Libraries, collections of books, magazines, and newspapers, have always given me a home away from home. I keep my own library both in my office and at home. Having books has always been important to me, but mega-collections of volumes offer a silent monument to imagination, creativity, research, personal effort, and perseverance. Somebody cared enough to write those books, to share their vision of their field, to offer up to humanity their grain of knowledge, to struggle to publish their work, making it, more or less, permanent. Even as a small child, once I figured out what books and libraries did, I was hooked, spending hours reading all kinds of works–novels, short stories, true life adventures, history, biography, science, philosophy, and poetry. I couldn’t buy all the books I wanted, and even if I could, where would I put them all? Above all, though, libraries are about sharing the books, communing with others in the study carrels and stacks. The quiet of libraries has often been a peaceful island where I could write papers, read long novels, study the plays of William Shakespeare, compose poetry, nap, contemplate the world, explore the existential angst implicit in the very fact of a huge library. There is nothing quite like finding a book of which you have only heard, but never seen, to take it off of the shelf and begin paging through it. Perhaps it is the orderliness of libraries with their complex numbering systems that break books into categories, subjects, genres, themes, epochs, and authors. The orderliness is comforting and predictable, and if you know one library, you can navigate almost any library with a similar system. Checking out books is, of course, an enormous privilege that most libraries in the USA allow, a reality which is not as readily available elsewhere. So you sit with your books at your study carrel in the library, half of them are open to important pages as you take notes, write a thesis paragraph, scratch your head. Time stops while you are in the library, and even though you think it’s 2012, it’s really 1955, or even 1845. Libraries are a liminal space out of time and out of space, a repository for knowledge and art, a place where librarians process books, people read, write, create, sleep, dream. The stacks are a labyrinth, consisting of books, people, librarians, chairs, desks, staircases, windows, offices. Yet I wonder for how much longer. The digital age is making serious inroads in the physical diffusion of books, and just this year more digital books that paper books were sold. I fear that my oasis of learning and intellectual pursuit may soon fit into a tablet, and that the libraries will close because no one will need them anymore. If you can get every book in the library without ever leaving your house, why go in the first place?