The Book Fairy

I love technology, but not as much as I love books. Paper books, that is. The feeling of getting a physical book in your hand, the smell, the magic of the sound it makes when you turn a page. Those are all small things that make my day better. So when I told my family that I am going to become a librarian, it didn't come as a shock to anyone. My brother jokingly said, "I know someone would find your bones in a library someday; you'd stay there your whole life." Maybe he said that to tease me, but I didn't mind. He was kind of right.

When you start working in a library, it is like finding your own tribe. You get to see people with whom you share your love of books, and you get to watch them wandering around the aisles, touching the spine of a book, then another, turning their heads sideways to read the title. You see people picking up a book from a shelf and not being able to resist the temptation; sometimes they sit in the middle of the aisle and start reading. Stacey is one of them.

You see men and women in their seventies who still come to the library for renting movies. In the age of streaming services, we still have people renting DVDs, and I love that. It's the effort that counts. It shows some thought has gone into the process, rather than just dropping oneself into the sofa and mindlessly scrolling through hundreds if not thousands of shows and movies and jumping from one streaming service to another. It's exhausting.

Margaret is turning 76 this year. She calls me Jane Austen because one day she overheard me defending Jane Austen's point of view to a woman who was saying, "Ugh! Her books are so boring, like, what's with all the chase? Just go talk to each other!" Needless to say, she had a stack of magazines she was borrowing to read to figure out what new shit the Kardashians are up to. I'm sorry, I am practicing not to be judgmental, but you know what I mean.

That's how Margaret and I became friends. She told me stories about how she fell in love with books and literature and how Jane Austen has changed her life. She told me her husband asked her to marry him in a note he attached to the first edition of Sense and Sensibility. To date, it's one of the most romantic proposal stories I have ever heard. It was her story that gave me the idea of bringing more joy to my tribe. I thought these are people who are choosing to broaden their horizon every time they pick up a book. What if we start sharing the magic with each other and make it even more interesting?

So I started leaving notes in books before I put them on the Hold shelf in the library. You know, these days we have many people who think there is no point in going to libraries and borrowing a book when you can simply have it on your phone as an ebook or listen to the audio version when stuck in traffic. I see the point of that and I have been enjoying ebooks and audiobooks here and there myself. But you see, people come to libraries for the human experience, for the connection, for the feeling of fulfillment when surrounded by all those books.

And then we have patrons who we call The Regulars. The ones you see every week, the ones whose names you see come up regularly on the hold list. I am always curious to follow their steps to see what they are up to these days. Some of them are pretty consistent, one historical novel after the other. Some go through different phases, one month is romance and the other mystery novels. The non-literary ones are also interesting in their own way. Sometimes I think, how many books can you read on the subject of supply chain? Apparently too many.

So The Regulars were the ones I chose to start this with. If they were picking up a book I knew, I would choose one of the quotes, write it on a piece of post-it and place it somewhere in the book, often adding a kind sentence like "You look beautiful today!" It gave me such joy, just imagining their smile and then thinking about who might have done that? One day I left a note for Stacey in one of the series she was reading that month saying, "Please take me home before start reading, you wouldn't be able to put me down and the library floor is not comfortable, woman!" I heard her laugh when she read it.

After a couple of months, something even better happened. Some of them started leaving notes for me when they returned the book. Well, not for me per se, for the Book Fairy; that's what they were calling the source of the notes. One day they were sitting together in the corner of the reading area sharing their notes with each other and beaming over some of the comments they've given, and that's when they came up with the Book Fairy!

It became our collective secret. I think somewhere along the way they all suspected it must have been me, but we never talked about it. There was too much magic, and we didn't want to risk ruining it. Spreading joy and kindness in its materialistic aspect could cost nothing, in my case, a stack of post-it notes and a pen. But it can become the most precious commodity in someone else's life knowing they have been in your thoughts, even if they don't personally know you.