Outside Passage: A Memoir of An Alaska Childhood by Julia Scully

1998 Random House

It's the memoir Outside Passage: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood by Julia Scully that gets me thinking about the particular joys of library patronage. 

The volume, wrapped in a goldenrod yellow "Interlibrary loan" temporary binding, has arrived in Alexandria, Virginia, where I live, from the University of Richmond Library, journeying more than one hundred miles at my request, because although the Fairfax County, Virginia Public Library system has twenty-three branches and a collection of nearly three million items, more often than you’d think, the books that I am in search of are not held there. That’s when I input an online request for an interlibrary loan.

It feels like playing the lottery. Once I enter the volume’s details into the system, I don’t get an immediate or definitive answer about whether I will get the book until later. It’s similar to online dating, a bit of a crapshoot, but unlike online dating, the odds are good enough for me to keep trying.

I can’t remember which one, but there was one title I borrowed this summer that made its way to me all the way from the Vermont College of Fine Arts Library, nearly 550 miles distant. It may have been Marion Winik’s extraordinary The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. This got me thinking. Why do these volumes so often reside in college and university collections? Many are literary memoirs that should be preserved in academic collections.

Julia Scully, the author of Outside Passage: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood, died this past summer in New York City at age 94, according to her New York Times obituary. Her life and passing would have escaped me, except that one of my friends from my Manhattan School of Music days knew Scully well and posted about her passing on social media.

Scully was renowned as the editor of Modern Photography as well as for the acclaimed memoir she published at age 69. When the obit described a childhood that involved being raised in Nome, Alaska after a stint in an orphanage in the Lower 48, I knew I had to track down the memoir. That Scully graduated in a high school class of 10 and had no college ambitions but ended up majoring in English at Stanford is just one in a string of remarkable events in her young life.

I hope that more people will seek out Outside Passage, perhaps even scoring the copy I will soon return via interlibrary loan to the University of Richmond.

Another interlibrary loan gem I read this summer is Old Filth by Jane Gardam. I don’t remember the loan’s provenance, but Gardam is the same vintage as Scully and still writing at age 95. She penned the text for The Iron Coast: Notes from a Cold Country: Photographs of Yorkshire, which also recently arrived from Beatrice, Nebraska, perhaps my most long-distance book loan, having traveled 1213 miles.

It’s one of a big pile of “to-reads” currently in residence chez moi.

Happy reading.