An elderly librarian is tired after a long day until, at closing time, a young man arrives asking if she remembers him. It is William Henry Spaulding, a man who, as a child, had spent hours at a time in the library. Of course she remembers him and she reintroduces him to his old friends, the stories that he read as he grew up.
Interspersed with the hints at which books he is reading — like Alice and Wonderland, Treasure Island, and others — are his own memories of the people and events that were shaping his life as he had first read those books. Thus reading the library books is like reliving his childhood. He wasn’t lonely because he had his books. The library and the books were his world, and Miss Adams the librarian was “Mrs. God.”
“And it was finished, all the books were placed, the outer ring of his selves and the inner ring of remembered faces, deathless, with summer and autumn names.”
“Exchange” is a reminder and testament that reading stories is a formative experience, one in which the reader’s life is changed and changing. We remember who we were when we read the story. The librarian and William decide that the Thomas Wolfe phrase “You Can’t Go Home Again” is wrong. William had felt he was in a foreign place in revisiting his home town. But no, William feels he’s come home again in visiting the books at the library. Books bring him home again, as they can all of us too.
