Interview with Nancy Pearl

Nancy Pearl is the world’s coolest celebrity librarian: she has served as the Executive Director of the Washington Center for the Book, founded the Seattle Reads program, invented the Rule of 50 (a guideline for deciding when to give up on a book), and written two—almost three—books, including Now Read This, Book Lust, and the soon-to-be complete Book Lust II. Oh, and she’s also the model for a five-inch-tall hard plastic Librarian Action Figure.

Almost as passionate a cyclist as she is a reader, Pearl suffered a mildly serious bicycling accident in the summer of 2004, right in the middle of our ongoing email interview. Despite a nasty fall on slippery railroad tracks, an ambulance ride, an ER visit, and a slightly broken clavicle, an enthusiastic Pearl agreed to finish the interview on schedule and by telephone because she’s a trooper like that. As a result, I had the pleasure of talking with her one bright July afternoon—or one Seattle morning owing to the time difference— about her impending retirement, compulsive list-making, pop cultural librarian stereotypes, the proliferation of MFA programs, poetry, and orange oatmeal cookies.

KR: You say in your introduction to your latest book, Book Lust, that “it isn’t too much of an exaggeration—if it’s one at all—to say that reading saved my life.” Can you elaborate on this? And can you describe instances in which you’ve seen reading do the same for others?

NP: As a child, it seemed to me that being in my house (which was in a lower-middle class neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan) was neither a particularly safe nor happy place to be. Consequently, I spent all my waking hours at the Parkman Branch Library, which was about two miles from my house. Miss Frances Whitehead, the wonderful children’s librarian there, changed my life by showing me—through the books she gave me—that there were worlds out there, families out there, far beyond what I knew from own experience. I think that librarians do this sort of thing every day when they find a book that will make someone down in the dumps laugh, or they give people information on how to register to vote, or become a citizen, or learn to accept their own sexual orientation, or recommend a good novel to read. It’s not always a dramatic encounter, but librarians really can (and do) change the world for the better, one book at a time, and one patron at a time by making information and good books to read freely available, without any accompanying judgment or suspicion of why the patron wants what they want.

KR: You’ve also said that, after being tempted in college to go to MIT to study with Noam Chomsky, you’ve “never since wavered in” your “belief that being a librarian is one of the best, and noblest, careers that anyone could have.” Why do you believe this to be the case? What should be the role of the librarian in society, and how are they uniquely positioned to be a positive cultural force?

NP: I believe that the public library should be one of the leading cultural organizations in a community. It is free, it is open to everyone, and bringing people together in the library—for a discussion or another kind of program—is a wonderful way to build community out of disparate individuals. I am a firm believer in what I call “recreational learning,” the opportunity to expand one’s horizons through group discussions and other programs, like a series of programs about well known operas, or ballets, or the newest exhibit at the local museum. I heard of one library that does a series called “Shake & Bake,” in which each week people come together to read Shakespeare out loud, and a local bakery provides some refreshments. I love that sort of thing. I have led a poetry discussion group at The Seattle Public Library for more than five years—12-15 people, both staff and the public—meet weekly to talk about one or two poems. The participants love it, and so do I. It’s important that librarians collaborate with the educational outreach folks at the other cultural institutions, as well.

KR: At the risk of sounding terribly combative extremely early in the interview: why read? What good are books anyway? What do they offer to the individual and to the culture at large, and what, if anything, does literature offer that nothing else can? Because lots of people—intelligent and not-so-intelligent alike—simply do not read either because it takes too much time, or because they feel they can get the information they need to function as citizens and professionals from other sources. Our current president, for example, is a notorious non-reader, and tells his advisors that if something can’t be summarized in five minutes, he doesn’t want to hear it. What are all these non-readers missing out on? Could reading make them better citizens and happier people?

NP: Why read? One might well ask why do anything else? Reading is the perfect way to both find yourself and lose yourself—who could ask for more? And what other medium does it as well? There are books for every mood, moment, and reason. Seriously, I think that a life without reading would be incalculably sad. One thing that books do is offer the space for considering a complex issue, which newspapers, or sound bites on television do not.

