The Fantasist’s Library

Libraries have long played an essential part in my life. I can, in fact, make the case that it was a library that started me down the path of writing fantasy literature in the first place.

When I was very young my parents would take me every couple weeks to the Des Moines Public Library. This was a huge, imposing building with a central card file the size of some 1960s science fiction computer; and branching off from this central space what seemed like endless rooms filled with books, as well as steps up to another ring of rooms around a balcony from which you could look down and see other people pulling out the skinny card drawers, flipping through the cards, jotting notes with their stubby pencils. It was one of those places where, because nobody was talking, you learned by observing. And there was something arcane and seductive and almost sacred about it.

For a number of years my parents came in and helped me pick out books to read. Mostly I remember coming home with stacks of all the Dr. Seuss you could throw a turtle at. I’m sure there was something else in the mix, but The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins has taken over my memory of that period.

Somewhere along in this process, they just turned me loose to find my own books. I must have been nine or ten when that happened.

The first book I can recall taking out of the library of my own choosing was a retelling of The Odyssey of Homer by one Barbara Leonie Picard. The cover and interior art was by someone named Kidell-Monroe and it was in the style of Greek black figure art off amphorae and pottery. Quite clearly I can remember sitting in a big chair in our living room and just falling into that book like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. Heroes, a cyclops, sirens, Scylla and Charybdis . . . this was not Dr. Seuss. This was the most amazing thing I’d ever encountered, and thereafter all I wanted was more of the same. The fantastic became my meat and drink, so that well before I got to high school I’d already devoured countless science fiction and fantasy novels, short stories, collections and anthologies. I’d already encountered dystopic futures, and epic tales of barbarians, Beowulf and Grendel, Bradbury’s Mars, Heinlein’s space suit, and Jack Williamson’s humanoids.

Some of those came out of the library as well, but I only hold it responsible for that initial selection. It delighted me to find out, ten years back, that Ms. Picard’s rendition of The Odyssey was still in print all these years later. I owe her, big-time.

- Gregory Frost, Local Author