Libraries as spaces of freedom

Por Elton Furlanetto

Enviado em 28/05/2025

Parágrafo de contexto: Fiz esse texto como reflexão do projeto de visita às bibliotecas que desenvolvi junto à disciplina de Língua Inglesa VII. 

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Another important detail about my school was that it was surrounded by books. Beside it, to the right, there was a bookstore and stationary called Bookstop. I would save some money and go there to buy one book or another from a series I was collecting. On the other side, there was a public library, called Monteiro Lobato. I remember it took me some time to go there. The building was not so appealing, but when I found out that was a building-size library so much bigger than that one room library inside school, I started visiting there. I remember spending some afternoons there, consulting reference books in English like grammars and dictionaries. It was just before the internet became a thing and was a source of research and materials, so I had no other way to be in contact with the language I had been growing so interested in.

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Even though I lived in Guarulhos, from time to time, I would visit São Paulo, to access things this neighboring city had to offer. My mother, knowing that I had a passion for comic books, found out there was a famous large comic collection in a library in the Vila Mariana district (the Gibiteca Henfil started at Viriato Correa Library, where I visited it, but in 1999, it was transferred to where it is now, Centro Cultural São Paulo). We took the bus and subway, which was something I loved doing as a child, except when it was crowded — I did not like big crowds — and there we went to this space that had so many comic books as I had never seen before. At that time, we would buy the comic books at newsstands, and they had a limited amount of the latest ones, as they would return the older ones to the distributors. It was right when I was starting to fall for superhero comic books, as I was almost a teenager and I would associate Monica’s gang to childhood. I needed more mature plots and art. So that place provided me with everything I wanted and more. I asked my mother to take me there a few times, it was a place of discovery and my little sister and I would spend hours taking the comic books, checking out their covers and sitting somewhere to leaf through them. I don’t remember what came before, the visits or the subscription to a monthly kit of Marvel comics which led me to collect hundreds of comic books at home (and later she had me donate most of them when I left home and she needed the space. She was never a hoarder). I saved 9 of them, which are still here on my shelf. Also, in one of the visits to that comic book library, there was a reporter and we were in the news. However, as my mother really does her decluttering, apparently she got rid of the clip with one of the first interviews I ever gave in life.

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At university, I was lucky to see a big change in regards to libraries. I started my undergrad course in 2001 and in 2005, while I was still a student, my Faculty unified the collections from different courses and departments that were stored in different places and they created the Florestan Fernandes Library, with three floors and very modern equipment and structure. I had to admit I spent many hours walking around the many shelves and floors, alone, or with my classmates and friends. I took naps besides piles of books, I spent hours looking for books that the system said were there or spent some time misplacing some book that I would need after lunch so people would not put them back in place (not very proud of this last one).

Some years later, when I went abroad for one year to spend part of my PhD at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, another remarkable situation happened. I was a visiting research scholar there and some days after I had arrived, I decided to visit Library West. The library was quite distinct from what I was used to. As I entered it, there were escalators going up and down, under them, a coffee shop. As we got to the first floor, the lights were yellow and not white. The floor was carpeted so there was no sound of steps. It was a wide hall, with the counter, several corridors taking us to different parts of the library. The armchairs were super comfortable, the study stations were also interesting and quiet. There were several long tables where different people could work. Later I would find the DVD area, the room for printing and use of scanners and the small rooms for group study. One very different feature of this library is that during exam weeks, mid or finals, the library would work 24 hours, so you could be there in the middle of the night, finishing papers or studying with a partner. And it was not like it would be you and ghosts only, the library would bubble with life at 2 am. One thing I loved doing there was “playing with” the moving shelves. They were electronic, so you had to press a button and it would move sideways, so you could access the material you wanted. There were sensors, so it would not move if there were people in the aisle, but I avoided standing still, as someone could press the button and I would be caught in between.

Libraries as spaces

If you read biographies and memoirs of writers from the early and mid XX century, most of them will pay their homage to the public libraries in their lives. They used the library as a means of escaping lonely, sometimes violent, oftentimes impoverished lives. Not a few of them will mention how they felt secure and in touch with what humanity had created up to that point. I am not sure if libraries held this same importance for artists of the XXI century, but it would be an interesting topic to research.

One of the most striking features of libraries, as we can grasp from my previous experiences, and also from reading testimonials of important authors, was that they are a space for a little more than storing and borrowing books and other materials. They are responsible for providing a place of silence and concentration, in a world with more and more distractions, from our phones to all other stimuli that reach our senses. Some people will use the metaphor of a sanctuary, because of this silence and protection. It allows us some time to wander around, not very fast, reducing our pace and taking the time to observe the books, looking for the codes and numbers to find what we are looking for.

Other metaphors, as one used by Michèle Petit in her Somos animais poéticos (2024), is that libraries are gardens. The idea of the garden evokes a sense of peace, of protection and a place to get lost. She says libraries take us to places-beyond we need to go. This need sometimes is not clear to us. It is only when you slow down that objects around us start to take shape again. Our accelerated lives tend to blur everything into a formless glimmer. And automatism makes things invisible to us because of habit.

