Hanagarne Josh - The worlds strongest librarian : a memoir of Tourettes, faith, strength, and the power of family

THE
WORLDS
Strongest
Librarian

A Memoir of Tourettes, Faith,
Strength, and the Power of Family

JOSH HANAGARNE

GOTHAM BOOKS
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Copyright 2013 by Joshua Hanagarne
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Excerpt on pages 17980 of Henry Rollinss The Iron reprinted with permission of
Henry Rollins.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Hanagarne, Joshua, 1977

The worlds strongest librarian : a memoir of Tourettes, faith, strength, and the power of family / Joshua Hanagarne.
pages cm

ISBN: 978-1-101-62177-6

1. Hanagarne, Joshua, 1977 2. LibrariansUtahSalt Lake CityBiography.
3. Public librariesUtahSalt Lake City. 4. Tourette syndrome. I. Title.

Z720.H24H36 2013

020.92dc23 2012037713

Designed by Spring Hoteling

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.
In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;
however, the story, the experiences, and the words
are the authors alone..

This is a work of nonfiction. Ive re-created the majority of the dialogue, but its all faithful to the substance of the conversations. When writing scenes, I interviewed the other people involved to see whose memory was the best. This led to some spectacular posturing about the health of our respective brains. Whenever we had different memories of how something happened, I tried to give the tiebreaker to my dear old mom. Im sure Ill still find mistakes in here, probably the second after the book is published, but I doubt theyll be of much consequence.

Josh Hanagarne

For Janette, who waited

Today the library was hot, humid, and smelly. It was like working inside a giant pair of glass underpants without any leg holes to escape through. The building moved. It breathed. It seethed with bodies and thoughts moving in and out of peoples heads. Mostly out.

You tall bigot!

I stopped and wondered if these two words had ever been put next to each other. The odds were astronomical; even someone with my primitive math skills knew this. I laughed, which didnt help the situation, which was this: A guy wearing a jaunty red neckerchief had walked by the reference desk, yelling about the motherfucking Jews and lesbians on the Supreme Court. I had asked him to lower his voice and voil! Now I was a tall bigotthe worst kind of all.

What are you, some kind of Jew? he sputtered. Ive never seen someone so enraged. I wondered what hed do if he knew Id been raised Mormon.

Maybe he was mad because he couldnt find the anti-Semitism section. The library has a robust collection of what I call non-cuddly hate lit. This is one of my favorite things about working here: If you believe censorship is poison, here lies paradise. We have sections on anti-Mormonism, anti-Semitism, anti-anti-Semitism, anti-atheism, anti-God, anti-feminism, pro-gaytheres something to offend everyone.

Moshe Safdie, the architect who designed the Salt Lake City Public Library, won numerous awards for his vision and technical derring-do. He thought big, appropriately, because a building that can hold 500,000 books is enormous. The number of items circulating each hour is rivaled only by the number of people napping in the corners. But nothing is as impressive as the way the building looks. I work in a beautiful building made almost entirely of glass. Seen from the air, it looks like the Nike Swoosh if it got frightened and began to cower.

An older librarianone of the few other malesonce said to me, Whatever we deal with, coming here is always a visual reward. This statement is poetic, accurate, and maddening. Because most of the time it feels like people show up just to fight about something with total strangers like me. Which is fine. Im not here for the good company.

One of the reasons I work here is because I have extreme Tourette Syndrome. The kind with verbal tics, sometimes loud ones; the kind that draws warning looks. Working in this library is the ultimate test for someone who literally cant sit still. Who cant shush himself. A test of willpower, of patience, and occasionally, of the limits of human absurdity.

A patron recently took exception to a series of throat clearings I couldnt suppress. As he approached, I put on my customer service smile and readied myself for one of those rare, mind-blowing reference transactions that I hear about from other librarians. Instead this man said, If youre going to walk around honking like a royal swan, you dont belong in the library. Im going to call security. Somebody needs to teach you a lesson.

I stood up. Im six feet seven inches tall, and I weigh 260 pounds. Is it you? Im not confrontational, but I dont lose many staring contests. Im good at looming when its helpful. He walked away.

I also work here because I love books, because Im inveterately curious, and because, like most librarians, Im not well suited to anything else. As a breed, were the ultimate generalists. Ill never know everything about anything, but Ill know something about almost everything and thats how I like to live.

Earlier today a young woman asked me to help her find a book about how to knit lingerie. This is the sort of question library school recruiters should feature in their dreary PowerPoint presentations, not claptrap about how were the stewards of democracy. They would definitely attract more males to the profession. When I arrived in my library department two years ago, the alpha male was a sixty-six-year-old woman.

On our way to the lingerie sectionyes, the official subject heading is Lingerie, call number 646.42I tripped over another young woman who was lying on the floor beneath a blanket, nestled between two rows of law books. Im thirty-five years old and it both relieves and elates me to know I can still be surprised.