I’ve had the good fortune to visit the homes of several writers of note—two, just to drop names: Ernest Hemingway’s homes in Oak Park, Illinois, and Key West, Florida, and Carl Sandburg’s home and farm outside of Flat Rock, North Carolina. Of course, I was a tourist.
But I’ve never visited a writer’s library—the place where he or she hung out as a kid or wrote when he or she didn’t want to write at the coffeeshop.
Until September.
I stopped in at the Riverside Public Library in the Chicago suburb of Riverside. Brian Lies’s grandparents, Mark and Josephine Lies, lived nearby. When Brian was a kid, he spent his summers with his grandparents, and when he wanted to get away to read, this is where he came. And this is where he came back to when he wanted to write and illustrate his book, Bats at the Library, a superb book to read to young children.
Come with me and make the tour.
The library that gave birth to a book
The librarian and her library.The first picture spread in Brian Lies’ children’s book, Bats at the Library, that’s it – that’s the public library of Lies’ youth. And the window through which the bats fly, that’s right there, too.
“He loved this place,” says Riverside library administrator Janice Fisher who hosted Lies for a week, now three years ago, while he sketched scenes for his book.
The building has a classic look, and Lies captured it all.
The library was built in 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression. An addition was added in 1986, an addition that almost tripled the size of the library, but the architect blended it so well with the original building that you just about can’t tell where the old leaves off and the new begins.
This is the lamp.Walk around the library with Fisher and she will show you the fireplace that’s on the Bats at the Library book cover, the reading lamp that’s on the first page and an inner page, the red couch underneath which Lies has bats hanging for storytime.
He was sketching a year and a half before the book was scheduled for publication. Fisher, ever the promoter, said to Lies, why not have the book launch here? He took the idea to Houghton Mifflin, his publisher, and got a yes.
“We went batty,” Fisher says when she and her staff got the word.
So they went to work planning what they later called Batober Fest, an event to be held in October of 2008. Yes, just last year.
Posters and banners and signs went up around the community, newspaper stories ran, business owners put Batober Fest displays in their windows. At night, electrician Aaron Murr threw a bat spotlight on the library and on the town’s water tower.
The bats flew in through this window. “We decorated the whole library,” Fisher says. “We put bats coming in the window. We had bats hanging in all the rooms. My office was the Bat Motel. And our gargoyle [at the roof peak on the front of the building] wore a bat scarf. Even one of our staff members dressed up as a bat.
“Aunt Diana’s Chocolates made chocolate bats that we sold here. Three dollars a piece.”
Metal sculptor Jim Eichorst always has one of his works on display at the library, so he made what Fisher calls a big fat bat for the library.
The actual event started with a VIB reception—a reception for Very Important Bats . . . Lies and his wife, the library’s board of trustees, and the village president and other community leaders.
Following the reception, Fisher threw the doors open for the regular bats. Five hundred people were waiting on the sidewalk and in the park across the street. Couldn’t get them all in at one time, so Lies gave two readings so no one would be left out.
He signed books and signed books and signed books. Fisher estimates 400 that night.
Total, the Friends of the Library sold 500 books as a fundraiser for the Friends.
All that was last year, but this year—on October 8—Fisher got to relive a bit of Batfest. “The Illinois Library Association, at its convention, gave our library its Highsmith Innovation Award, for how we took a concept—a book signing—and made it a community-wide event,” Fisher says.
It’s not over. She’s now taking pictures of prominent people reading the book—the business people in town, people in Riverside government, members of her board of trustees, State Representative Bob Biggins, state officials, and—cross your fingers—the president of the United States.
“Yes, we sent a copy of the book, autographed by Brian, to the president and his family, to try to get them to have a picture taken for us of them with the book,” Fisher says.
All these photos will go into a book that will be displayed at the library.
The couch under which the bats hung for storytime.
© Jerry Peterson.
