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The city’s Central Library was once a place of absolute quiet. Traffic whizzed around it like minnows circling a great granite whale; inside, the loudest sound was the clack of heels against marble or the thud of books as a weary researcher piled his latest gamble on the table. You made your requests in a hushed voice and waited in silence for your number to light above the Grand Hall’s long desk.

Only a lucky few got to go behind that desk, climb the narrow stairs, and tiptoe across the glass floors of the seven-story stacks, hushed by awe as well as by custom.

For well over a century, the St. Louis Public Library has been building its collection: more than 4.5 million books and objects, many of them irreplaceable. “Frankly, we couldn’t afford the insurance policy if we discovered just how rare the collection was,” says executive director Waller McGuire. Central is the main showcase—but these days, it’s far more than a repository.

Photography by Kevin A. Roberts

Once sedately organized by research purpose, the building was aired out and sunlit in its recent renovation. Now there’s a café, a big auditorium, and a maker space. Children chatter freely; teens take a break from homework to sprawl on sofas and play video games; adults check out a Book Club in a Bag (everything but the wine). Families come to learn English together, watch actors stage the classics, hear horror rock at Halloween, sit on the library’s front steps on summer evenings and listen to blues, country, soul, or hip-hop.

More community center than temple of knowledge, the library has reinvented itself for a time when people no longer think of a book as a physical object—and literacy crosses so many platforms, it’s in danger of missing the train to Hogwarts.

Across this radical shift, though, language remains the point: It encodes knowledge, captures emotion, frees you to explore. The ultimate democratic institution, a library is still a place “where you learn,” as Alan Dershowitz put it, “what teachers were afraid to teach you.”

At Central, nobody’s trying to sell you something, judge you, fix you, or exploit you. A book will only be banned if its content is laced with hatred or cruelty. You can find words that resonate with your experience—yet were spoken five centuries ago. People who’ve been puzzling out the same questions millions of miles away. Answers to niggling everyday problems; ideas that pry open your mind; insights that soothe your soul. And all of it’s yours for the borrowing, shared on trust.

You can even peer at 4,000-year-old cuneiform clay tablets, upstairs in Special Collections. Or a single leaf from a Gutenberg Bible, straight off the first press. A Galileo engraving. A microbook of the Chinese zodiac that’s about as big as a mouse’s eyeball and comes with a magnifying glass the size of the rodent’s paw.

In 2000, it was the smallest book in the world, but it soon lost pride of place. Even in the dustiest corners of a library, change is accelerating.

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A burst of giggles, a guitar crescendo, a few triumphant shouts as the ending becomes obvious… Storytime finishes with a crest of applause and a whirl of small bodies, scattering to find their (now rested and receptive) parents and regale them with wonders. A little boy climbs up an upholstered black “tree,” seeking a perch on which to keep reading. A grandfather plucks Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel from the shelf and waves it aloft, delighted to find a relic of his own childhood still in circulation. Sobha Mishra folds herself into a tiny chair and examines her 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter’s prehistoric vignette with amused interest. They come to the library every week, but this obsession with dinosaurs is new…

The kids who dashed into Central in the late 19th century were “like eels,” a librarian at the time reported, “never still, and perfectly lawless.” Over the decades, her profession came to understand that children need to wriggle and bounce, hear stories read aloud, make things with their hands. Both sides are far happier now, and the library eases parents through rainy Saturdays and long, sizzling summers. This July, St. Louis writer Rebecca Schuman tweeted: “Confidential to Forbes guy: libraries are lifeblood to lower income adults, older people, and parents of small kids who often have nowhere else they can take those kids without a) having to spend lots of money or b) being glared at/shunned. F—k you.”

Older kids find sanctuary in libraries, too. Stranded halfway between childish joys and teenage drama, an 11-year-old seeks out a quiet corner and bends over a book, a curtain of hair protecting her as she reads. As the poet Nikki Giovanni once observed, “You never know what troubled little girl needs a book.”

