"As I made many journeys there, I began to speak to the people of the town, and once I walked in merely to attend a lecture at the Atheneum. Nantucket Town was a pleasant plae, with many independent and intelligent women. When men were home from the sea, they were happy to socialize along with their wives. I much liked the gabbiness of the town, for the talk was not mere gossip but of ideas and politics, spiced with the customs and sights from all around the globe."
-- Ahab's Wife or, the Star-Gazer p. 337 (end of chapter 77)
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| The Coffee Maven prior to a 2007 Atheneum appearance |
The passage above is near the middle of Sena Jeter Naslund's 1999 novel, which could be called Moby Dick fan fiction. As with the original novel, it has much to do with New Bedford and Nantucket but also oceans a world away. I am a slow reader and this is something of a slow book. I have enjoyed it as a mood piece over the past several years, during stays at our weekend place that we have dubbed Whaling House.
I was away from the house and the book for nearly a year as the house was renovated as our full-time home. Now that the dust has literally settled, I have dipped back into this book, savoring a few pages at a time. This is just the kind of novel -- or film -- I enjoy most: rich in texture, characters, and atmosphere.
I read this passage aloud to my librarian spouse and share it again here because it mentions something we have actually done together. In 2007, we delivered a lecture at the Atheneum. This was very early in my time as a public scholar of coffee, and it was a delight to be ferried over to the island to talk about our travels to the coffeelands of Nicaragua. What better place for a local talk on a global topic?
I think it was from this experience that I learned that Atheneum usually refers to a private library, but in this case, the Atheneum serves as the public library for Nantucket. (Geographic note: although the Atheneum is in the densely-settled area near the harbor that is considered Nantucket Town, it is the case that Nantucket is a town, a county, and an island -- all occupying the same exact space.)
Our dear friend Nancy had grown up near the Atheneum and was a clerk there for many years. She played a big role in organizing lectures and hosting the speakers at her family's guest house. She also arranged for us to give related presentations at nearby schools, which I describe on my old coffee outreach page.
The excerpt above mentions a few other things of interest. One is that when it was the global center of the whaling industry, women ran their households and the town. It also was a tiny place with global connections, much as its successor New Bedford became. Travel broadens the mind and globally diverse communities like these are good for the mind.
Which leads to the last point -- conversation is more interesting when we have diverse experiences to share. And it was a casual conversation on a street corner a couple blocks from the Atheneum that made Moby Dick possible.
Lagniappe
Happy National Library Week to those who celebrate -- which should be all of us. My slow reading of Ahab's Wife brought me to the Atheneum passage on the first day of the 2025 celebration.
I am immensely proud of both librarians in my house. My wife Pamela has worked in every kind of library -- academic, corporate, and public -- both as a professional and as a volunteer.
Our son Harvey has worked in a few libraries and archives and is now an outstanding student of library science at the University of Rhode Island. He is keenly interested in seeing that everybody has access to libraries.
Libraries are among the public institutions most directly under attack here in the United States. Our family stands firmly for the freedom to read.
Geography asks three questions:
