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![]() I’d go to him when I needed to find a book I couldn’t track down. The twenty-five-year-old librarian, a pleasant, rather custodial type, who was tall, though not overly so, kept an eye on them, but not on me. I did my homework, researched for a while, and still had time to read a whole comic or a couple of chapters of a novel in whatever detective series I happened to be enjoying. Long, typed-out projects on Japan and the French Revolution, on bees and the different parts of flowers, projects that were a perfect excuse to research in the shelves of a library that seemed, then, infinite and boundless much greater than my imagination, then anchored in my neighborhood and still restricted to three television channels and the twenty-five books in my parents’ tiny library. I don’t think children today have to write as much as we did in the eighties. The Biblioteca Popular de la Caixa Laietana acted as a surrogate nursery. That’s probably when my desire to own books began. When my father began to work for the Readers’ Circle in the afternoons, the first thing I did was buy the Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple novels I hadn’t yet read. Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie were devoured in both places. I had the entire collection of The Happy Hollisters at home, and Tintin, The Extraordinary Adventures of Massagran, Asterix and Obelix, and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators at the library. That’s when I began to read systematically. I must have started going to its reading rooms at the start of primary school, in sixth or seventh grade. My other knowledge, the abstract kind, stood on the shelves of the Biblioteca Popular de la Caixa Laietana, the only library I had access to at the time in Mataró, the small city where I was brought up. My practical training came from the street and the school playground. I wasn’t at all enlightened by the two books I found about the rules of basketball, one of which had illustrations, despite my notes and little diagrams, and my Friday afternoon study sessions but I was very lucky, and on Saturday morning the local coach explained from the sidelines the rudiments of a sport that, up to that point, I had practiced with very little knowledge of its theory. That same afternoon I bought a whistle in a sports shop and went to the library. Nowadays, if a thirteen-year-old wants to research something he’s ignorant about, he’ll go to YouTube. I left that place with details of a game that would be played two days later, and the promise of 700 pesetas in cash. When my turn came, he asked me if I had any experience and I lied. I vaguely remember going to an office full of adolescents queueing in front of a young man who looked every inch an administrator. I needed income to bolster my collections of stamps and Sherlock Holmes novels. Someone told me that you could get paid to referee basketball games and where to go to find out about such weekend employment. Photo courtesy of Science History Institute. The Chemists’ Club library in New York, New York, ca.
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