Justin: Minnesota libraries offer a treasure trove for pop culture hunters

I just joined Minnesota’s coolest club: I got my library card.

I’m no stranger to the institution. It was a major part of my childhood. But like a lot of grown-ups, I drifted away, ignoring the fact that libraries offer a lot more than books. While spending a small fortune on record stores, streaming services and Amazon, I could have been discovering pop culture gems — for free. Many of the state’s libraries no longer charge late fees, making them the best bargain since the invention of Taco Tuesdays.

At St. Paul’s George Latimer Central Library, one of the staff members revealed that she had just put the Billie Eilish album on display. I didn’t find it, but I did see a Bob Mould anthology, a 24-CD set that’ll set you back more than $100 at Walmart.

Radiohead, Lizzo, Billie Holiday and William Shatner were all available on vinyl. Threw out your phonograph with your pocket calculator? No worries. There’s a listening station in the second-floor corner with a nice view of the patio below.

Going through the DVD selection sent me back to the Blockbuster era, when skimming through the titles was almost as much fun as actually watching the movies. Crammed together on the “S” shelf were “Shane,” seasons of “Shameless,” “Sharknado 3″ and “Good Times,” a Sonny and Cher movie directed by William Friedkin.

There were several offerings that are hard to find anywhere else.

In the children’s section, not far from a couple of teens playing chess, there were episodes of “Young People’s Concerts,” specials that ran from 1958 to 1972 in which Leonard Bernstein brought classical music to a vast CBS audience. In the adult section, I checked out “King,” the 1978 miniseries in which Paul Winfield plays Martin Luther King Jr. Neither set is officially available for streaming.

“My partner was looking for ‘Airheads’ yesterday and we couldn’t find it anywhere online,” said Xenia Hernández, public services manager for St. Paul Public Library. “So we checked to see if the library had it. Sure enough, it did. We picked it up in Hayden Heights.”

Materials selector Patrick Reckas-Jackson, who helped pick the 67,000 DVDs and 29,000 CDs floating across the dozen St. Paul branches, considers many factors when deciding how to spend some of the library’s annual budget of about $1.6 million.

Some, like Marvel movies and the latest from Beyoncé, are obvious choices. But he and his team also consider tastes that are unique to this market. One of the 10 most-checked-out artists this year by St. Paul patrons has been Arooj Aftab, a Pakistani American jazz composer.

“What’s popular around the country doesn’t necessarily line up cleanly with what our community wants,” Reckas-Jackson said. “International TV, like British TV, [Korean] dramas and Scandinavian mysteries are pretty popular with our patrons.”

You don’t have to venture to the big city to enjoy a diverse catalog.

The Two Harbors Public Library recently acquired the Oscar-winning film “Poor Things,” the box-office smash “Dune: Part Two” and the latest season of “Bluey.”

“We had some boys in last week who didn’t realize we had DVDs,” said director Madeline Jarvis, who welcomes between 100 to 200 visitors a day, an impressive number for a town of 3,500. “Their dad was about to give their DVD player to Goodwill, but they stopped him.”

Little Falls’ Carnegie Library, which celebrates its 120th anniversary next year, boasts well over 500 audiobooks, including Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” read by Jeremy Irons. It also has a wall dedicated to VHS tapes.

“That’s only because we have the room for them,” said Jade Lauber, whose duties as interim director include netting errant bats that occasionally fly down the aisles.

Like most librarians, she wishes teenagers would take better advantage of her facilities, even encouraging them to bring in coffee and pastries from the bakery around the corner.

“That’s a tough group to reach,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how cool you think you are. They don’t think you’re cool because you’re an adult.”

If the music and movies can’t convince you to get a card, maybe some of the other goodies will do the trick. Certain branches stock telescopes, snowshoes, state park passes, cake pans, sewing kits, pickleball sets, jigsaw puzzles and board games.

Oh, and there are still plenty of books, some of which you may not expect to stumble across in such hallowed halls.

One patron asked Jarvis why Two Harbors carried the book “Does a Bulldozer Have a Butt?”

“It’s just a silly book about butts with no educational value,” Jarvis said. “But it makes kids laugh. We’re purchasing for every family in the community.”

During a recent DVD hunt at the Latimer Library, I spotted a copy of “I Spit on Your Grave,” a horror film that Roger Ebert called “a vile bag of garbage.”

That 1978 film is an unlikely reason to finally join the state’s greatest club. Then again, one member’s garbage is another’s gold nugget.