Back Talk — Rip Van Winkle Returns to Charleston! Column Editor: Ann Okerson (Advisor on Electronic Resources Strategy, Center for Research Libraries) <aokerson@gmail.com>
H
ello, there, it’s me again: Rip, Rip van Winkle! I gave you a little backtalk earlier this year, when I had just awakened to find this whole pandemic thing roaring along, but I must have dozed off again. This time when I woke up, everybody around me was talking excitedly about a major event called the Charleston Conference. I remembered it from the Times Before (my long nap, you know), and I thought I might as well go along with them to see what it was up to — maybe it had a long nap as well! Now exactly where I woke up is a bit of a puzzle, because I was in a car rattling along I-95, and the people I was with were plotting their course for a Chocolate Library. I thought that was a very confusing idea because I’m so old that I can remember when they wouldn’t let food into a library, much less make a whole one out of chocolate. Suddenly, there we were, pulling into Savannah and driving around gardens of good and evil by Bull Street, when one of my colleagues exclaimed, “There it is!” and we veered to a stop. Sure enough it was a Chocolate Library of sorts (http:// www.chocolatat.com/locations) – shelves with fine chocolates arrayed in neat librarianish order, mixed in with shelves full of, well, you’d have to say books, but really, did they all need to be hardcover encyclopedia volumes from before I was born, and in rather bad shape at that? And the large scale models of the Eiffel Tower and the Tower of Pisa over by the entrance? The nice lady gave customers wooden trays that looked like card catalog drawers to use in going around and collecting their choice of chocolate, which was rather amusing, but dear me, strangest library I’ve ever been in. Now, I’m telling you all this not only because I’m sure you like to read about all kinds of libraries, but because the Savannah Library has a sister shop right in, yes, downtown Charleston,
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62 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022
on King Street a block before you get to Ben Silver — only there it’s called an Orangerie, not a library, with lots of bird cages and the same chocolate. Actually the chocolate in both places is very good and is made by a fine young man named Adam Turoni, and I was glad to have been hauled around to explore his shops! OK, as you can already see, eventually we got to Charleston, that lovely city you remember from the Days Before COVID. Nice people, nice hotels, nice cafes, another totally excellent chocolatier who’s been there for some years and seems to have opened a second shop out in West Ashley of all places (“Christophe Artisan Chocolatier” on Society Street, just five minutes from the Francis Marion https://christophechocolatier.com/), History was in the air. I hadn’t been there since the Days Before, and the pleasure of going back to favorite places now is one of the few blessings this evil bug has brought us. Oh, there are changes: more new hotels and cafes, but a lot of empty shops on King Street waiting for the waves of visitors to return, as they should. I was pleased to see that the Cat Cafe on Meeting Street was still around and busy. The colossal pillar in Marion Square that had the statue of a rather unpleasant man on it has been completely torn down and carried off — and in its place is a large work of art forming the word JOY with a South Carolina pineapple playing the part of the second letter. I couldn’t tell if this was a message to replace the old statue or a highly premature Christmas decoration or — my vote — a tribute to one of the conference’s keynote speakers. But we all were back. The Conference itself was just as I remembered it, with a huge buffet of rich intellectual fare spread over three days. In the Days Before, something like 1800 people would come to the city for the buffet, but then last year, when the whole thing apparently went virtual, the number hit 3000! The total number this year was a bit less, but now it was a mix of online and presence and a great experiment — the first one I’ve seen personally — in how to manage that combination. There’s a lot to be learned about making such things go smoothly, but perhaps even just five years from now we’ll be standing on the rooftop terrace of the Dewberry (thank you, Stephen Rhind-Tutt for the treats!) boasting about how we were there for the first hybrid conference and now, we will say, look what a huge and roaring success this new format has turned into. The issues of the day included the new focus on post-COVID realities and the renewed challenges of inclusiveness and equity, and I learned a lot about what I’d missed during my long nap. Keynote speaker and futurist Paul Saffo — entirely virtual, beamed in from, where else, Silicon Valley, talked about how librarians can learn to think like a civilization, while Joy Connolly — the one with her first name up in lights in Marion Square — came from the American Council of Learned Societies to tell us to think different and reviewed the opportunities she sees continued on page 61
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