by Emily Nichols
I became a librarian because Ben Steinbach swore at me and I stayed a librarian because I desperately missed my mother.
This is not the story you would get if you took me out on a first date. Dates usually say, predictably, “You don’t look like a librarian.”
“I save my Winnie the Pooh sweatshirt for special occasions.” I answer and rapidly change the subject.
If you met me at a conference I might say how my great grandfather was a librarian at Princeton. And I knew some really great women who became librarians and it seemed like a kind of amazing career. You might smile politely. And I would smile with a few too many teeth and a slightly manic air, especially if you were a middle aged woman with status in my profession. Other phrases I repeated until I believed them.
- “I love books and children, it seemed like a natural fit.”
- “I was accepted to several graduate programs in History but I decided I wanted a job that made me happy now, not in 10 years, ha Ha!”
- “The children’s department allows you to focus a lot more on books and writing than other departments where the focus is more on computers or resumes.”
Lies and more lies. It was dark haired, dark eyed Ben and his advanced vocabulary that triggered my trajectory. We were five and best friends, playing with his three legged dog in the road near his house. His father was napping in the room he used as a drawing studio and after Ben used the worst word either of us knew I left, showing more backbone in that relationship than I have since. It was three miles through dark scary woods on a dirt road to my house, but I walked the whole way. When I got to the center of town I stopped by the town library to pick up some books. With all the casual nonchalance a pudgy kindergartner could muster, I walked in. The town librarian called my parents who retrieved me from my sanctuary.

Ben and Emily
It now seems inevitable that as a confused and grieving college graduate I picked the library as my future. My hometown of Heath, MA (population 800) and Brooklyn have very few things in common. After three months in the city, I secured a job at the Brooklyn Public Library. Traversing the borough, I thought ‘this train holds more people than my entire town, more than my high school, more than my college class.’ However, a library is the library wherever you go and I settled into BPL as easily as I had the 900 square feet of the Heath Free Public Library.

Saywer Hall, Home of the Heath Free Public Library, Town Offices, and Post Office

Brooklyn Public Library's Central Library
On my second day of work in the Central Library’s Youth Wing, my supervisor sent me out to the stacks and told me to start reading. I discovered almost immediately a powerful secret. When I was reading the children’s books I could hear something I had thought was gone forever: my mother’s voice. As I turned the pages of There is a Monster at The End of this Book I could hear her as throaty Grover begging me not to turn the pages. In Rosemary Wells’ Noisy Nora I relived the naughty thrill of the refrain “Nora, said her sister, Why are you so dumb?” I was not allowed to call my brother dumb, but in a book it was allowed, and my mother would say it! When I turned the moody pages of The Runaway Bunny and heard her gentle nighttime voice reading “‘If you become a sailboat and sail away from me,’ said his mother, ‘I will become the wind and blow you where I want you to go.’” I slumped on the floor between the shelves, bowed my head to the book in my lap, and cried.
I cried a lot at work. The babies and the reading, singing, story times we put on for them scared the crap out of me, if I’m honest, which I wasn’t. People in other departments or other professions would say “I don’t sing. I don’t know how you do it.”
“It’s easy! The babies don’t care how you sound.” Children’s librarian bravado. It wasn’t easy. It was excruciating, hours of nervous churning stomach before the program followed by the fifteen minutes storytime of terror mixed with humiliation. The abject stage fright seems as silly as the bragging- storytime is not such a big deal to others, is it? During mine I could hear The Itsy Bitsy Spider in my mother’s soprano echoing behind my own ragged voice and I saw all these babies and mamas and felt stranded somewhere between the two.

Emily and her mother
The older kids were my favorites. I remembered fondly hundreds of solitary hours I spent reading The Phantom Tollbooth, A Wrinkle in Time, and From The Mixed Up Files of Basil E. Frankenweiler. I shared these and many new books with the kids and their parents and I stayed carefully in my prepubescent world. Sixth grade was when things went wrong for my family, so the children’s department was where I felt most at home, working with the limited range of emotions available there.
I developed a juvenile crush on a coworker and would take him down into the vintage wilderness of the four subbasements of the Central Library. Not to make out, horrors no, but to show off all the secret passages and rooms I had found. Past the morgue of the Brooklyn Eagle- huge and full of filing cabinets with clips from the paper- there was a room with a ditch that you could only cross on a board and I stood on the other side of the dark crevasse and taunted my beloved, precisely as if we were eleven.
“Chicken.”
The building is an art deco wonder, four floors above ground and four below, designed to look like an open book from the air. I swear to Dewey I once found a half floor, like the one in Being John Malkovich, with a desk, chair and telephone in a space not high enough to stand. In true children’s book fashion I heard voices coming, fled and never found it again. Deeper down I traveled a corridor crowded with dusty display cases and card catalogs. Beyond that there was a gravel floored room intended by the designers to be a subway stop but never completed. Cigarette butts, condoms, and a Polaroid photograph of a car proved I was not the first explorer.
I imagine, although I don’t know from experience, that all professions have their secret satisfactions. I believe everyone must have their own guiding passions that they fail to mention in polite conversation. Does the catalog thrum like your father’s encouraging baritone when you know you are entering records correctly? I am not a Freudian or a ghost whisperer. I know I missed my mother and I followed her voice to a good job in a wild city. And if I tell you anything else, I’m lying.