I Heart Libraries

by Melissa de la Cruz

What author does not love libraries? Being an author means that you are immediately drawn to them. I’ve noticed that many writers even include libraries in their books. One of my favorite fictional libraries is the one Ben Hanscom creates in Stephen King’s “IT”. Ben grows up to be an architect, and he bases a lot of his work on the beautiful building that was a safe haven for a “nerd” like him. That always stayed with me. When I was in Seattle recently, and visited the public library designed by Rem Koolhass, I thought immediately of Ben, Stephen King, and the library in that book, I thought, “I wonder if Rem had read that book and if he was thinking about it when he designed it.” It’s a wonderful library, gorgeous, light-filled, orderly, well-stocked. A reader’s dream.

I was the kid who spent her lunch hours at the library. When I was in elementary school, I read every book in our little library. Every. Single. One. When I was done I re-read them. When we moved to America, my dad took us to the library every week, and we would marvel at the wealth of this country – a public library! For everyone! What riches! (Only private schools had libraries in the Philippines when I was growing up. My dad used to joke that if there was a public library it would be empty in an hour. Everyone would borrow books and never return them.)

The library was the place where I discovered my favorite writers, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, JRR Tolkien. I never even owned a copy of the Vampire Chronicles until I was in my thirties and could afford the special edition hardcover one. It still saddens me that I couldn’t afford to own those books, it’s like a memory loss, not having them on my shelves. So I’m really grateful that I was able to read them in the library.

In college, I worked at several libraries, both of them inspired the Blue Bloods books. At Columbia I worked at the main library, at Butler, in the reference department. The Columbia library is one of the largest libraries in the world, and there are six million books in the stacks – in the basement – that aren’t even out in the lending shelves. If you want a copy of a book from the stacks, you have to request it, and one of the library workers like me, would take this rickety cage elevator (okay so maybe it was a normal elevator but it felt like a cage elevator) down into the deepest dungeons (I mean floors) of the library and retrieve it. It was kind of creepy and it freaked me out a little, being alone underground, hunting for books. It inspired the Blue Bloods’ Repository of History, and the core-scrapers, upside-down skyscrapers built underground. Then I worked at an Art History library, where I steamed blueprints and archival material. I spent a summer steaming Stanford White’s blueprints. Pretty cool. In my new book, Witches of East End, one of my characters is a librarian and an archivist. Libraries are in my blood, and in my books.

Monster Librarian note: Check out our review of Melissa de la Cruz’s latest Blue Bloods novella Bloody Valentine.