Teens study in a quiet room with “DREAM!” painted on the wall, the letters so big that not even the shyest kid can miss the point. In the adjacent lounge, they can play Dungeons & Dragons, pour out their troubles, get help with their homework, or learn to play chess. This is where Nicholas, who was living with his grandmother in the Peabody apartments, found out he could reserve a Creative Experience pod free of charge and edit photos, video, or audio. Grabbing as much time as he could get, he taught himself to play the keyboard in the recording booth. His talent was so obvious, a tech assistant helped him fill out an application for Pianos for People, and he received a piano of his own and free lessons. Now he’s heading off, at his instructor’s invitation, to perform in Japan.

“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed,” Orhan Pamuk wrote. With today’s mix of media, the odds of that happening increase exponentially.

As you read the “Reminiscences of a Reading Room Assistant,” you can just hear her: clear, crisp, each syllable crimped with precision. She’d started work three decades earlier, in 1878: “The library force at that time consisted of nine persons including two boys and the Janitor… We all did with our might what our hands found to do.” She’s still ticked at her colleagues, though, for their response to a library fire and a cyclone: “Candor compels me to say that in neither instance did I have occasion to think highly of the courage of men.”

In 1892, the examination for library apprentice required that a candidate name five nations that flourished before the Greeks, five men in Roman history before the Christian era, four famous naval commanders… After penning 10 lines on, say, the Peloponnesian War, you were to write a brief sketch of Beaconsfield, Bismarck, Richelieu, Talleyrand, or Wolsey. (Beaconsfield?) And God help the candidate who could not name the authors of The Alhambra, Elsie Venner, English Traits, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, and The Lights of Asia.

The head librarian in those days was Frederick Crunden, who was born in England but came to St. Louis with his family as a child. When he took the reins in 1877, the library was run through the St. Louis Public Schools but only by subscription. Member events were lively: Ralph Waldo Emerson was invited to lecture and seems to have demurred, but P.T. Barnum agreed instantly, for a $100 honorarium. After an 1867 lecture series whose speakers included Susan B. Anthony and another early feminist, a St. Louisan wrote an op-ed titled, “The Twaddle Season,” summing up their message: “As the Creator lacked the sagacity to discover their superior wisdom, things generally are all wrong… This is about the substance of the masculine lectures delivered in petticoats.”

In other words, the library served as an open forum. Crunden came to see it as “the people’s university.” And after some strenuous campaigning (“Vote for the Free Library!”), it opened to the public in 1894.

Seven years later, Andrew Carnegie plunked down $1 million, half to build a beautiful central library and half to build branches. The architect would be Cass Gilbert, who’d done such a nice job with the World’s Fair’s Palace of Fine Arts (now the Saint Louis Art Museum).

Central opened in 1912, with Crunden’s remark—“Only through books can civilization become cumulative”—inscribed in the granite. Stepping beneath those words, you enter the Grand Foyer.

“The outside of this building is a little scary,” says staffer Scott Wolfe. “St. Louis was an immigrant destination— many people who came were trying to learn English and educate themselves—so Cass Gilbert simplified the entryway, made it quiet and contemplative, almost churchlike. The huge space is divided into smaller spaces, which is comforting.”

The muted tones of the ceiling mural (pronounced the most beautiful example of Beaux Arts building painting in the country by an architectural consultant) blend with the marble, and the arched stained glass windows convey a blessing. Once you’ve gathered your bearings, you venture into the Great Hall, its coffered ceiling a High Renaissance relief of gold rosettes on red octagons in gold frames.

And mundane inquiries are welcome.

“When I started, in 1988, the most frequent question was how to spell ‘mostaccioli,’” recalls Brenda McDonald, director of central services. “On my first or second day, someone wanted to know the latitude and longitude of a Holiday Inn at I-270.” She pauses. “We don’t ask why.”

These days, people also text, phone, or email their questions, and because Google’s doing triage, they’re often more complex, extracting information buried deep in the internet or determining the authenticity of some arcane source. A graduate student in Brazil needed an article from the 1940 Transactions of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. A German publisher of organ music needed sheet music for Charles-Marie Widor’s Symphonie Romane, Op. 73. Two textile designers in Geneva saw a couple of stunning hand-colored pattern books from the early 1800s in the online catalog and flew to St. Louis to photograph them.

