This article for January 2nd is the last in a string of lighter posts for the holiday season. It will soon be time to get back to the depressing biographies and other heavy topics!
January 2nd is the official birthday of the great - if not the greatest - science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who was featured in an article that marked the 25th anniversary of his death. There is also an article about a never forgiven or forgotten brushing-off experience that he had in common with Noel Streatfeild.
Just like many other writers, including Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Isaac Asimov was a great user of public libraries as a boy. He learned far more from library books than he did at school, as did I and many other self-educators.
His autobiography In Memory Yet Green contains some details of his early dealings with public libraries, which he first joined at the age of six. Just as I did, he managed to wangle cards from two different libraries so got twice the normal ration of books; just as Neil Gaiman and I did, Asimov was soon able to get access to the adult section.
Isaac Asimov read voraciously to satisfy his craving for knowledge, but he was not indiscriminate. I could have written this myself:
“I wanted excitement and action in my stories rather than introspection, soul-searching, and unpleasant people. So if I did reach for fiction in the library it was likely to be a historical novel by Rafael Sabatini...(Usually, when I discovered one book by a prolific author I found I liked I would methodically go through all the others by him I could find.)“
Even though he moved on to academic and other professional libraries and eventually established a reference library of his own at home, Isaac Asimov never forgot the huge debt that he owed to public libraries.
He expressed gratitude for his great fortune with this tribute In his memoir I, Asimov:
“My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.“
In addition to incidentally providing public libraries with hundreds of titles for their catalogues, he gave talks in various libraries once he became well known as an author. On one occasion his audience consisted of librarians, and one of them made an amusing statement. From his autobiography In Joy Still Felt:
“Dr. Asimov,” she said, “I just want you to know that in our branch, your books are the most frequently stolen.”
Asimov goes on:
“There was widespread laughter and I said that this seemed to indicate that either my readers were particularly dishonest, which I doubted, or that once having one of my books in their possession they couldn’t bear to give it up on any account—something for which I couldn’t blame them.”
Asimov shared his love of libraries with the children who used Troy Public Library:
Isaac Asimov grew up in Brooklyn in New York, where many of the public libraries were founded by Andrew Carnegie.
He never forgot the local libraries, and they have remembered him. His connection to the borough is commemorated on the library cards, where his signature appears with those of other authors associated with Brooklyn including Walt Whitman:
The Imperial Library on the fictional planet Trantor is of particular interest. This is from Foundation's Edge:
“...its Library had been the gathered record of all the creative (and not-so-creative) work of humanity, the full summary of its knowledge. And it was all computerized in so complex a manner that it took experts to handle the computers.
What was more, the Library had survived.”
That last sentence raises a question that is becoming increasingly relevant to public libraries in our world.
Like many other writers who praise public libraries and acknowledge how much they owe to them, Isaac Asimov expressed his concern for the future of public libraries. He said this in I, Asimov, which was first published after his death:
“Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.”
Thirty years after Asimov's death, the door to wonder and achievement as he called it is still open, Despite many further funding cuts, public libraries are still here – for now.
A good way to honour Isaac Asimov would be to support public libraries in every possible way and keep up the demand for printed books.
A good way for fans of the genre to celebrate National Science Fiction Day would be to read the large number of Asimov's quotations that can be found online and to renew acquaintance with whichever of his books that they like the most. With any luck, his books will be available from the local public library.
