Keeper of Keys

How to steal like Ray Bradbury: “I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest.”

austinkleon:

“I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college.”

While digging for a 1971 Ray Bradbury essay called “How, Instead of Being Educated in College, I Was Graduated From Libraries,” I came across this Paris Review interview again.

Loved this bit about him stealing magazines:

I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them.

Bradbury claimed that the library was way more fun than school “because you make up your own [reading] list and you don’t have to listen to anyone.”

He considered the library a self-invention station:

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

More on why libraries are the true schools for writers→

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    I like when you think about me.

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    Carolyn this made me think of you because libraries.

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