Libraries in Fiction part 6

Beware: the LIbrary Policeman is coming to get you

Daniel Gooding encounters the threat of a terrifying enforcer who will come to your house to get your overdue books back in Stephen King’s The Library Policeman, a novella published in his book Four Past Midnight.

“Now she wants to do it again. If we let that happen, I think that later this year, in some other town, in San Francisco, California… or Butte, Montana… or Kingston, Rhode Island… a man named Sam Peebles will show up. Most people will like him. Children in particular will like him… although they may be afraid of him, too, in some way they don’t understand and can’t talk about.

“And, of course, he will be a librarian.”

Plenty of students and young adults come in nowadays saying that this is the first time they have ever been inside a library, which for most of us in the profession seems shocking. For those of us who possess such fond memories of visiting the library as a child, and the unlimited choice of reading material which could be yours in exchange for a pink cardboard ticket, we can only wonder at the joys these people have been deprived of, and what kind of -upbringing they must have had that didn’t include regular trips to the library.

He hated the place on sight

In the case of one Sam Peebles (not a librarian, in fact, but a realtor and insurance salesman), it is only due to an unfortunate incident with an acrobat that he finds himself in need of a library. At the age of 40, Sam claims to have never really noticed the local public library before, despite having walked past it countless times over the years; and when he looks at it now for the first time, “he discovered a rather amazing thing: he hated the place on sight.”

The Junction City Library itself is described in forbidding terms: “an oversized crypt”, with “the frowning face of a stone robot”, and Sam immediately feels “a sense of wrongness” on stepping inside. When he encounters the librarian-in-charge, Ardelia Lortz, “a plump white-haired woman of about fifty-five”, he finds her equally repellent, though for reasons he can’t quite fathom; and on returning home with the books he needs, he finds a message from Ardelia on his answerphone reminding him to bring his books back on time, otherwise she will set the Library Policeman on him. Transformation

 

Sam, of course, does not return the books on time; in fact, he accidentally throws them out with the newspapers for recycling. But when he goes back to the Junction City Library, to apologise and pay for the replacement copies, he finds himself in a completely different place, one that is much more modern and welcoming. Greeted cheerfully by two student library assistants, Cynthia Berrigan and Tom Stanford, he asks to speak to Ms Lortz, only to be informed that the librarian in charge is Mr Price, “a tall, bespectacled man of about forty with a narrow little mustache”. Ms Lortz is nowhere to be seen, and when Sam begins to make enquiries about her in the wider community of Junction City, he is met with fear and anger.

Into the “morgue”

Unable to find out anything about the mysterious Ardelia Lortz from anyone around him, and despite specific warnings against prying into the matter, Sam goes back to the library to indulge in a bit of ­local historical research. Consulting ­microfilm archives of the local newspaper in the library basement (or as it’s known by the staff, the “Morgue”), with the assistance of Doreen McGill, he finds exactly what he is looking for: a special library supplement of the Gazette complete with a potted history of Junction City Library and its staff, written by the reigning librarian Mr Price. Only on closer inspection does Sam deduce that the punctilious Mr Price has for some reason omitted a certain number of years from the record, those that correspond with Ardelia Lortz’s time as librarian.

Faceless enforcers

In his introductory note, King cites the inspiration for this story as a conversation with his then-young son, who expressed a reluctance to visit their local library for fear of being accosted by the “library ­police”. He describes how this brought back to him the memories of the fears he felt himself as a young child, of “the ­faceless enforcers who would actually come to your house if you didn’t bring your overdue books back.”

The Library Police is an urban myth; an off-white lie intended to keep ­children on the straight and narrow (much like the dreaded school “permanent ­record”); and yet the legend seems to be a ­uniquely American invention, perhaps most ­famously immortalised by Philip Baker Hall in an episode of Seinfeld. British readers I spoke to seem to have no recollection of such fears from childhood, while a certain reader growing up in ­Lafayette, Colorado describes a vivid memory of visiting their local library, “browsing through the Amelia Bedelia books, certain that the Policeman was on the other side of the bookshelf, making sure that I didn’t steal the book by slipping it into my far too little seven-year-old pockets.” A quick online search also yields nothing about this mysterious institution, other than links to King’s story.

Despite this somewhat menacing image, it seems that the invisible threat of the Library Police does not deter children from going back to the library time and again; even as Sam finds himself recoiling from Ardelia’s terrifyingly graphic library posters (AVOID THE LIBRARY POLICE! GOOD GIRLS AND BOYS RETURN THEIR BOOKS ON TIME!), when he pops his head into the children’s area of the library he finds himself charmed, that “what was behind it seemed perfectly right”:

“Here Sam felt all that old sense of benevolent after-school welcome, a place where the books did all but beg to be touched, handled, looked at, explored.”

Sam eventually remembers that he has visited the Junction City Library before as a boy, but something terrible happened that stopped him from ever going back; something he repressed so deeply that only much more recent and terrifying occurrences could force him to bring it back to the surface, and to once again come face to face with his own Library Policeman…

The author and libraries

A lifelong resident of Bangor, Maine, King and his wife Tabitha have been long-time supporters of Bangor Public Library; ­donating $2.5m in the 90s towards building a new library wing, they also pledged a third of the $9m needed to refurbish the building in 2013. King describes in his memoir On Writing how he met his future wife while working in the University of Maine library in the summer of 1969.