16 pamphlets & libraries

On my walk to the library (down a narrow cobblestone street), I looked through a rod iron fence and saw this statue of a woman reading.

Favourite thing today: entering the Bodleian library (already high on my personal list of life favourites), getting the stack of books I had ordered (also way up there on my favourites list), and finding a book entitled 16 Pamphlets. I had ordered one of these pamphlets but, luckily for me, it had been bound together with fifteen other pamphlets that were entirely unknown to me. It felt like opening some sort of treasure box. The pamphlets were all sizes and shapes, all from the nineteenth century, and all stitched together in one volume.

This pleasure in libraries prompted me to look for libraries on the favourite things list and, in another strange omission (right up there with the omission of favourite things in Toronto), there was nothing. I love libraries. University libraries, public libraries, private libraries, cottage libraries (all those detective novels and How to Stay Alive in the Woods and bird books!), hotel libraries (the quirky things that are left there), bedside libraries. All of them. But the Bodleian is probably my favourite: the courtyard, the crunch of gravel on the ground as one approaches, the leaded windows, the view out the windows across the spires of Oxford, the smell of books, the silent sound of people reading, the long wooden desks, and, of course, the old books with their frayed bindings, uncut pages, soft leather, strings that tie them together, or, as with the 16 Pamphlets today, fragile pamphlets stitched together to form a single solid volume.