Photography by Kevin A. Roberts

The books were tucked away in the Steedman Room, the English Renaissance jewel created to shelter George Fox Steedman’s donated collection of architecture and design books. The Steedman Architectural Library is a bit of a secret: You walk between the backlit shelves of the Fine Arts Library and enter a door (which must first be unlocked). Inside, you’ll find a fireplace (never to be used again, if McGuire, the executive director, has anything to say about it); a deep window seat, sunlight streaming past the medallions in the leaded glass windows; and finely carved wood cabinets wrapping around the room. In one, antique, leather-bound German books about mosaics and wall painting stand almost 3 feet tall. Steedman even left money to continue building the collection; he wanted architects to be inspired to do great work in St. Louis.

“What on earth were you thinking?” The voice shrills through the tiny holes in the phone, but as McGuire quickly ascertains, it belongs to someone who lives far away, not a city resident. Most of his patrons have been amazingly chill about Drag Queen Storytime.

“Children are growing up in a diverse world,” he tells the caller, his voice even, “and many parents want to expose their children to that world at an early age.”

The reply is unprintable.

“It would have been easier not to even do this programming,” McGuire concedes later, “but ‘community center’ means more than a heated and cooled place where people can gather.

“In some city neighborhoods,” he adds, “schools have closed and churches have moved out. The neighborhood library is the only community asset left.”

From his office, across 14th Street, McGuire watches people line up every morning, waiting for Central to open. A few years back, many of them came from New Life Evangelistic Center; since it’s closed, the number of patrons hoping for a washroom and a nap has dropped sharply, though they’re still part of the mix. Signatures in the guestbook for the Working exhibit in the Great Hall include visitors from South Africa, Singapore, Dublin, and Barcelona; a 14-year-old boy who was celebrating his birthday at the library; an ornately flourished comment from someone who’s signed several times already; and “Long Dick,” who gives his address as “homeless.”

Because they are free and open to all, libraries are refuges of many sorts. Some big-city libraries have hired full-time social workers to help people find work and housing, and the library across from Philadelphia’s “Needle Park” keeps Narcan on hand for opioid overdoses. But although Central is a great resource for people struggling to find a better or saner life, “it is not a social service agency,” McGuire says firmly. “The library is a safe place, a place where you can be at peace and protected, but you have to be using it as a library.”

Balancing that caveat can be tricky for the staff. But out in the atrium computer center, patrons very much want the help a library can give. They blurt their dilemmas in a panicked rush: “I’ve got a chance for a job, but they’re saying I’ve got to apply on a computer and I’ve never even used one.”

Bill Selbert, one of the public technology assistants, beams a steady kindness that’s so reassuring, his words are just a bonus: “You have two hours here. We can get you down the road.”

He recognizes the helplessness instantly: “People come in with that look in their eye. They’re scared to death. They don’t know how to get past this hurdle. A few clicks later, you can see the anxiety start to go away. But every week I get somebody who’s never held a mouse.”

For those more fluent, hotspots can be checked out for a week at a time, taken home, and linked to as many as 10 devices. Patron by patron, the St. Louis Public Library intends to take down the digital divide in St. Louis.

Until 1982, the loudest sound at a librarians’ conference was the choreographed competitive book-cart drills. Then news broke of the indictment of James Richard Shinn, a gentle-voiced man with tousled white hair and a shirttail forever trying to escape his suspendered trousers. From his St. Louis base, Shinn had plucked rare books from the shelves of the nation’s finest libraries, amassing almost $1 million in loot. His treachery taught the outraged librarians a painful lesson.

Granted, they’d never been as naïve as stereotype (and porn tropes) suggest. In the late 1800s, your hands had to be free of soot and grime to read the periodicals, so you were shooed off to the washroom—where the wily librarians had encased the oft-stolen bars of soap in net bags and chained them to the washstand. But traditionally, libraries worried more about fire and flood than theft. (McGuire still shudders when he remembers coming upon a photo of a man ensconced in a wing chair in front of a blazing fire in the Steedman Room, smoking a cigarette with the first-edition Palladio open on his lap.) After Shinn, every major library in the country tightened its security.

Then a new kind of theft began.

On Thursday morning, January 19, 2017, shocked curses slashed through the customary drip of coffee, the scrape of chairs, the sleepy “Good morning” greetings. The computer system of the St. Louis Public Library had just been hijacked. A message on the desktop—the cyber-equivalent of pasted newspaper letters—demanded a Bitcoin ransom. Pay up, or the system would be held captive.