KR: Like yourself, First Lady Laura Bush is something of a celebrity librarian; is your husband a reader? Do you find it difficult to be friends with people who don’t read, or is this even an issue?

NP: My husband is not an addicted reader, as I am—he is much more of a movie slut (he’ll go to any movie anytime, anywhere, with anyone), but he does enjoy reading, and usually has a book he’s immersed in (right now it’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street). I don’t know that the subject of friends reading or not reading has ever occurred to me—I think I just assumed that any friend I made would love to read, too. I certainly talk about other things with my friends, though—families, movies, politics, but we always seem to come back to books.

KR: These days, lots of electronic sources of information have re- or dis-placed books in many people’s lives; how can books fruitfully co-exist with these new information outlets? Can they? Also, how has the information technology revolution changed the role of librarians and of libraries?

NP: I think that books and technological information access serve different functions. Technology has certainly created a sea change in the library profession, but information access is only one reason why people come to libraries (and I might argue that if information access was what we were staking the future of the library on, we’d (as a profession) be in trouble, because it’s likely that other people just might do it better). The other is to find a good book to read, or a movie to watch, or a CD to listen to. They’re not in competition, although during the last decade that’s certainly how it’s been played out. We need to train librarians to be savvy in both—not just how to build a website, but how to listen to our library users and then recommend the perfect book for them. That’s what I teach in my Reader’s Advisory classes at the ISchool at the University of Washington.

KR: In their Spring 2004 “Freaks and Geeks” issue, Bust magazine ran a story about librarians entitled “Revenge of the Librarians: Modern librarians are giving stereotypes about their profession the (shushing) finger,” and across the nation, more and more people are enrolling in Library Sciences programs. Why do you think that the profession is becoming so popular? And why, in particular, is it becoming so popular among women?

NP: I don’t know why library science is becoming more popular, or even if it is more popular now than in the past. It’s always attracted more women than men, partly because of the low pay librarians received (and still receive).

KR: What, in your opinion, are the best routes to pursue if one is interested in the vocation? What does it take to be a top-notch librarian?

NP: I think a commitment to serving the public is the first criteria for being a good librarian. I became a librarian because I believed that libraries really do change people’s lives. You can love to read all you want, but if you aren’t interested in helping other people find good books, you won’t be a very good librarian. Similarly, finding arcane bits of information can be a real high, but if you’re not interested in helping someone find out what he or she needs to know to live a better life (citizenship information, where to pay their electric bill, the distance from El Salvador to Mozambique, the title of a book they read when they were eight years old), then library science isn’t the right career for you.

KR: Recently, you served as the model for a 5-inch tall hard plastic Librarian Action Figure, featuring a stack of small plastic books including your own, plus a tiny button in the back that makes the arm move with “amazing shushing action!” How did that come about, and why did you agree to do it? And how do you respond to those among your fellow librarians who fail to find it amusing?

NP: My life as an action figure actually began at a dinner party. Mark Pahlow, the owner of Accoutrements, Inc., a novelty company in the Pacific Northwest, was there. So was I, and my husband, a patient and low-maintenance sort of guy. We were talking about a recent article in one of the supermarket tabloids, in which people were attributing miracles to the Jesus Action Figure, one of Mark’s best selling items. Someone (maybe me) said, but you know, the people who really perform miracles every day are librarians. And someone else said, “Mark, you ought to do a librarian action figure.”

After we all picked ourselves off the floor (where we’d fallen because we’d been laughing so hard at the oxymoronish notion of putting the words “librarian” and “action figure” together in one sentence), someone else said, Nancy never takes herself too seriously—she should be the model. Then the conversation turned in other directions.

On our way home, my husband asked me how I would feel if there really was a Librarian Action Figure (LAF) based on my likeness. I told him that it would never happen, but if it did, I said, what a hoot it would be, and how great for librarians to have their good work celebrated by a wide audience. And, I added, it would be wonderful opportunity to promote books, reading, and libraries, which is, after all, the mission of the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library, of which I just happen to be the executive director. Besides, I said again, (oh famous last words!), it will never happen.

