Ray Bradbury is launching a campaign to help U.S. libraries, which are struggling because of funding cuts. Bradbury appeared last Saturday at a California event to help raise money for the HP Wright library in Ventura.
The HP Wright library in Ventura is threatened with closure due to cuts in public funding, unless it raises $280,000 by next March. Bradbury's event was the first in a year-long series of author appearances designed to help keep the 44-year-old library open. The $25 ticket offered patrons the chance to hear a talk from the author of Fahrenheit 451, as well as see a screening of The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, a film based on one of his short stories.
Bradbury said that he had spoken at all of California's 200-odd libraries. "I have a wheelchair, so they carry me to the car, and they throw me in the car, and throw me in the library, and they sell books and they keep all the money. I talk free, to make money for them so they can continue," he told the New York Times. "All libraries are special."
Although the 88-year-old Bradbury is vehemently anti-internet – it's "a big distraction ... It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere," he told the Times – he is very much pro-library. "Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years," he said. "I read everything in the library. I read everything. I took out 10 books a week so I had a couple of hundred books a year I read, on literature, poetry, plays, and I read all the great short stories, hundreds of them. I graduated from the library when I was 28 years old. That library educated me, not the college."
If you'd like to donate to the H.P. Wright library, you can contact the library through its website. There are libraries across the U.S. which are in trouble right now. Because of the recession, traffic is up and funding is down. Librarians are overworked and could use trained volunteer help, as well.
