Growing up in Danbury, Connecticut, Dr. Spero Lappas’ favorite place was the local public library. He would walk there after school, to the place where the adult collection was on the second floor and the first floor was a kids’ reading heaven. 

“The children’s library had a corner in the back that contained science books and biographies of famous people,” he says. “Over the course of a few years, I think I read every biography and many of the science books. It was a very exciting day for me when I became old enough — I don’t remember how old that was — to qualify to use the adult library.” 

Today, Lappas is a well-known attorney and the best-selling author of Conquer Life’s Frontiers, The Seventh Name of Happiness, and New Tricks for Old Dogs. His first legal thriller, “The Widow on the Ledge,” is scheduled for publication early this year.  

He is also an award-winning photographer whose works are on display through March at East Shore Area Library. His exhibit is part of the Limelight on Local Artists initiative, a partnership of the Library and the Lower Paxton Township Arts Council. 

Lappas has also created a library of sorts in his home, stocked with 10,000 books, and he still reads biographies.  

What are you reading?

I recently finished Samuel Freedman’s terrific biography, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights. As a long-time civil rights lawyer, I am fascinated by the history of America’s fight for equality, and this book tells a very important story. Now, I’m halfway through Straight Man, by Richard Russo. This is a hilarious send-up of college faculty life, a subject that interests me from my days as a college professor. Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad, a few legal thrillers, and Susan Bakewell’s account of the early existentialists are also in my reading pile right now.  

What do libraries mean to you?

From my early youth to adulthood, libraries have played a very important role in my life. When I was working on my first book, I did much of the writing during a trip to Athens, Greece. While there, I took the metro from my apartment every day to the National Library of Greece. It was a grand old building with an enormous reading room, and I wrote there for many days. In fact, because of that library, the book took the form and shape that it did, very different than how I contemplated it when I left America.