When the head of IT appeared in his office, pale, to give a terse explanation, McGuire’s first thought was This can’t be happening. More than 1,000 computers scattered throughout the city and all of them down?

His second thought was to call the authorities. Heart racing, cold sweat matting his shirt to his back, he called a contact he’d worked with at the FBI. (Libraries tend to get in the middle of all sorts of adventures, but absent a court order, they protect their patrons’ privacy like lion dogs.)

Not for a second did McGuire consider paying the ransom. Give money—or Bitcoin—to somebody malicious enough to attack a library? His stomach had clenched at the attack, but so had his fists. “It was a violation,” he explains. “Computers are key to everything we do, and they were just sitting there like bricks. There is nothing more useless than a hacked computer.”

Libraries are all about sharing information, so he was completely transparent with the public, issuing frequent updates. IT staffers canceled their personal lives and set up shop in a big conference room, and McGuire made sure there was a steady flow of pizza, soda, breakfast pastries, coffee…emphasis on sugar and caffeine. “We took complete advantage of them,” he says. “They had most public services up within 24 hours.”

Eleven days later, with the FBI’s help, they’d traced the attack and sealed the entry point. There are still files missing, tiny moth holes in the data, but not a single thread of patron information was compromised. “The attackers wiggled in through the voice-mail system,” explains spokeswoman Jen Hatton. “They were operating from Indonesia.”

“They may not have even known we were a library,” McGuire concedes, ever so slightly mollified. His other consolation was the patrons’ response: Instead of being angry with the library, they were outraged on its behalf. How could someone attack their library?

Teams tease, groan, and toss out idea after idea as they search for clues to Escape the Library. There’s a different challenge in each of the second-floor rooms: In Entertainment, Literature & Biography, players are solving a murder; in History & Languages, they’re seeking “happiness.” There are cryptograms, ciphers, jumbles, book titles hidden in blocks of text...

The younger librarians who planted these clues are quite pleased with themselves. Central’s gotten to be a cool place, what with comics and graphic novels, pop culture books, poetry terrariums, a collection of zines and workshops on how to make one for yourself.

Christine LaBarbera just taught a class in Japanese stab binding. She loves physical books. “Digital’s cool because of the accessibility,” she concedes, mentioning the Gutenberg free digital library of the classics, “but I don’t have a Kindle, and I only read on my phone if I’m on vacation. I love texture and the beautiful things you can do with paper.”

Her colleague Kristal Feldt nods: “I think I only own two digital books.”

Wolfe, who works in information services, has done some reading on the subject and reports, “What they’ve discovered is that young people have kind of rejected reading things on a screen. They have enough screens.”

There are now libraries (usually one location in a large system) that consist mainly of computers, hardly a bookshelf in sight. “There’s no question we are moving in that direction,” McGuire says. “Our patrons are moving in that direction. But there’s pushback against digital libraries, too.” At one point, ebooks were growing by more than 1,200 percent a year; now, their sales are dropping and print is regaining a foothold.

As the novelty wears off, we’re learning to choose different platforms for different purposes. A lot of readers “tried ebooks and are willing to use them when it’s convenient,” McGuire says, “but they still prefer print.” It’s more relaxing, they say, more immersive.

Ebooks tempt us to skim. Print books have more distinctive personalities because they’re designed in specific sizes, colors, materials, typefaces. They add weight and permanence; a crisp or leathery or musty smell; the “hand” of their slick or satiny pages; the movement of rifling or backtracking. More of your body participates, and it becomes easier to ignore digital distractions. A physical book’s content is fixed in place and can’t be manipulated or deleted. And because libraries are where the world’s memory is stored, at least some of that memory needs to be encoded in a stable form, protected from future whims and subversive or revisionist agendas.

Of course, print books were themselves a technological revolution. The Gutenberg press looked pretty rad to monks with ink-stained fingers. But the pace and form of change have altered dramatically: Now we’re not just altering physical processes and capturing information in a faster or sleeker physical form; we’ve left the material world altogether. And digital platforms don’t just speed up change; they also complicate our response.

Physical media “preserved itself, in many ways,” McGuire notes. Ebooks vanish without warning if a publisher chooses to stop providing the files. Also, “every single electronic book has to be negotiated in its own way,” adding to the costs and imposing a hodgepodge of limits on circulation.

