundance in the city. The next book on my pile was about one particular famous cat from the early days of Sydney. There’s a statue of this cat on the side of the Mitchell Library, near the statue of Matthew Flinders, as it was Flinders’ cat Trim, known for being a “brave seafaring cat”. I’d been considering cats over the weekend, in particular how few men I know who own cats. When I was talking about it with Simon he mentioned Trim, and here I was reading the account of his life.

The last book in my pile was a big, heavy book on Russian architecture, the type of book I can’t imagine borrowing without having brought a trolley with me to carry it home in. I flipped through pictures of wooden churches constructed without nails, and nineteenth century wooden houses with elaborately carved windowframes. It was peaceful sitting in the nook with the sun coming in through the windows, looking at these beautiful, far away buildings. Apart from the woman looking at soup recipes and a librarian slowly putting books back on the shelf, it was pleasingly quiet, and the right environment for self-timer photography.

I left my books on a nearby trolley and noticed the librarian who had been putting books away had stopped and was now reading a book about sharks. I went downstairs again. At the desk a man was enquiring about lawn bowls books, and I waited behind him to ask about buying a photocopying card, as I wanted to copy the Kenneth Slessor Sydney essay.

The librarian asked if I was a member of the library and I said no, fearing that this would mean I wouldn’t be able to photocopy.

“Do you live in the area?” she asked, to which I gave a typical Vanessa answer:

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean, sort of?” she said, disliking my evasiveness. I told her where I lived and she was satisfied it was in a different council area. She pushed a piece of paper across the desk and asked me to write my name and postcode on it, but almost as soon as she’d done this, asked how many pages I wanted to copy. When I said 6 she said I could just use the library’s card and pay her the $1.20, rather than  having to buy my own card for $1.

I was glad I wasn’t copying anything too weird, as the librarian came over to the photocopier with me and stood by while I copied the six pages. At the end she counted the pages to make sure I had done all of them. “There’s only five,” she said, before realising that two pages had stuck together. I appreciated how seriously she took my photocopying.

On the way back to return the book to the shelf I looked at the Koori section. In a book about song poetry from the Pilbara, published in the 1970s, I found this strange poem:

I also looked at a book about mapping and colonial conquest, in which I read about the vanished continent of Lemuria, which was discovered/invented by an English lawyer and amateur zoologist called Philip Sclater in the 19th century. He had named it Lemuria after the lemur, those odd looking, stripy tailed monkeys. Reading the story of Lemuria at first seemed magical but then became creepy, as the idea was taken up by various occult societies and Lemurians were figured into a scheme of racial order by the Theosophists. The book did have one beautiful looking map, even though it was about racial hierarchies:

Thoughts of Lemuria were making me feel strange so I went back up the stairs again to find the gap on the shelf where the Kenneth Slessor book had come from. The librarian had brought a chair over to the shelves and was now sitting, still looking at the shark book. I went into the next row along from her so I could spy on what she was looking at. What was so interesting about this shark book? All I could see from my spyhole on top of the books was a page with a big, bloody-mouthed shark head on it.

Peering through library shelves is a classic library scene. I have done it numerous times when there has been someone interesting in the next aisle. When the librarian looked up I pretending to be looking at the books, and took out one about Cuban voodoo, Palo. “Put simply, Palo is a craft of working with the dead to transform the fates of the living”, it said in the introduction. I didn’t understand so I kept reading, moving over to the table in the middle of the room.

The book, Society of the Dead by Todd Ramon Ochoa, is a first person account of learning Palo through two teachers of it in Havana. I skimmed through it and in the middle of the book read an account of finding human bones in order to make a spell. Bones, graveyard soil and coins were just a few of the necessary items. The word for dead people in the Palo religion is “nfumbe”, which means “dead one”. The more I read about the nfumbes, the more scared I felt. Things had taken a strange turn for me. Lemuria, Cuban voodoo – I decided to leave before something truly scary happened. I put the book back on the shelf and went downstairs and out of the library. Outside I took a deep breath. The nfumbe weren’t going to appear in front of my eyes. No 7 foot tall egg laying Lemurians were coming for me. I was standing next to a box hedge with an empty McDonalds chip container resting on the top.  It was a perfectly normal afternoon.

Blacktown is one of those suburbs which has a large shopping centre, Westpoint, the kind of place you go into for the air conditioning and to forget the world outside. It also has the older shopping streets, with little arcades branching off, housing mysterious businesses. The library is in between these two sides of Blacktown, a serious block of a building with large ENTRY signs on the automatic doors. I thought about it for a moment and realised it was one of those kinds of buildings where it might be hard to determine the entrance otherwise.

In the foyer was a glass display case full of zines, which I encountered in the way one encounters old friends. In among the zines were items of stationery, my favourite being two paperclips resting one on top of the other. I liked to think of them being arranged lovingly in this way. Paperclips don’t get much attention, have you ever thought about the fact that someone invented them?

I next looked through the book sale trolleys at the entrance to the library. A man was browsing them too, he had a big stack picked out to buy. My looking was fairly distracted as I was thinking about my impending workshop. I was a bit early, as usual, and so set off through the library to see what I could find. In the non fiction section I started looking through a book called Famous Last Lines.

I have no particular interest in railways but I was curious about the idea of endangered railways. My concentration on the trains was broken by the man sitting on a chair nearby, who had a book open on his lap and was underlining in it with a pen. Was it a library book? I looked closely and it appeared to be so. Here was one of these people I had previously only discovered traces of, when I am reading a book and distracted by their underlining and I think “what kind of a person does that?”. It was a chemistry book, and he underlined the words “carbon disulfide” as I watched. At the point the librarian who had organised the workshops found me and I thought for a moment about drawing the underlining to her attention. But then I was following her upstairs in a lift and into the secret realm of library offices, which like in many libraries is tucked away so you wouldn’t even notice it.

I wrote at length about my zine workshop at Mosman library, so I won’t go into detail about this one. The workshop was held in the young adult section downstairs. It was for teenagers and the highlight for me was the girl who described her bedroom to me in great detail, while drawing a little diagram on a piece of scrap paper. She had spent a lot of time decorating her room, it had walls of different colours, fibre optic lights she’d bought when they were on clearance after Christmas, and two mirrors so she could see the front and the back of her hair. I told her she should send a photo of it to Teenage Bedrooms.

When the workshop was over I retrieved my bags from the secret office room and went to say hello to Tim, my friend who works at the library in another, smaller, secret office area. He had promised to show me “the robot”, which is connected to the book return chute downstairs. I know that a robot doesn’t need to be humanoid but I had pictured a contraption rather like Metal Mickey (the robot from a particularly bad 80s tv show for kids).

We went down the stairs and into another secret room behind the front desk. The robot was series of panels which, when a book was returned through the chute, moved the book along until it was in the correct position for the panel to flip up and deposit the book into a container. A number of people were working in this room with the robot, and they seemed happy to have some visitors. They showed me the robot’s tricks for a minute or so and explained its back-saving oh&s advantages. We left them to their work and went out, pausing to chat by the portrait of Max Webber, not the social theorist but the Blacktown Town Clerk for whom the library was named. The portrait had been faded by the sun, and we imagined it fading more and more, until all you could see was his eyes. We stared at the portrait for a moment in silence, then Tim retreated to his secret office and I went out into the sun, which beamed down strongly and threatened to fade me, too.