Time passed. One spring day, many many months later, Mark Pahlow was interviewed on the local National Public Radio affiliate and mentioned that the next product Accoutrements would bring out would be a Librarian Action Figure, joining such dignitaries as Moses, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein, Freud, and Rosie the Riveter, and modeled on the station’s own weekly book reviewer, librarian Nancy Pearl. This was all well and good, except that the show was on April Fools’ Day, so no one, including me, knew how seriously to take his announcement.

Time passed, although not quite so much time, and in May Mark called and asked me to set up a time to come to their offices and be digitized

The next big question was what to wear. Because I had several important speaking engagements coming up, I splurged and went to the Eileen Fisher store and bought not only the most beautiful, but also the most expensive clothes I had ever purchased—a wool skirt, turtleneck sweater, and long cardigan, in a beautiful heathery grayish blue. They looked great on me; and I decided to wear them to be photographed in. (Big mistake. On the basis of my own experience, I can declare without fear of contradiction that Eileen Fisher’s classic clothes just don’t translate into plastic well. Part of what I had to live with, once the LAF came out, was accusations about how dowdy I looked, or rather how dowdy the LAF looked. I always get the two confused!)

Once the photos were taken, I got to sit down with the creative team at Accoutrements and talk about what action the figure should be doing and what the accessories should be. Hands down—really, there was no discussion—everyone agreed that the stereotypes that most people associated with librarians was that they wore their hair in buns and said “shush” a lot. (Remember the scene in Breakfast at Tiffanys when Audrey Hepburn gets shushed at the New York Public Library?) We all thought that having the librarian make a shushing motion would set a tone for the LAF that would let the world see that librarians are not uptight and take themselves and their profession too seriously, and are able to laugh at themselves.

Little did we know that there would be of people who wouldn’t see the humor, or the fondness with which the LAF was conceived and produced. It’s hard to imagine that anyone looking at the packaging, which is basically a huge tribute to librarians and reading, could possibly be offended, but as I now know, there’s no predicting people’s responses. I actually got two unsigned emails from people saying that I had set the profession back 30 years! But in all of my recent travels around the country to promote my new book, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason, and in the many emails and letters and phone calls I got, the vast majority of librarians love the idea of an action figure in their honor.

My (brief) life as an action figure has generally been good—the only problem seems to be that now I don’t quite know what to aspire to next—after you’ve been plasticized, what worlds are left to conquer?

KR: Speaking of stereotypes, why do you think so many exist about librarians, particularly female librarians? Because it seems as though they’re typically depicted as either frumpy, sexless, humorless cat ladies or repressed sex kittens just waiting for someone to rip their glasses off; there seems to be very little middle ground. How does the modern librarian cope?

NP: I think that those are in many ways due to the fact that almost everyone had an experience with a librarian in their childhood, and because if you are of a certain age, all the librarians at one time were primarily women, and most of them were single. Also, I think that in many professions where women are the primary people, stereotypes persist.

Also, the assumption used to be—it’s not so much anymore—that anyone who wanted to spend their lives around books was bookish and shy and quiet. Now, we no longer think of librarians exclusively in terms of books. Information has crept into the profession, and librarians are required to be navigators to that information. As a result, it’s seen as a much sexier occupation to go into. When those movies were made like the Music Man with “Marian the Librarian” or Breakfast at Tiffanys, they were made by people whose experience of librarians in their home libraries probably consisted mostly of dealing with women who probably were single and probably did look very much like those women who appear in those movies. I think that what we need to do today, whether we work around books or in a research library, is to dispel the stereotype just by being the best librarian you can. I don’t think I know anyone who wears her hair in a bun, for instance. Although if you’re working in a library you’re on your feet and you have to walk a lot, so you do have to wear sensible shoes. You couldn’t wear Manolo Blahniks—even if you could afford them. So I think what librarians today need to do is to just be proud to be a librarian because it’s the best profession in the world.

KR: Literally judging a book by its cover—how do you feel about that? Is it ever okay to do?

NP: In Book Lust II I actually have a category called “You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover,” because so many covers don’t yield up the wonderful interiors that the books hold. But we all judge books by their covers—in browsing, I think, one of the main reasons we pick up a book is that we are intrigued by the cover, or by the title. Unavoidable, I think, which is why I was so pleased that Book Lust had such a wonderful cover.

