On Great Authors and their Libraries

I collect stories and quotes about books and libraries. I ran across this piece at WNYC about "Loving Libraries". It features three "stories about the power of libraries to alter lives and draw out surprising aspects of ourselves."
The three stories are:

Clavino's A General in the Library, "in which a team of military men sent into the national library of a fictive town to week out subversive literature find themselves disarmed."


Ray Bradbury's Exchange which "documents a twilight encounter between an overworked librarian and a lonely soldier, returning to the one place that gave him pleasure as a child."

The third is from author Edith Wharton's memoirs, entitled, Backward Glance:Henry James, it describes how her friend Henry James and his "impassioned readings (of works by Walt Whitman and Emily Bronte, among others) used to entrance her in the very library to which her books have returned."

I should mention that the WNYC piece was done in honor of the return of Edith Wharton's (2.6 million dollar) rare book collection to the library at her home, The Mount, in Massachusetts.

Here is an excerpt from Edith Wharton's memoir about the pleasures of listening to great literature read aloud in her library:

"One of our joys, when the talk touched on any great example of prose or verse, was to get the book from the shelf, and ask one of the company to read the passage aloud. There were some admirable readers in the group, in whose gift I had long delighted; but I had never heard Henry James read aloud-- or known that he enjoyed doing so-- till one night some one alluded to Emily Bronte's poems, and I said I had never read "Remembrance." Immediately he took the volume from my hand, and, his eyes filling, and some far-away emotion deepening his rich and flexible voice, he began:
Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave,
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time's all-severing wave?

I had never before heard poetry read as he read it; and I never have since. He chanted it, and he was not afraid to chant it, as many good readers are, who, though they instinctively feel that the genius of the English poetical idiom requires it to be spoken as poetry, are yet afraid of yielding to their instinct because the present-day fashion is to chatter high verse as though it were colloquial prose. James, on the contrary, far from shirking the rhythmic emphasis, gave it full expression. His stammer ceased as by magic as soon as he began to read, and his ear, so sensitive to the convolutions of an intricate prose style, never allowed him to falter over the most complex prosody, but swept him forward on great rollers of sound till the full weight of his voice fell on the last cadence."

http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/kjohnso1/jameswhitman.htm

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/shorts/episodes/2006/12/17