Let’s begin the new year by all-hailing our wondrous public library.  Here are a few quotations for you to recite to your favorite librarian:

• At the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better.  [Barack Obama, ALA annual conference keynote address] 
• The free library is a living room to an ordinary citizen, a treasury to a researcher, and a chamber of horrors to a dictator.  [Bengt Holmqvist] 
• Where else could a member of the public linger for over ten hours without being questioned?   [Barry Bowes]
• I must say that I find television very educational.  The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book.  [Groucho Marx]

The November 11, 2019 issue of The New Yorker has an interesting article under the title “The Gentleman from Indiana.”  It begins, “Can you name the only three writers who have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice?“  The Library of America recently reissued two such novels in one volume: The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams, by—did you know?—Booth Tarkington.  Nine of his thirty or so novels were bestsellers in their day.  Remember Penrod?  Longmont Library has that, plus the new double-novel publication, and a lot more, including DVDs of the books that were made into movies. You can find The New Yorker in the library’s magazine collection.  Oh, the other two Pulitzer Prize authors?  Faulkner and Updike. 

Here’s another test of your memory.  Sniglets.  Barbara Wallraff, a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly updated the idea of “a word that someone is looking for, which other people helpfully try to find or coin,” i.e. a word that should have been in the dictionary but isn’t; for example: the runny stuff that comes out of the bottle before the mustard does—“musquirt.”  Wallraff’s book, Word Fugitives, is available from the Boulder Library by way of the Longmont Library.

May your 2020 be happy happy.