Celebrating Books in Columbus OH

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. —Elizabeth Hardwick

What a great weekend at the Columbus Book Festival. If you ever get the chance to go to this festival, you should go. That is obviously a message many readers and writers who live close to Columbus, Ohio, are ready to embrace. Thousands of people showed up for their third annual Book Festival, and wow, was it ever worth their time to come to the Columbus Metropolitan Library to celebrate books. The venue was beautiful. The people were friendly, and the library was packed with people who love books. They came and listened to the writers talk about their books. They went to a bookstore set up in the library and bought armloads of books.  The auditoriums were packed for the headline writers that included Mary Alice Monroe, Wally Lamb, Gregg Hurwitz, and others.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his needs, is good for him. —Maya Angelou

And there were a lot of children’s activities and happy children running around in the library learning to love reading and books. Parents were smiling as they carted their little ones around, sharing their love for story and books. I had no trouble imagining those parents reading bedtime stories to those wonder-filled children.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. —Richard Steele

On top of seeing all the people there celebrating books, actually being in the beautiful building was a special treat. Marble steps, ornate stair railing, beautiful sky lights. Everywhere you looked you saw beauty and knew that there had been many people through the years who knew the importance of libraries to a city. Books were displayed in wonderful ways that made you feel you were in a bookstore on the first floor, but it was a store where all you needed to carry a book home to read was a library card. I have always loved libraries but have never been in one quite like this one.

Then upstairs they had rows and rows of shelves of books for readers to check out. Add to that, they had comfortable seating all around the library for people to sit a while to do some quiet reading although quiet wasn’t expected or found Saturday or Sunday. I told my daughter, who went with me to the event, that there was no library shushing going on. Plenty of noise was happening as we all celebrated books and writers and readers.

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” – Stephen King

I wish you all could have been there to say hello to some of your favorite writers. I had a great time talking to plenty of readers about books and did see a few of you who I had only met here or on social media previously.

They had a tent full of used books for sale that had a line of people waiting to go in to see what they could find for a dollar or two. Even a sudden thunderstorm on Saturday afternoon didn’t dampen spirits although it dampened a lot of people. Oddly enough, that was one of the few times I was out of the library to where tents were set up for exhibitors. My daughter and I were fortunate enough to get into a tent before the downpour.

Even with that one rainy spell, all in all, it was a beautiful weekend of books. The book is surely alive and well in Columbus, Ohio. That makes me happy.

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time—proof that humans can work magic. —Carl Sagan

You can check out more pictures at the Columbus Book Festival’s Facebook page.