Our public library system increasingly feels like a miracle. The ability to walk in, find a book, check it out, and bring it home—for free, on an honor system—offers a glimpse of a society in which collective knowledge and well-being are valued above profit. 

Anyone can check out a book. Anyone can enjoy air-conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter. Anyone can use the bathroom, sit on a soft chair, or log onto the internet. Everyone’s library card looks the same. Children can encounter new worlds, and elders can find community. There’s no red tape.   

Also: Public libraries fly in the face of our increasingly oligarchical, anti-intellectual, individualized culture and are currently threatened from about a thousand different directions. They’re threatened existentially by cuts to the humanities and the rapacious rise of artificial intelligence, and they’re threatened quite tangibly by book bans and Elon Musk, who is pursuing sweeping privatization and austerity measures, with public services—PBS and NPR among them—first on the administration’s chopping block. 

This next year, I want to spend some time with our libraries—the ones that inspire us and reinforce our reputation as the Research Triangle. Of North Carolina’s 411 libraries, 23 are located in Wake County, seven are in Durham County, and two are in Orange County—and that’s not to mention university libraries, through the public UNC system and beyond, that residents have access to.

As part of a yearlong series, the INDY will run one feature a month exploring the story of a Triangle library through different lenses: their history, programming, patrons, and people behind the scenes. This is a way to draw attention to the resources of our treasured third places—and a nice way to focus on something positive. For January, Durham’s Stanford L. Warren Library, which has a rich history as Durham’s first library accessible to the Black community, feels like a great place to start. 

I like how the novelist Anne Lamott puts it: “When people don’t have free access to books, then communities are like radios without batteries. You cut people off from essential sources of information—mythical, practical, linguistic, political—and you break them. You render them helpless in the face of political oppression.”

Thanks for reading! I hope you’ll join us on this journey.  

more from the series

Have story suggestions for this series? Email [email protected].

Sarah Edwards is culture editor of the INDY, covering cultural institutions and the arts in the Triangle. She joined the staff in 2019 and assumed her current role in 2020.