The small towns of New England and the Midwest are littered with libraries, many of them minor gems — the ones that haven’t been flattened for handicapped access — but as far as my observation goes, their charm is mainly architectural. The shelves are stocked, for the most part, with ephemeral fiction and how-to books: stuff people really should buy themselves, and not have me buy for them. There are exceptions, thank goodness, but the idea of the local public library as a community collection of the canonical documents of civilization has largely evaporated, and it’s probably true that few libraries run on the old-fashioned basis would survive for long.