Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian by Avi Steinberg

ziti and play video games together.
    Every day for nearly a month I tuned into this soap opera—all of which took place inside an ordinary reference book. Using volume 57 of the Federal Reporter , a bulky series of case law, as their ad hoc mailbox, Shizz and Mars Bar, two inmates who never came face-to-face inside the prison, maintained their stormy relationship. The correspondence ended one day, leaving me to wonder what ever became of their complicated romance.
    As I made my daily rounds, I discovered notes—sometimes pages long—wedged in books. In an art book, or a guide to women’s health, or a giant concordance of Lord Tennyson’s works. The denser, the better.
    “Ill leave you the next one in the boring books,” wrote one inmate to his lady pen pal. He was referring to the Encyclopedia Brittannica .
    As I learned from reading them, a prison letter is known as a kite . The word appeared everywhere. Stix, a nineteen-year-old first-time convict, always signed off his letters with a promise to “fly ya another kite next week.”
    I liked the connotation of the word. It was a tidy metaphor for a letter, especially from prison, a precious and precarious little creation, a physical object—unlike most forms of letters today—folded up and sent out into the world for another person to see from afar. Sometimes these letters were addressed to a specific person, sometimes they were left for whomever found them. Often, that person was me.
    I didn’t always intercept these missives. When a male inmate, who had just entered the prison, broke the news to his sister, an inmate in the tower, that their mother had just died, I obviously wasn’t going to remove the letter.
    “See lil’ sis,” he wrote, “you know you still got me. Don’t never forget.”
    But in general, I treated even the innocuous letters as contraband, as per my job description and Amato’s warning to prevent the library from becoming an “anything-goes zone.” I made regular searches through the books and shelves, scouring hot spots, keeping an eye out for inmates dropping notes. I checked disks and computer desktops for e-kites. I felt bad tampering with other people’s mail. One never knows what’s behind even a silly letter, what the context is. Removing letters seemed more of a misdeed than the placing of one.
    Secretly, I was grateful for the kites. They taught me a great deal about the language and culture of my workplace. Like actual kites, these notes came in all shapes and sizes. They were some of the best reading on the library shelves. Some were masterpieces of the genre, contenders for the Great American Kite. One guy tried to win back his erstwhile girlfriend by writing in the voice of God. “Behold,” he wrote on page 5, “I give thee today the Blessing and the Curse.” The takeaway lesson from his letter: if you decide to speak in the name of the Almighty, don’t make so many spelling errors (“… for I shall reek vengince …”).
    Another inmate alternated between English and Spanish, sometimes in the same paragraph: in Spanish she was sweet and conciliatory, but in English she was a raging lunatic.
    But few could match the swashbuckling antics of a kite that dropped out of an economics textbook one dreary afternoon. This letter from one woman to another—unsigned, though all evidence suggested Ms. Brutish—may be the voice America has been waiting for: the diesel-fueled lesbian hybrid of Saul Bellow’s Augie March and Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle:
What’s good Baby girl?!
Yo, your kite was right!! Chic, ya off the hook, and on some real shit, I’m feelin’ that! But anyhow, I’m never one that’s lost for words. A bitch like me can’t be stuck on chuck, the boss is lost, for nada. I’m a go-getter, and I go for what I want, and usually, I get what I want. Early!… so you need to be dicked down and licked down? Well, ma, I can’t help ya with the first one, but I’ve been told that my skills on the other is