Henrietta Hay's Column

A Denver suburb on the east has completed three major construction projects this year. Tom Noel in the Denver Post summarized them. "Future Coloradans may marvel that taxpayers spent $215 million on a smaller ballpark than Mile High Stadium with far less parking...No one has complained that the new Denver International Airport is too small. It may be too big ... The new Central Library is just right...on time... within budget and in many ways the city's greatest achievement."

"The Big New Library," as the promotional material calls it, opened last week. I have not seen it, but the pictures are spectacular. I must confess that from the outside it looks a little like a cross between a medieval castle and a modern prison, with a pencil for taking notes. What is it with libraries and towers? It reminds me of the comment one of the less respectful local staffers made when the present Mesa County Library building was finished. She suggested that we fill the Kiva with root beer and put a spigot on it.

Inside, however, the new Denver Public is a masterpiece of library architecture. It is spacious, efficient, and beautiful to look at - and is designed for the convenience of its users. And it has room for the thousands of books and documents that were unavailable to the public because of lack of shelf space.

When the big airport and not so big baseball park are dust, libraries will still be alive - in some form or other. They keep the record of the activities and ideas of humankind through the ages the minutes of the meeting, so to speak. Lord Samuel commented that, "a library is thought in cold storage."

The earliest ancient libraries were clay tablet repositories in ancient Mesopotomia, and later, papyrus scroll libraries in Egypt, Greece and Rome. Today the largest library in the world is the U. S. Library of Congress with 88 million items, including, so far as I know, no clay tablets.

The first public library in the United States was opened in Salisbury, Connecticut in 1803. Andrew Carnegie, who came along later, helped finance over 2000 libraries across the nation, including one in Grand Junction. He explained his choice of philanthropies. "I choose free libraries as the best agencies for improving the masses of people...They only help those who help themselves...They reach the aspiring, and open to these the chief treasures of the world -- those stored up in books."

Here in Grand Junction a subscription library was started in 1897 and was housed in a rented room on Main Street, close to the Avalon Theater. It had 15 books and a treasury of $2.15. In 1994 the Mesa County Public Library District had over 220,000 books and documents and a circulation of over 700,000.

The concept of the free public library today is a far cry from a collection of clay tablets. But whether ancient or modern, libraries protect and defend first and foremost the principle of intellectual freedom, the freedom of thought -- Everybody's thought. They are based on the thesis that dialogue is always possible, political dialogue, social dialogue, dialogue between the past and the present, old and young, sophisticated and ingenue, professional and amateur. Locked into the classification system exist rebels and revolutionaries, poets and crackpots, philosophers and extremists, statesmen and schemers, theologians and atheists, paupers, presidents and kings, women and men of all colors and beliefs.

Nowhere else is there such a treasure chest of information, wisdom and the pure pleasure of recreational reading. The Library is for everyone.

The information explosion and the electronic age are changing the physical characteristics of the modern library. Nearly every library in the country can access the catalog of any other one. Documents are being computerized. Multi-media are with us. But I think books are here to stay. I can't imagine curling up in bed with a good computer. I'll take my mysteries either in hard cover or paperback.

The logo of the Mesa County Public Library System shows the progression of recorded history: from a buffalo scratched on a cave wall -- to an open book -- to a computer disk -- to a line leading -- where? Clay tablets again? Whatever the format, the concept of the library as the social memory of mankind will last.

Congratulations to the Big New Library in Denver -- Happy Birthday