Library Tour: San Diego Central Library
Laura's Manga Library tour has begun!
Public libraries are essential infrastructure in our communities but with the rise of booktok and mangatok, we went from encouraging people to use their local resources to getting them to spend money on curating their own personal libraries. Influencers (including myself) are to blame for making people spend a lot of money on books, sometimes even encouraging large impulsive hauls because those do the best on social media. While buying books did have a positive impact because so many bookstores and publishers did well during in the pandemic and post-pandemic world, we also have to be honest and accept that it has also caused many people to impulsively buy books that go unread. This year due to the economic uncertainties and the threat to our local libraries by the current administration, I’m going to be touring some of the libraries in San Diego county to see what they have available for manga readers.
The first library in our tour stop is the San Diego Central Library in Downtown, San Diego. This is the main branch of the San Diego Public Library, it has 9 stories and a beautiful glass steel-and-mesh lattice dome. The building was designed by San Diego architect Rob Wellington Quigley and it opened in September 2013. This library houses a free art gallery, a collection of rare books, the Sullivan Family Baseball Research Center, and a charter school that takes up two stories of the library.
As an online creator making content about manga for the last 4 years, I went to the library specifically to check out their manga section and let me tell you- it was amazing! The manga section is in the second floor in their Teen Center, it’s literally the first thing you see as you walk into this section.
I found the manga selection at the San Diego Central Library to be very diverse. They obviously had your big shounen series like One Piece, Attack on Titan, and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure but I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of shoujo series in this section as well. I found titles such as Fruits Basket, Snow White with the Red Hair, Skip Beat!, and Yona of the Dawn and they were very well stocked with a lot of the series available for people to dive right in.
Much to my surprise, they also had a great selection of out of print titles such as Revolutionary Girl Utena and the beloved classic Mars which I know how pricey and difficult it is to collect. I’ve been wanting to read Mars for a while, so it was great to see this in person! Unfortunately volumes 1 and 2 were checked out which meant I couldn’t rent them but it still made me happy to see that someone had picked up this series.
Another happy sight was seeing the number of queer manga series available at the library! I found two copies of Is Love the Answer? which is the manga series about asexuality which helped me so much with my own journey with asexuality, the trans story Boys Run the Riot, and even BL series like Given and 10 Dance.
The book I ended up picking up to read was Shirahime-Syo: Snow Goddess Tales by CLAMP, one of the few CLAMP titles I don’t own in my personal CLAMP library. I will post a separate review on it but I really enjoyed grabbing a seat in a corner of the library where I could look up and see the Coronado Bridge in the distance. It was so relaxing!
As I sat in the silent reading room under the dome, I found myself reading Sakura, Saku next to a quote that read “We read to know we are not alone.” At that moment, I felt like I could use whatever influence I have to encourage people to support their local libraries. This first stop in my library tour was a complete success that sparked my interest in discovering more manga libraries and more manga series.
If you have the money to spare, please consider donating to the ALA. If you don’t have the money, just go out there and support your local libraries! Make it an outing with your friends or family, there’s so much to do and discover at the library.
330 Park Blvd, San Diego, CA 92101
You can follow my library tour on YouTube and TikTok!