Check this out

I was all worked up yesterday about seeing the new library for my area. The old Perry Hall Library branch was a smallish kind of place, not really much bigger than a lot of houses, and the County has been planning and building its replacement for many years. All that hard work paid off majorly; it's a beautiful building with 125,000 books (the old one had 50,000.) I've been a library card holder since I was a kid; it's always been a tremendous thrill to me to be able to ankle into a building and - for free! - borrow books, CDs, DVDs, and I don't know what-all else. For free!

This library has a couple dozen pcs for the public to use, lots of books and books on CD and music CDs and movies on DVD and small group study rooms, a large community meeting room, and a really cool quiet study room with magazines and newspapers and a working fireplace! It's a tad late in the season now to be planning for this, but you watch: a lot of 50+ guys from my area will be hanging around there, warming our naugahydes by the fire and reading. In fact, most of us will.

I have a plan to test things. If someone has a new dictionary, I always look for the word "eleemosynary" (charitable) and if it's in there, the dictionary is complete enough for me. If not, then it's a little skimpy. "Eleemosynary" seems to be the Rubicon separating thorough dictionaries from less-detailed volumes. Same thing with libraries: I look through their catalog, and if they don't have at least a book or two by Ring Lardner, the great colloquial humorist, then they loaded up too much on Robert Ludlum and Dr Phil. That seemed to be the case here, but all in all, I give our new local library very high grades. Not that many of us are into Ring Lardner these days, it would seem. Maybe I could be so eleemosynary as to donate to them a copy or two of his masterworks.

Discuss: what th' heck ever happened to silence being the word in a library? There were a few people passing through the book area, just gabbling on like we all wanted to hear about their brother-in-law's legal woes, or why their daughter didn't go out for the school play this spring ("Too busy with homework"). I guess that 'silence' concept went out with service station attendants wearing leather bow ties and police-style hats and cleaning your windshield before checking your oil while pumping your Buick Roadmaster full of 28.9 ¢ per gallon gas.

My new plan to is spark big interest in the work of Ring Lardner by telling the neighborhood posse that he invented ringtones and they named them after him.