FORUM: You can literally hear the changing culture of libraries
Published 1:30 am Saturday, April 25, 2026
Edie Everette| Herald Forum
I recently entered my local library planning to experience a quiet space to start work on an illustrated book that a friend suggested might be interesting. This book – we’ll call it “I Was a Grade School Drunk,” for lack of a better title – demands quiet concentration, plus distance from my oven because I would rather clean it than calm down enough to focus on anything.
What I noticed as I settled at a small table in the non-fiction section of the library, a section where books have clever titles like “Girls Just Wanna Have Funds,” was that there no longer exists librarians of yore like Miss McDonald who would raise a finger to her lips and tell chatty visitors to shush.
At my local library youngsters sit across from one another at banks of computers and game while talking as loud as if they were out in the parking lot. At first I thought, that’s cool that they have a place to be friends. But seconds later I picked up my notebook, annoyed that I had to move further from the noise and back near the fantasy section, which is a genre I’m not crazy about.
Fifty years ago, as a kid at my hometown library, I would have turned Sweet Million tomato red with shame if our elderly librarian Miss McDonald, in her perineal dress and pearls, had found it necessary to shush me. Yet, at this library, the loud talk didn’t seem to bother visitors nor staff.
It seems that shame is as obsolete as an asbestos sundress.
As I walked to the far reaches of the building, I soon came upon a row of very mod ‘Quiet Area’ pods, seats with little desks surrounded by frosted Plexiglas walls. I was astonished and thought, ‘but…the whole library used to be a quiet area’!
I am, myself, guilty of reading less, preferring to listen to audiobooks at bedtime. This horrifies me because way before a smart phone made me dumb, I spent hours and hours reading — first on my parent’s living room couch whose cushions were goose feather filled, then in a series of weird apartments while sitting next to radiators on busted easy chairs or while bathing in deep, claw-foot tubs. I once dropped a copy of Robert Moore’s thrilling book “A Time to Die: The Untold Story of the Kursk Tragedy,” into the bath water — which was fitting since it concerns the sinking of a Russian submarine that was double-hulled, with a space between the hulls of six or seven feet!
Who can blame librarians and other grown-ups for fearing to shush people? These days, Miss McDonald’s laying down the law by laying an index finger across her lips might get her canceled, doxed, protested, fired and even assaulted – imagine the pearls of her busted necklace exploding every which way. We have created a culture where shame is on the other foot. Many of us are afraid; none of us want to be the ostracized gray wolf cast out of our pack to survive alone.
Alas, where are we to have a quiet space now in which to focus on, say, writing books about our childhood alcoholism if libraries have simply become a place to chat and look at screens while surrounded by silent walls of books?
Edie’s suggested reading:
“A Time to Die: The Untold Story of the Kursk Tragedy” by Robert Moore
“Girls Just Wanna Have Funds: A Feminist’s Guide to Investing” by Emma Due Bitz, Camilla Falkenberg and Anna-Sophie Hartvigsen
“American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West” by Nate Blakeslee
“Handbook of Asbestos Textiles” by the Asbestos Textile Institute
Edie Everette is an artist and writer living in Snohomish County.