“Publishers,” says associate deputy director Kathy Leitle, “still haven’t quite figured out how they want to sell ebooks to libraries. One company just jacked the price up—the average cost of a single copy is $80–$84. The Tor imprint for fantasy and science fiction decided that libraries were hurting sales, so we can’t even buy the ebook titles for four months after they come out... We don’t believe we’re in that much competition with them. We’re the biggest supporters of books!”

Even as it fights to keep up with slippery new technologies, the library maintains a curiosity cabinet of obsolete readers and players so it can continue to access the past. “St. Louis has a rich media history,” McGuire notes, “much of it in forms whose machines haven’t been made in decades: delicate kinescopes. Nitrate film, which is remarkably beautiful but quite explosive.”

The layers of history shift with cultural upheaval, one medium sliding into another, and the linear progression gets lost. Librarians do the archaeology. And their work curating, translating, and preserving is rendering them more relevant, not less: A 2016 Pew Research Center study found that 53 percent of millennials had used a public library or bookmobile in the previous year—more than Gen X, the baby boomers, or the Silent Generation.

The libraries of the future won’t be empty or silent.

The sobbing’s coming from a corner of Genealogy. It’s cathartic, subject specialist Cynthia Millar decides. For years, this young woman heard stories from her grandmother about the family home’s burning down, and she’s just found the newspaper report. Maybe those matter-of-fact gray columns will settle the lurid images.

The carpet in Genealogy is blood red, the pun inadvertent, and shelves hold books and microfilmed records for the states or countries people most often left to settle in Missouri. “We focus on African-American, German, Irish, and French,” says Millar, “and we see all kinds of discoveries—especially now that Missouri’s opened access to adoption records.”

A week or so later, another young woman is drenched in emotion—but this time, it’s elation. Millar helped her find a phone number in California for her long-lost father, whom she hasn’t seen since her parents’ divorce, many years earlier. “She called him on her cell phone, sitting right here. He told her he’d saved his old landline number in the hope that someday she’d find him.” She comes back the next day to tell Millar she’s booked a flight to California.

In the St. Louis Room, Kirwin Roach did a little lower-stakes detective work for a patron who wanted to know where actress Mary Wickes went to high school—except the patron couldn’t even remember her name. He was pretty sure how many letters were in it, and he offered a few random clues, and Roach assembled them like an IKEA cabinet: Mary Wickes! Beaumont High School. And if the patron needed to know where that was, the Saint Louis Room has maps of the city from the 1700s to the 2000s.

You can find just about anything at Central. Need to see an edition of the London Times before 1785 or government documents from the 1880s? Need the manual for a 1940s Magic Chef or an old Chevy? Want to inspire your next vacation by peeking at 1930s postcards from all over the world?

Art historian (and stlmag.com freelancer) Chris Naffziger will never forget an eighth-grade library excursion: “My dad and I came down to Central at night in order for me to do research on the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the inspiration for the Civil Courts Building. The reference staff retrieved this gigantic book from the 19th century, published by the British archaeologist who had done the actual excavations in Turkey.” That evening set his course.

When Jean Larson Steck lost her infant daughter, she somehow had to help her 3-year-old understand. A friend recommended The Dead Bird, written in 1965 for a child. “I was told it was in the stacks due to its sensitive material,” Steck says. “I still remember waiting for that book that I thought would save me somehow.”

Malaika Horne remembers going to Central “sometimes two or three times a week, all six of us. My mother got us library cards as soon as we could print our names. She didn’t want us to be poor. So we walked the 12 blocks from Mill Creek Valley, which was an adventure.” In the dim, cool library, she eluded her big sister, who was bent on Malaika’s reading Greek mythology, and skipped off to find Beverly Cleary or a biography. “I wanted to be Ida Wells-Barnett,” she says. “It doesn’t matter who you are when you read.”

Those 12-block walks started a longer journey: through a master’s in urban affairs, a Ph.D. in public policy, and postdoctoral work in psychiatric epidemiology. And when Horne researched her memoir, Mother Wit, a librarian at Central found the newspaper article about her father’s protest of the Mill Creek Valley blighting.

“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers,” writer Neil Gaiman once quipped, but “a librarian can bring you back the right one.”

“When in doubt,” said J.K. Rowling, “go to the library.”