When I remember going “marketing” (as my mother called food-shopping) with my mother as a small child, I remember that we always went in the car. But if it wasn’t groceries we were after on our round of errands, we might set out on foot—I in my stroller in the earlier years, or on my two feet thereafter.
We lived just two blocks from where the shopping district started. Our errands often included such sweet stops as the candy store and the bakery, but there was another, though less frequent, stop we also sometimes made: the lending library. This was not the public library—though we certainly went there too!—but a bookstore that rented books rather than selling them.
I don’t think they carried children’s books, or at least I don’t remember ever getting any books from them. My books either came from the public library or were purchased outright, not rented. The same was true of most of my mother’s books. But occasionally she rented a book from the lending library.
The lending library stocked multiple copies of hot new titles. In later years I wondered what they did with books that were no longer in demand, to clear shelf space for the latest best sellers. In those days, my chief curiosity about the shop revolved around the question—and, frankly, it baffles me to this day—of why someone would pay to rent a book when they could borrow it FREE from the public library if they just waited until it was available. Why was it so urgent to read it in a hurry?
After all, these were mostly novels they were lending. Although I’m sure they had some nonfiction, I don’’t think they had any reference books, anything that someone would really need with any immediacy for business or educational purposes. I think all their books were geared toward reading for pleasure.
The lending library didn’t even smell like a library. The public library had a distinctive smell to it, which I loved, because I loved the library. The lending library, despite being similarly filled with books, didn’t smell at all the same.
I haven’t seen a lending library since I left the town I grew up in (a suburb of New York City), and I don’t even know if they exist anymore. Neither do I know what brought the lending library to mind after all these years. Goodness knows it’s been decades since I even thought about lending libraries. But I’m all for anything that promotes reading.
Let’s hear it for books!