GOOD NEWS

Okay, it seems like "it's all bad news" lately....as it often does these days...and has ever since 24 hour news realized crises get more eyes and ears etc. But, in fact, there's been a lot of good news.

Not just states getting rid of laws against carrying small amounts of marijuana or legalizing it, or legalizing gay marriages, or raising the minimum wage, etc...

...or the Obama administration achieving all sorts of things that previous administrations couldn't, or reversing their failures (in the case of almost, not all, but almost all Bush/Cheney policies).

But I had in mind the news that The New York Public Library at 42nd Street is reconsidering removing the stacks that go several stories down under the building full of books often impossible to find outside The Library of Congress. There had been a plan to remove those books to a storage facility in Jersey, and get rid of many, the trend in most libraries.

But someone has to keep these things for scholars and researches and just interested readers to have access to. There's been a big campaign going on ever since the plan to not just remove those underground stacks of books but to remodel the library to make it more like other libraries have become, i.e. computer centers rather than places where you could go and take a book off the shelves and sit and read it in their reading room, one of the coolest places on earth as far as I'm concerned.

One of the great moments in my life was my stopping by the 42nd Street Library after I moved back East in 1999, and looking through the card catalogue and finding almost all my books, some even in "the rare book room"...it made me feel all the work I'd done wasn't all destined to disappear forever.

I'm sure the powers that be will try to find a way to recycle their nefarious plans in the future, but for now, they're off the table, for which to all those writers and readers famous and unknown who have signed petitions and marched and demonstrated outside the library to stop the remodeling and removal of the stacks I say a big Thank You!