I love the juxtaposition of Seattle’s central library when compared to New York City’s “main” library. One is all glass, metal and light, portending the future, and the old NYC library represents the old worldview of publishing and books. Both perspectives have their place in the lives we lead with books.
While New York City has always been a world capital in publishing, it is Seattle that is a mecca for technology and has the talent and capital for the new integration of technology with publishing (nee publishing technology) to flourish.
The charm of the library
On Aug. 1, we held our third-annual Book Summit at the Seattle Public Library downtown. Principally designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Ramus, the Seattle library is a tribute to light, glass and the feeling of space and energy reaching toward the sky, transcending time. In the midst of the glass atriums filled with books, we feel like we are looking to the future.
Markedly different from Seattle’s library of the future, the library in New York City on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue sprawls the expanse of an entire city block and is instead steeped in tradition and a grand monument to the past.
Last March, in between my meetings in NYC, I slipped into the main public library on Fifth Avenue. I wandered up to the third floor to the Rose Reading Room, where I used to visit long ago when I was a working-class kid growing up in Yonkers. The room was always filled with generous light filtering in from windows that reach forever upward to a ceiling that appears to be a painted with clouds like a rich variation of heaven.
There are many libraries that I have come to know and love, and especially our small library in Queen Anne, with its turn-of-the-century charm and magical stained-glass window. I feel a special tenderness and rich spiritual awareness for libraries that I have not come to feel for any other physical place in this world. All libraries have stories of their own to tell.
I love libraries mainly because they allow people from all walks of life to read books for free. I love the idea that all of us can develop a lifelong love of learning if we so choose. Books not only transform lives; books have the power to save lives and ennoble us to become better people.
Writing for one
During the recent Book Summit at the Seattle Public Library, we talked about why books matter. I recounted my story about a Cuban woman named Mycenae who works in a small shop called the Four Winds on the top of Queen Anne Hill. Mycenae is not a writer, but like most of the Seattle population, she’s an avid reader. She said it does not matter if an author sells a lot of books; what matters is whether your book connects to an audience, even if that audience is only one person.
The concept of writing for one person, an audience of one, reminds me of the sacred laws of the Talmud Scripture that say if you change the life of one person, you have forever changed all of humanity. Authors have the power to change the world. More than ever, authors need to write for that one person. That is why we write, so we can change the world one person at a time, one book at a time.
PATRICIA VACCARINO is founder of the Queen Anne-based PR firm PR for People, (www.prforpeople.com).
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