Eugene Oregon’s Public Library, c. 1908. (1)

MLA President Sean Anderson has very kindly invited me to continue this occasional column in this new space. I hope that these musings provide an excuse for us all to sit back, take a breath, and think about the how’s, and even more the whys of libraries. 

Everyone has their own library story, everyone that is who’s lucky enough to have a library they’ve made their own. My first library memories are from the mid-1950’s and center on Eugene Oregon’s 1906 Carnegie Library building, located at that time across from the old fire station on Eleventh and Willamette. 

The children’s collection was accessed down a flight of stairs, and indifferently illuminated by several small windows straining to rise above the stolid brick foundation. The adult section, to me an untouchable, far grander promise of endless reading adventure, was at the top of a flight of stairs accessed behind and above the pictured lady in white. I don’t remember having access to the ‘grown-up’ books until Eugene’s new library was built in 1959. 

The new library was for me a revelation. Instead of shunting kids off into a dim basement, the new library put all its collections on one daylighted floor. I could march around the scrim formed by a low long circulation desk and find myself in a forest of books, illuminated by natural light, and surely containing all-the-world’s most compelling stories. 

A couple of things spring to mind: 

The car parked out in front of the library is way cooler than any I’ve ever driven, although our mid-1960’s VW Van was pretty splendid. When it ran. 

My memories of Eugene’s old Carnegie Library are still vivid nearly seventy years after the fact, but these memories are not about story times I attended or books I read. Instead they’re about the degree to which I felt liberated when a new building’s layout and permission to roam made it easy for me to find the library’s adult non-fiction collection, and I could start reading about mountaineers and sailors and spacemen and traveling with a donkey across the Cévennes. My library was a magic carpet to discover the world I came to inhabit.

Bruce Newell, Helena

Next time: Why libraries?

Image Credit: OSU Special Collections & Archives Research Center, Oregon State University. “Carnegie Public Library” Oregon Digital. 17 Aug 2025.
https://oregondigital.org/concern/images/df66vb09m