There’s something of a romance between Americans and their public libraries.

Maybe it’s because Ben Franklin gave Americans their first one. Maybe it’s because Franklin himself was self-educated and upwardly mobile like so many Americans who, like Franklin and others after him, owe much of their learning to borrowed books.

It should not surprise us that when Port Arthur lost its library to that ravages of Hurricane and Tropical Storm Harvey, people from far away thought soon after about restocking our library shelves. Libraries provide not mere food but food for thought, which may be as fundamental to well-lived lives.

Americans didn’t start the concept of public libraries but they sure hold them in near reverence. What’s a town without one?

So when Library Director Steven Williams and Assistant Director Jenniffer Hudson Connors and Library Board Chair Randy Haltom and library Friends President Ray Cline stood on the Port Arthur Library loading dock Thursday, they participated in a noble undertaking. They received for Port Arthur people a shipment of some 10,500 books from our good friends in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the books were collected — for us — from generous donors from around the Midwest.

Not every book will make it to the library’s shelves but they’ll make it to readers nonetheless. Cindy Cunningham — she and her husband, Jeff, helped spearhead the collection and culling and packing and shipping of the books — said that some books may be repeats of what’s on Port Arthur’s shelves; others won’t meet the standard that Williams sets for the permanent collection. Those books, she said, may go to other purposes; perhaps they will be offered for reading at local shelters or at waiting or gathering places or wherever folks just need a good read. That’s OK.

Fortunately, Port Arthur’s library was well insured against most of its losses and the staff itself was able to salvage much of the collection. So the need here may not be as great as elsewhere. That’s why the same truck that delivered crates of books here — 700 to 1,000 in a crate — was headed to take other donated books to people farther south on the Texas coast. Harvey’s reach was long as well as destructive.

Our new books will provide solace but so does this: People we’ve never met in places we may have never visited or imagined thought enough about our well being that they donated books for us.

“It’s wonderful what they have done,” said Haltom. “It shows the strength of our country, neighbors helping neighbors, even though it’s a thousand miles away.”

That’s something you might read about in books. Or you could live it, as Port Arthur people did Thursday on the loading dock at the public library.