Everyone has a story about being saved by literature and at a recent Friends of the San Francisco Public Library event, author Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) shared his tale, saying that he “can’t imagine a world without libraries.”

His library love began as a child, where there was hardly a day he wasn’t visiting the West Portal Branch.  As a teen,  he was a regular at the Merced Branch Library and even kept bookmarks in books he “didn’t have the guts to check out.”

As an adult, Handler spends much of his time at the Eureka Valley Branch,  which is where he wrote most of his newest novel, Why We Broke Up, adding that:

I would mostly work with headphones on.  One day the batteries went off and I took out my headphones and realized that suddenly, I was surrounded by exactly the sort of people whose voice I was trying to capture.  It was a really diluted moment where I spent weeks trying to cover up the noise of teenagers so I could really get the voice of a teenager.

To properly illustrate his love for libraries and where we’d be without them, he wrote and performed a song about the importance of libraries to people of all ages–children, teens and adults!  Check out the lyrics below!

Do you have  special story about reading, literature or your library?  Share it with us in the comment section!

Without Libraries, by Daniel Handler

SONG
We are born and we’re not smart
and our parents kinda try and do their part
But our brains, they need some facts
so our education starts in the public stacks

Chorus:
Without Libraries We’d be Dumb
We wouldn’t know our elbow, from our bum
Libraries are our Friends and we should take good care of them
Because without libraries we’d be D-U-M

Now when we’re teens, we start to sour
We have hormones but not a lot of power
And when there’s things, we want to know
We need a nice safe place where there isn’t any blow

YES!

Chorus:
Without Libraries We’d be Dumb
We wouldn’t know our elbow, from our bum
Libraries are our Friends and we should take good care of them
Because without libraries we’d be D-U-M

Then we’re adults and we’re in charge
And our egos can get a little large
We open our mouths, and words come out
But how can we make it seem, like we know what we’re talking about?

LIBRARIES!

Chorus:
Without Libraries We’d be Dumb
We wouldn’t know our elbow, from our bum
Libraries are our Friends and we should take good care of them
Because without libraries we’d be D-U-M

As we grow old, we might get dim
Even if we keep up at the gym
We lose our figures, we lose looks
But we’ll keep our smarts if we hang around with books

Chorus:
Without Libraries We’d be Dumb
We wouldn’t know our elbow, from our bum
Libraries are our Friends and we should take good care of them
Because without libraries we’d be D-U-M

And then we die, and that’s the end
At the funeral, there’ll be one loyal Friend
And he’ll get up, remove his cap
But where will he find a poem, that isn’t utter crap?

YES!

Chorus:
Without Libraries We’d be Dumb
We wouldn’t know our elbow, from our bum
Libraries are our Friends and we should take good care of them
Because without libraries we’d be D-U-M

Filed under: At the Library, Check it out, Uncategorized