News from Your Otis Library
By Stephanie Skinner, Director
March 2025
New Adult Fiction:
• James by Percival Everett
• Shattering Dawn by Jayne Ann Krentz
• Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
• Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix
New Adult Non-Fiction:
• Oathbreakers by Matthew Gabriele & David M. Perry
New Juvenile Non-Fiction:
• Bugs That Love! by Lori-Michele
And lots more, including movies and new chocolates!
And now for something completely different…
Growing up in New Haven, CT, always in and around the Yale crowd, I often met people who I now know were kind of a big deal. Being a typical cranky tween and teenager, I was dismissive of their achievements and knew far too much to bother finding out who they were and what they did. One of those people was Archibald MacLeish in his very late years. He was the grandfather of two girls, Meg and Morellen, whom I went to school with and shared many a laugh.
I have been reading some of Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series (which we have right here at the Otis Library!), and I came across a quote from one of MacLeish’s better-known poems, The Rock in the Sea, written in response to the Luftwaffe bombing of London. Naturally, this made me Google him, and with all the chagrin I richly deserve, I realized how important and impressive this grandpa truly was.
Yes, MacLeish was a poet. In fact, a damn fine poet who was the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes. He was the First Assistant Secretary of State for Public and Cultural Relations, he taught oratory at Harvard, and he wrote for Fortune magazine. (Fun fact: He was a member of Yale’s infamous Skull and Bones… the same secret society that included Presidents George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Secretary of State John Kerry.)
And, most important for this article, he was the ninth Librarian of Congress for thirteen years under Roosevelt and Truman.
Proceeding merrily down this rabbit hole, I came across an essay MacLeish wrote that says what needs to be said, and exactly what I would say if I was as gifted a poet as he. Here it is, slightly condensed:
“No true book was ever anything else than a report. A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence… it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded—Euclid’s figures, Leonardo’s notes, Newton’s explanations, Cervantes’ myth, Sappho’s broken songs, the vast surge of Homer—everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves.”
“Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby Dick, it is still a ‘report’ upon the ‘mystery of things.’ But if this is what a book is, then a library is an extraordinary thing. The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. It asserts that all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies.”
“The library, almost alone of the great monuments of civilization, stands taller now than it ever did before. The city decays. The nation loses its grandeur. The university is not always certain what it is. But the library remains: a silent and enduring affirmation that the great Reports still speak, and not alone but somehow all together.”
Read that again. Right here in tiny Otis, we have a monument to civilization that holds a beacon to the past and lights a way to discovery of mysteries—the Otis Library.
Yep. I’m just like Archibald MacLeish … minus the SecState stuff and poetry … oh yeah, and the Pulitzers. But I am a Librarian, and that is enough for me.
