Rebecca Wigod
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, April 26, 2008
A klezmer band played in Library Square after Wednesday's announcement that The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky, a 500-page novel about the Jewish immigrant experience in Canada by Karen X. Tulchinsky, is the choice for the Vancouver Public Library's 2008 One Book, One Vancouver program.
The library has hundreds of copies available, including sets of 10 for book clubs, so you'll be seeing lots of people engrossed in it on beaches and patios this summer.
Librarian Janice Douglas, who started One Book and a host of the VPL's other community-minded programs, was there in her trademark jewelry and spike heels. She's retiring Friday, after a 41-year career, so getting the city-wide book club's seventh season off the ground set her reminiscing about how it all started.
"[Librarian] Nancy Pearl was the first one to start one, in Seattle. People were saying, 'Why don't we start one?' I thought, 'One more thing!' But then we got a little group together and put it in our strategic goals. I thought, 'We can just do this. It can't be that difficult.'
"The part that kind of floored me was that when we were looking at the budget, [we discovered that] Seattle had taken three years to plan and had a budget of $103,000. I just laughed hysterically.
"We had $3,000. We're nickling-and-diming all the time to try and make a great idea come to fruition, but in this case it was such a good idea."
Finding a book that will get all of Vancouver talking, ideally a gem that people might have missed when it appeared, has become increasingly difficult, she says. The search now takes five months.
Douglas, who believes in the power of story to illuminate and educate, has a bifurcated job title: She has been the library's director of youth services and community programming.
On the programming side, she can take credit for inviting authors into the library to read from their work. These readings have been going on for 25 years -- they started in the old Burrard Street library, back before there was a Vancouver International Writers Festival -- and are now so numerous that some nights there are two or three to choose from.
"It's music to my ears," she says, "when somebody comes down the stairs, looks at the posters and says, 'Oh, I want to go to all of them!' "
Nonetheless, library staff didn't like the readings at first. "They resented the incursion on their study space, they resented the noise and, most of all, because we were allowing booksellers and publishers to sell books, this was [seen as] huge commercialization of the public library."
She loves the way readings give emerging and mid-list writers exposure while offering the public a stimulating evening with no admission fee. "Not everybody can afford the writers' festival."
On the youth-services side of her job, Douglas started storytime for babies, inviting toddlers and even infants into the library because being read to at a tender age is a foundation for literacy.
"Many of my colleagues really thought we were crazy. Of course, now everybody does it."
On Thursday at 7:30 p.m., a stiletto-shod Janice Douglas will be in the library's Alice MacKay Room to introduce Tulchinsky's first reading in what promises to be a lively One Book season. After that, she'll be doing other things with her evenings.
rwigod@png.canwest.com