KR: Speaking of covers, about the cover of your own book: the pages of text are from Treasure Island, but is there any particular reason? And is the woman in the green-and-white checked outfit clutching the book to her heart you? What’s the book?

NP: There’s no particular reason for Treasure Island (except that we needed a book in the public domain), but I love the cover because the picture of a young woman (not me) hugging a book seems so appropriate for how I feel about books and reading. At my talks, I tell a wonderful story about the time I started reading Pete Dexter’s The Paperboy on the bus (it’s too long to relate here—you’ll just have to come hear me talk!), but it absolutely fits with both the title and the cover of Book Lust.

KR: Of what does a typical day in the life of Nancy Pearl, celebrity librarian, consist? You’ll soon be stepping down from your position as Executive Director of the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library, a post you’ve held since 1993. What will you pursue with your extra free time (besides, I imagine, even more reading)?

NP: It’s in flux right now because I’m leaving the library to devote myself full-time to writing the second Book Lust, speaking, and consulting on readers’ advisory boards and public programming. So at the moment, because I’m on vacation in order to use up the time I have left before I leave my job on August 6th, I’m reading, and writing Book Lust II.

KR: Not to force you to make yet another list, but of the hundreds of books you’ve encountered over the course of your reading life, what are the very best books you’ve ever read, and why?

NP: That’s really hard because they change all the time. But let’s see, Searching for Caleb by Anne Tyler. See some books, I really, really loved when I first read them, so I always put them on my list, but when I’ve tried to re-read them, they’re not the books I remember. Every time you read a book, even if you’ve read it before, it’s a new book to you because you’re in a different place in your life—you’re basically a different person. Also, The Lord of the Rings—that’s held its own over the years; it’s a fabulous book. The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam, which is non-fiction about the Vietnam War. Oh, gosh, this is really hard. Want me to put in some recent favorites? Crossing California by Adam Langer, which is about teenagers from Chicago. I just finished it last night and I loved it. Also The Hamilton Case, a novel by Michelle de Kretser about Sri Lanka at the time around World War II. Oh, and another book that I re-read every year is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré.

KR: While we’re on the subject of categories and lists, do you prefer the Library of Congress or the Dewey Decimal system, and why? How do such systems relate to the construction of knowledge?

NP: Because I’ve only worked in public libraries, I’ve never used the LC system. I do think that one of the flaws in Dewey, just from the perspective of somebody who loves fiction, is that poetry and drama are kept so far away from the fiction. Francis Bacon, the Elizabethan philosopher, had three categories of knowledge: reason, which would include mathematics, logic, and science generally; memory, which would be history; and imagination. And if you think about dividing a library up that way, that makes a lot of intuitive sense in ways the Dewey system doesn’t.

KR: You seem to have an admirable policy of avoiding being judgmental about the reading practices of others, and your lists in Book Lust seem to be precisely that: simple lists as opposed to value-laden hierarchies in which, say, highbrow books are privileged over lowbrow ones. What do you make of such hierarchies of taste? Are some books really superior to others, and how does one decide?

NP: That’s a great question, and I have a complicated answer. Part of me believes that no matter what the book is, everybody who reads it reads a different book. This is a corollary to my previous statement about how you’re always a different person each time you re-read a book. And this is like my credo for being a librarian: what you want to do, what your job is, is to find books for your readers. If you’re a reader, then what you want to read at any given time changes according to your mood and why you’re choosing to read at that moment: do you want to learn? Do you want to be inspired?

So I don’t believe in those hierarchies, but I do feel very strongly at the same time that there are books that are better than others—better written, better plotted, with better characters who are more fully developed. And I think that’s great and that’s fine to say that there are some books that are better. You can love a book, and enjoy it, and know it’s not a particularly “great” book that’ll last 100 years. Honestly, very little will. But I don’t think it’s up to anybody to say you should read Pride and Prejudice instead of Bridget Jones. I think there are books that it would be a shame to go through life never having read. Reading should be of such joy and pleasure to a person that it makes no sense to me to tell them that their reading tastes leave a lot to be desired. When you do that, what you’re really saying is “Your reading tastes aren’t like mine.” So when I teach Readers Advisory to LS students, I emphasize that when you’re helping find a book for someone, you’re not necessarily recommending books that you personally like, but rather books that you determine—through interviewing the reader—that you feel that they would like.

