Despite the crowded spaces and construction noise, the Henry Madden Library is now a better place to study than it ever was before. For me, at least.

Why? There used to be too many books.

Many times I would settle down to study for some intensely tedious class, only to abandon my post minutes later. While my study guide and highlighter lay forlornly on a desk, I would be off in the stacks, ostensibly doing “research.”

In reality, I was, as a friend of mine so eloquently puts it, “geeking out” on books.

There is a smell about books that have not been touched in decades. It is pungent and musty, not unlike the smell of an old forest. It is intriguing, not unlike a good mystery novel.

As crowded as the study areas may have been, the stacks were invariably void of human presence. The flickering light and 1970’s yellow metal bookshelves added to the sense of abandonment. It would have been the perfect place for a student horror film.

I would wander slowly down the aisles until I found a spine that looked particularly unusual. Sometimes it was a tooled-leather Latin dictionary that had not been checked out since 1989. Sometimes it was a small, unmarked book with a flaking spine. Often, the books I picked up were printed before 1940. I found one marked 1823 once, but since all the text was in Italian, that could refer to the emperor’s birthdate for all I know.

I liked to brush my fingers over the spines, as if I could pick up some small bit of knowledge from the books by osmosis. The sheer feeling of ignorance often hit me and made me feel that I wanted to read all of the books in the library. They proffered the wisdom of thousands of minds and decades of learning, if only I would pick them up.

Eventually, I realized that I really had no desire to read the multi-volume Benezit Dictionary of Artists any more than I really wanted to study for the class that originally brought me to the library.

My favorite find came while searching for books to use in a California Studies research paper. The book was small and looked as though it had never been read. In the Land of the Grasshopper Song, said the golden letters on the red leather cover. A barely-discernible photograph of an American Indian man’s face peered at me when I cracked it open. It was an account — a journal — of two white women who spent 1908-1909 as government “Indian agents” in Klamath county. There were photos of these women with their mules and their little house and their American Indian friends. I took it home with the other books for my paper, and while I could not use it as a source, it touched me and taught me about that time in America as no anthropology study ever could.

That was my freshman semester. This is my fifth (and possibly final) year at Fresno State, and one of my greatest regrets is that my past two years have been devoid of library adventures. When the new library opens, you can be sure I will be there for one last hurrah in the stacks.

I fully expect my exams to go unstudied-for that semester.