If I remember my schoolboy history, Thomas Jefferson’s evacuation during the 1812 War was delayed as he tried to secure the fate of his books. Even as a ten year old, this didn’t seem strange to me. I placed a high value on my own library, which was pretty flush for a kid.

I’ve always had books around. I recall two of my earliest: a volume of Kipling’s Jungle Books and a pop-up book variant on Hickory Dickory Dock. I may have been barely four when I explored the spine on the pop-up and came across the bold words “Random House.” What could that be?

Today I still worry about my books. I even consider their fates post mortem—which is a kind of lunacy. I have several hundred, but my true concern is with a core, and most of them have been duded up with ex libris stickers. Those are the ones I hope to never be desperate enough to sell, never homeless enough to not shelter.

But this is not to be a taking of the pulse of my own library, not here and now. I present that I have my own, and after the fashion, I have taken an interest in the health of some other libraries. I use my hometown library—once top-rated in the nation—extensively. But that is for my pleasure. I also concern myself with libraries because I believe that a civilization will not long matter when its libraries fail.

A dramatic budget shortfall in Ohio has caused the funding for the library system in C-bus to be cut back to 1980 levels. Just in case you mistakenly thought Democrats were inexhaustibly perspicuous, it was the judgment of our Governor that this top-of-the-nation bibliophile daisy chain should be well-clipped. This motion was followed.

Well, I will grant that the money must be suffered from somewhere. Perhaps a reduction in the salary of state legislators…? In any case, The C-bus Met is biting the bullet, and the reduction in hours, staff, and availability became a reality last Tuesday.

Columbus has been in a bit of a spiral the past nine years. Normatively tepid in times boom and bust, Columbus has been trimming itself shoddy, and that was before the State got into the act. Rain does more civic work cleaning the minor debris of automobile touchés from the roadways and, well, the parks don’t have lights after dark. Not quite the mecca of business convention travel that they’d like to sell you.

Literacy is the lifeblood of Democracy (possibly why they are phasing it out), and the regular respiration of loaned works has meant that anyone who could prove an address could be exposed to Marx and Lincoln and Douglass and Learned Hand. As far as that goes, you could even groove to Adolf Hitler’s scintillating tabloid-style history, if that’s your thing. In other words—and words are what we aim for—this was the Garden of Eden you’ve heard tell of, complete with trees of knowledge and helpful serpents.

I despise writers who whine that they lose money on book sales because of libraries, when they ought to be down on their knees thanking whatever watchful eye is located out there somewhere West of Orion. Most writers will only have the library to keep their words in stock. There are very few Poes and Twains and even fewer Livys. Most writers will not find time—and capital—kind to their own currency.

I am not calling Columbus Metropolitan Library dead, by any means—but it has been substantially harmed. And I fear that in our continuous march towards historical irrelevance, this is one more mile marker—towards, not away from.

Just as Rush Limbaugh believes forests magically appear elsewhere on the globe to compensate for woodlands lost, another Ohio library has surged while one wanes—but it is not for general use. I recently attended the opening of the new Ohio State University Library, and what a chuckle that was.

Having been years since my schooldays there—and in confusion with my heavy utilization of the quality-over-quantity resources at Denison University—I can’t imagine why the OSU stocker needed a dramatic facelift. I assume space was the main motivator, but the speakers at the mall-like configuration’s door-swinger seemed mostly fixated on aesthetics.

Some of you may know that OSU is a powerhouse yet utilitarian state property, with a cancer hospital that is considered superior to most of the nation’s private affairs. OSU is big in every way, but bigness is not the same as esteemed. OSU would very much like to be nationally respected, which has led to some very ill-fitting parts, such as the misbegotten reign of Karen A. Holbrook as President. She did not bring prestige, but she did bring Eastern Establishment-style contempt with her—thus the unhappy marriage.

Alas, OSU is a football school, in a football culture. So it was that at the opening of the library, esteemed speakers were not scholars and were not scientists, but none other than Buckeye Coach Jim Tressel. Tressel had been given the steering arm on the library funding committee, no doubt to give the project credibility.

Joining Big Jim (actually rather slight of stature) on the mall dais was many-moons-ago double Heisman Trophy winner Archie Griffin. Nothing against Archie, but he is prone, as Marlon Brando once said of someone else, to show up for the opening of a phone booth at a gas station. Archie makes up for his frequency of appearance with affability, a resource sterling in former Buckeye star players.

Both gentlemen served as draws, but even so, the crowd was mostly polyester-bedecked elders. There was that same blind stop-and-stare quotient as is remarkable in the halls of a VA Hospital. The absence of Beautiful People at the library opening (and with football fever in the wings!) perhaps shadows the fate of the C-bus Met with even more charcoal. About libraries, no one now cares. Isn’t all that available on the Intertubes?

Some speaker or another, while I sought some cool air absent from this stifling glassine envelope of academia, made a crack about the erotic adventurings in the old library. It’s true. The OSU Library was long known as a quick interface for casual cruisers and end-of-exams blowjobbery. Even the polyester crowd managed a dirty chuckle.

Piquant to me, because books themselves have long seemed quasi-erotic, in the same way that musicians often fondle longingly the frets of their guitars. Books have long seemed to me suitable companions, ones that never stop talking yet never quite interrupt. I am pleasured to be lectured by minds wiser than mine, and if not wiser, at least minds with a good deal more sense of fun. Books provide the words of masterminds living and dead, and if it remains a one-way dialog, it is surely not a dialog without profit.

There may have always been libraries, at least from that moment when records were struck and fired in clay, and businesses needed to warehouse accounts. But there have not always been libraries for general use. There have not always been references for the many. The most locked-up libraries were in that era we call The Dark Ages.

I am suspicious of the Internet. Despite its pretentions to print, it is much more oral in kind and temporary in nature. It is damned more effective in changing the facts to suit New Necessities than imagining Winston Smith burning old clippings and filing amended histories. Wikipedia skins itself over with the ease of selecting the next track on your IPod. In a library, the counterfeit of an article would have been a noticeable attempt.

I fear for the libraries, that they might go not from burning, but from lack of funding, lack of interest, and the fading cares of the noonday football crowd, as yet another two-point conversion consumes our personal sovereignties.