KR: As a Seattle-based librarian, what can you say about the character of the city and its readers? What is the value, do you think, of living in a community that is uniquely committed to the arts?

NP: You know, Seattle really is well-suited to the arts. People have tried to offer explanations for that, and a lot of them have said, well, it’s because of the rain. But the summers here are beautiful, and this is the most beautiful place to live from mid-April to around late-September, so I don’t know that it’s that. Seattle has a large concentration of college graduates and some wonderful independent bookstores, and it is a place that just supports the arts in many—in all—areas: theatre, music, literature. So I don’t know that anybody’s ever come up with a satisfactory answer.

At any rate, I think the arts add this kind of unquantifiable aspect to somebody’s life. I think being exposed—whether it’s through literature or ballet or theatre—to someone else’s view of the world, or to their understanding of beauty is just so valuable. I just think that anytime you can get out of your own self and live for a moment or two as somebody else experiencing the world the way they do—which is what the best books give us—helps each person grow as a human being.

KR: Do you think you’ll ever write a book that’s not specifically about reading?

NP: I’ve always written fiction as well as non-fiction, but I’m an extremely slow fiction writer since I’m a sort of vicious self-editor, which is kind of terrible. For the past few years, I’ve had some characters sort of determinedly making their way into my head, saying, “Were really interesting, you should write about us.” So I’d really like to do that at some point, to write a novel.

KR: Relatedly, what do you believe to be the relationship of reading to writing? Is it possible to be a good writer without being a good reader, or does one inform the other?

NP: No, it’s not possible. In fact when Ernest Gaines came to talk about A Lesson Before Dying, somebody asked if he had any advice for writers, and he said, “It’s six words: Read read read, write write write.” I absolutely believe that.

KR: Although there aren’t a lot of listings of poetry collections in Book Lust, there are a number of mentions of poets and poetry. Are you a fan? Also, what do you make of the anxious assertions frequently tossed around in literary supplements about the decline of the genre, both in terms of quality and readership? Should poets be worried that theirs is a dying art?

NP: I am a huge fan of poetry. I love poetry. I actually lead a poetry discussion group in the library that meets weekly, and has met for more than the last four years. Poetry is very important to me. And in Book Lust II, what I decided to do is take some of those poems that I’ve most enjoyed, and that the group has most enjoyed reading and discussing, and listed those. So there’ll be at least one section of good poems, a huge variety of particular poems by particular authors.

I know there was just that depressing report from the NEA about how the numbers of people in general who read literature in general, not just poetry, are declining—but I think that literature still matters and is still very much alive and read. This may just be because I’m used to big cities like Seattle or St Paul or New York or Boston, but I don’t think poetry’s dying at all. I think it’s changing, definitely. I think that hip-hop, for instance— that’s poetry. So people shouldn’t be so depressed. Although I think that the same people who are obsessed with hierarchies over books are depressed by the state of things in contemporary poetry now, because the old ways of memorizing formal verse aren’t around anymore. I mean, the way things used to be is a far cry from hip-hop. But then you had people like Coleridge. Coleridge was kind of a celebrity and a big opium user so he sort of had a lifestyle like we’re familiar with among certain performers today.

KR: I’m a bookseller at the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston, and I love it; I can see quite a few similarities in the roles of booksellers and librarians, but so too can I see tremendous differences, the chief one being that bookstores sell books, whereas libraries circulate them for free. What do you make of bookstores as combinations of literature and commerce versus libraries as institutions of pure art and literature?

NP: I think libraries and bookstores complement one another. Clearly in the case of bookstores, the owners want to make a profit and stay in business, whereas libraries want to build their circulation up to keep their funding. Because that’s unfortunately what we’re judging the success of our libraries by. I think they work together because there are lots of books you might want to read but not necessarily want to buy. I think in a lot of ways, the emphasis on customer service in both places makes them nearly identical. Still, no bookstores are as big as a large public library, so there’s a lot more room in the library for a big backlist, and that is one of the huge differences between a library and a bookstore. Even the most enormous Barnes & Noble is not as big as the Boston Public Libary.

