Back in my college days–a lifetime ago–I spent most of my waking hours in the school’s main library. Between classes and my work-study jobs at the cafeteria and at the library itself, there just wasn’t enough time to dash back to my bare-bones studio atop an uptown bar. And so I would stake out a desk in a quiet corner on the basement floor of the library, and there I could do my homework and study in peace, and sometimes even squeeze in a much-needed snooze by simply laying my head down on the small table. Ah, those few z’s caught on the fly, they were just pure heaven! Once in a while, I would take a short break to go stretch my legs and wander among the rows and rows of filled bookshelves, and it never failed to amaze and delight me then, just how much knowledge and entertainment was at my fingertips, literally.

All this reminiscing simply to say that I love libraries and the treasures hidden within them. They are some of my favorite places, the coolest of hideaways. So imagine my excitement when earlier this year I discovered that my own books had been added to the catalog at Yale University, on the stacks at iconic Sterling Memorial Library (SML in the catalog annotations). That’s the Gothic-styled building shown in the picture above.

A little digging around using the World Catalog revealed even more surprises. I was thrilled beyond words and much humbled to find out that my books also figure in the library catalogs at a number of other academic institutions, as listed below according to geographical locations.

East Coast: Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, NYU, Georgetown, Temple U, Vanderbilt.

Middle USA: Carnegie Mellon, Ohio State, Ohio U (my alma mater), Indiana U, U. of Wisconsin, U. of Michigan, Northern Illinois, Coe College, Iowa State, U. of Nebraska, U. of Montana, Colorado State, Brigham Young U.

The South: U. of Florida, Tulane, Rice.

West Coast and Pacific: San Diego State, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Berkeley (my other alma mater), Stanford, U. of San Francisco, U. of Oregon, U. of Hawaii.

Overseas: U. of Alberta, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) at U. of London, Australian National U.

Below are snapshots of the Harvard Library catalog (or Hollis) and the UC Berkeley Library catalog

I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to know that my books reside in all those cool libraries, just waiting for some curious young minds to discover and explore them. It is what writing is all about, at least in my humble opinion: an act of sharing–a small gift of experience and knowledge to be paid forward. I keep my fingers crossed that this list of libraries will keep on growing.

Have a wonderful summer y’all, and if you haven’t done so in a while, stop in and cool your heels at the local library for an hour or two of peaceful getaway.