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In my memories of the old Leon County library on Monroe Street, it is always summer. My mother packs us all up and takes us downtown, past J.C. Penney and the Little Folks toy store (a stop generally not permitted) and into the dank, cool expanse of the library. The kids section is a subterranean lair that smells of mold and stale paper, and here I find books on sports and Daniel Boone and a series about an investigative pig that I check out with my paper library card and its small metal tag.

The Leon County library would move to another subterranean lair, the bottom of the old Northwood Mall, before finding its way to its current location, but by then I was gone, off to college and work and back. It never occurred to me that libraries might be changing, even with the advent of audiobooks and the Internet, until one day I entered the Strozier library at FSU to find the tank-like racks of card catalogs absent and a Starbucks kiosk bustling in the lobby.

Wayne A. Wiegand, professor emeritus of Library and Information Studies at Florida State and former director of the Florida Book Awards, provides a much more expansive history of public libraries in the U.S. with his book “Part of Our Lives — A People’s History of the American Public Library” (Oxford Press), starting with Benjamin Franklin’s Library Company of Philadelphia and other “social” and “circulating” libraries.

Interestingly, none of these early libraries included fiction, as such offerings were deemed to nurture “impure desires,” “vanity” and “dissipation.” According to Thomas Jefferson, “A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels.” Eventually, of course, libraries relented, in part due to the fact the public demanded it, but also perhaps because novels empowered women, people of color and the lower classes to rethink societal roles others assigned to them.

“Part of Our Lives” provides other interesting facts about the way American libraries matured. Reference service became standard practice in public libraries around the turn of the century — they furthered the “useful knowledge” public libraries saw as their mission. In addition to issues regarding segregated libraries, there were other conflicts, including the failure of public libraries to feature enough Catholic books. Not to mention the arguments about “banned” books, of which America has a long history, from “Huckleberry Finn” to “The Jungle” and beyond (extending even into “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” in our local school community, circa 2015).

Technology began changing things even in the sixties, with the advent of scanners and magnetic alarm strips. Libraries began offering videocassettes, films and recordings, and things beyond just merely books. “Multi-purpose” rooms became common. Meetings and readings and workshops and free computer use.

People love libraries. And yet the Internet cometh. Suddenly public libraries find themselves under attack — do we need all these libraries, when people can download (mostly for free) what they want? Futurists proclaim the printed book as dead. Recessions, budget-cutting, reduced library hours proliferate.

And yet, as Wiegand points out, reading in public libraries is actually up, as is use of library space. Public libraries have become over the years much more than merely book repositories — they are community gateways to knowledge. Although they’re used now less for reference purposes, other uses have increased, including serving as a cultural forum and place to bring people together. As a portal open to everyone. And still as a place for little boys who like to read and imagine, and think maybe someday I could write an article, story or perhaps a book.

Please join Wayne Wiegand, Dr. Charles McClure of the FSU School of Information, Florida State Librarian Amy L. Johnson and me for a discussion of his book and the future of the public library at ... of course, the main Leon County Public Library at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 12.

Mark Mustian is a local attorney who spent 10 years as a city commissioner. He is the author of the novels “The Return” and “The Gendarme.”

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