KR: Speaking of things being free or not: The Patriot Act. What do you make of Section 215, the notorious clause allowing the federal government to investigate the records of library patrons in an effort to curtail potential terrorists?

NP: That’s very distressing. It’s especially distressing because one of the cornerstones of the public library has always been user confidentiality—the idea that it’s nobody’s business what books people check out or what sites they use on the Internet. And it’s my belief that the Patriot Act, the part that relates to the libraries, is simply wrong. First of all, every community, every library, has to be representative of the community in which it lives. So if you’re in a community in which filtering is valued, you have to balance that desire against the desires of the library as an entity, and its own position on filtering. You have to be responsive in some way to the community, but I think a good solution would be to offer the chance to use a filtered or unfiltered access point to the Internet.

As for the Patriot Act, some places will choose, when confronted, to say no, and to refuse to give out information. Others will obey the law. One thing a library can do is to make sure that the records and materials they unavoidably keep—Internet signup sheets or lists of books checked out—only cover the shortest amounts of time necessary for the library to function. There’s no reason to keep a sign-up sheet after that hour is over. I think some libraries would be shocked at the amount of unnecessary information they keep on record. Short of disobeying the law, which is up to everyone’s own conscience, I think the best course of action is simply to elect a president who would fill positions of power and authority, like the Attorney General, with people who know that this kind of law is wrong.

KR: You include a category in Book Lust entitled “Growing Writers” which features the work of graduates of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. What do you make of the so-called ‘professionalization’ of literature and the proliferation of MFA programs?

NP: I don’t think I have a strong opinion about that. It used to be that you could look at a story and immediately identify the author. Like as a New Yorker writer, for instance. But I think that’s less the case now. There are certainly a gazillion MFA programs out there now. I read Poets & Writers, and they have listings for places you’ve never heard of, featuring people you’ve never heard of. But in some ways, I’m happier for anything that makes people better writers, because that makes me happier as a reader.

KR: As all of your books thus far and your Rule of 50 acknowledge, there are so many books out there, and life is so relatively short—how should an active reader avoid becoming depressed or anxious over the fact that there’s so much to read and so little time? Should readers have a lifelong reading plan to help ensure that they get the most reading satisfaction out of their allotted time on this earth, or should the adopt a more casual approach?

NP: The older I get, everything I say, I see the opposite could be true as well, so that makes for complicated answers. I think it’s a mistake to read anything that you’re not enjoying. I think you should try a lot of different books, but basically you should stick to that Rule of 50: give up on a book that’s just not making you enthusiastic about reading. The problem I see with a lifetime reading plan is that that goes back to that hierarchy of books, and it would be more interesting to me if people stumbled across Oedipus Rex, like in the course of reading another book in which it was mentioned, without sort of setting out to read the 100 Greatest Books of all time as listed by Random House or the Library of America. In every reading life there needs to be a lot of serendipity.

KR: Although you do include a category on food-writing called “Food For Thought,” cookbooks are conspicuously absent from Book Lust. Why is that? And would you care to share a favorite recipe with the readers of Redivider?

NP: Mainly it’s because I’m not much of a cook. If you’re an addicted, sort of promiscuous reader like I am, you have to give up other things in life. One of the things I gave up was cooking. But in the new Book Lust, there’s a section called “The Dewey 600” which is on cookbooks. My favorite cookbook is the I Hate to Cookbook by Peg Bracken. She was a humorist, and these recipes are incredibly easy. It’s from the 60s or 70s. None of them fit Atkins or anything like that.

There’s a wonderful recipe for gazpacho in The Silver Palate Cookbook—on p. 73, I think. And in The Joy of Cooking there’s a wonderful recipe for Baked Macaroni and Cheese, which is perfect comfort food. And also in The Joy of Cooking, there’s a recipe for oatmeal cookies and they’re flavored with, like, not orange zest, but orange powder—orange stuff. They’re delicious.