She says we can expect libraries to be frameworks, places of order, where we can find things by following a certain code, a certain arrangement. Also, she affirms that we can find the unexpected there, in books and outside them. Libraries are the house of thought, a habitation of memory and the voices that are lost in tragic events of our history.

When libraries are located inside schools, they seem to carry other meanings, other objectives. Sometimes, like in my previous account, they will be the only place people can have access to a variety of books and ideas. Silvia Castrillon, in her Biblioteca na escola (2024), tells us of her forty-year experience with programs that installed and sustained, sometimes closed libraries inside schools. She demonstrates that libraries can weigh heavily in the formation of new readers, in the awakening of an interest, and maybe a passion for reading. And for those already initiated, they can be spaces of protection or expansion of their reading horizons. She emphasizes the point that many people believe libraries in schools are necessary, but these same people do not know why they are. To deal with these reasons, she resorts to political, administrative and academic discourses. She thinks it is fundamental to develop a policy for the creation and for the functioning of libraries, in a sense that they evaluate and select those materials that are most pertinent for the school's larger project. She claims libraries should be systems or mechanisms, or a service that allows the books to be found where they are needed. Also, it saves students from the single vision of their textbooks. And it goes beyond offering a place to voluntary and spontaneous reading.

Libraries as experiences

According to the last Retratos da Leitura no Brasil (2024), a report that shows different aspects of literature consumption in our country, the number of people that read decreased, in comparison to 2019, in all categories: level of education, gender, age (the exception was a slight increase in 70 or more), social class (the exception here was a 6% increase for families with 5 to 10 minimum wages). The choice of libraries as places to read fell from 20% to 14%. There are some possible reasons for this number: people are not aware of how libraries work; after the pandemics, there were more digital resources available and people knew better how to access them; the price of transportation increased; and the fact you have to go to the library twice: once to borrow the book, later to return it. (By the way, some people could claim that libraries are places to exercise a sense of responsibility. You have to take care not to damage the book, you need to be careful with deadlines, renew or return the books according to the time frame each library gives. You should not highlight information with markers, pens or pencils, as this could disturb other people’s experiences with the book later.) 

What we can understand from this set of data is that there are varied and complex reasons for people to be accessing libraries less and less. There seems to be something going wrong with the readership formation in the educational system, little to no support from families, economic problems, but more than that, the most common reasons people say prevent them from reading are lack of time and patience to read, preference for other activities and the unavailability of libraries near their houses.

Our hegemonic ideology, to get a bit more cultural materialist, teaches us that everything that is for free is not good enough. You have to accumulate, you have to own, and what’s public has lower quality. Books in libraries are for free, you can use them and then take them back so other people may take advantage of them. We are taught that what’s older is less important, we are drawn to the glossy cover, new fonts, bright colors. And libraries are rarely offering those. The system of updating their collections tends to be flawed, slow and ineffective.

Can we have a really good experience with an object even if that object does not belong to us? Can we experience a different treatment of time, develop a new sense of community, of something larger than life, as we see put together all those human endeavours to create stories, to interpret the world? Could looking at shelves and books be similar to looking at a starry sky? Do we wonder about the infinitude of ideas, creativity, uses of language, that are available to us in different shapes, in different styles, different languages?

In the context of trying to understand a little bit better these questions and many others, I developed a project integrated into a course they have to take, Língua Inglesa VII. Visiting libraries with my students started as a way to ressignify those spaces for us. It was a way of de-automatizing and de-instrumentalizing the visit, so we can see some layers that were hidden by hurriness and impatience. We are not looking for some specific information only. We are searching for what moves us, what is completely or partially unknown or unfamiliar. We are giving chance a chance. For this project, one or more guidelines is/are created and shared with them as they get to the place, and more than just reporting what they do (or how they do it) in the library, they have to make observations and relate to the space, to their feelings about that space, about their establishing of a dialog with works and the people who came before them. The results in previous years have been very promising. Even though the students are approaching their graduation moment, some of them had never borrowed a book and needed help to do that. Others had not done that in a while. Once, there was a student who had borrowed a book and forgot to return it. When she remembered, she felt ashamed of being that late, and felt bad about returning it. As she told me that, inside the library, I told her how important it would be for her to return it, and face the consequences of her mistake, as she would be suspended, but would not have to pay a fine or something. 

For future teachers, especially language teachers, this experience of reflecting about the space of the library is essential for empowering discussions and encouraging the making of relationships between books, materials, quality information, libraries as real and imagined spaces and projects and their students.

I feel that everyone should take some time off of their busy routines and should visit a library to reconnect with those moments when they were treasure-hunting as children or adults. They should try wandering around, lurking, looking, waiting for some kind of magic to happen and some title, some letter, colors, a glimpse of a cover to call their attention and the connection be established with some knowledge or creativity produced by humans for us, other humans.