On Libraries

During World War II in the neighborhood where I lived, a small lending library of current fiction and non-fiction books was maintained in a nearby home. Anyone could pay a modest fee to borrow a book for a week or so, making it unnecessary to purchase a copy or wait until one became available at the distant public library. It wasn’t so easy to buy books during those wartime years so the little lending library around the block became a popular and much appreciated neighborhood center. Whatever happened to those small private lending libraries? I suspect they have all but vanished from this country.

About the time I entered Junior High, I began to study at the nearby library in my hometown. It was a small library located in the City Hall of what was then a village, albeit no less fashionable than now. The library was not far from my home and eventually I began biking or taking the bus there several times a week. It was quiet. The tables were hidden from one another in between the open stacks that filled the rooms. The books that I needed then were readily available. But mostly I would go to study and read. It was more than enough to simply be amongst those books for an hour or two in the afternoon.

I recall an older man was always there when I arrived. Now that I think about it, he must have been about the same age as I am now. Perhaps he was a writer for he was always scribbling something on a pad of yellow paper. I suspect I was rather impressed by his devotion to writing and seriousness of intent. Strangely, after all of these years, I’ve not forgotten him or that strange blend of paper, leather, and dust that I inhaled each time I stepped foot in the little library in my hometown.

In his blog (10/16/14), Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp describes a somewhat similar experience, updated for modern times. Every weekday in my university library I see a diminutive elderly man seated in front of a computer near the main reference desk. He wears an olive-drab bucket cap with the cord fastened below his chin and a sweater with holes at the elbows. His nose is inches from the screen, against which he holds a pocket magnifying glass. Beside him is a pile of books and papers. His gaze is intent.

Since the days of my youth, I have been to many fine libraries: Widener, Bodleian, the libraries at Stanford and Berkeley. I am overwhelmed with gratitude each time I step foot in one of those places. The first time I wandered in to the great reading room of the New York Public Library I had to stop and catch my breath.

Before me were row after row of tables with hundreds of readers peering at their books. I walked down one of the long aisles lined with book shelves glimpsing the titles of reference books most of which I didn’t even know existed, crossed over to the other side with a comparable collection that I would love to be able to get my hands on. It was hard to leave. While I usually work alone, after being in that room, I realized for perhaps the first time that I could actually read and write in the reading room of the New York Public Library and that if I lived in New York, I would probably go there every day.

And yet, as rich as are the resources of the New York Public Library and other comparable collections, the little library in the City Hall of my hometown, like any first love, will always remain my favorite. It is where I would want to be when it comes time to read my last book. I am sure the card catalog will still be there. After all, the librarians would never think of abandoning it for something as racy as a computer.

Is anyone going to the library now? To find out I went over to the Portland State University library the other day. I walked in the main entry and was immediately confronted by a room full of computers, with a student working at each console and a long line of other students waiting for an opening.

I counted about 50 workstations and as I walked up and down row upon row of them, I failed to see a single person reading a book. Some were taking notes from a website, others were writing text, while still others were composing e-mails. I went upstairs and observed much the same at about a dozen round tables each with five radiating computer stations, fully occupied with students peering at the screen.

As far as I could tell, not one was reading from a book. Where were the books, anyway? What a barren place I thought. Off to the side there were a few scattered readers. Most of them were taking notes from textbooks not anything from the library collection. However, I did see a fair number of students listening to their iPods and talking on their cell phones.

Up to the third, fourth and fifth floor with progressively fewer students but almost without exception each one working away on their laptops. These floors were largely devoted to the library’s open stacks, aisle after aisle of book shelves crammed full of books, journals, and monographs. I walked down the central aisle of each floor, glancing to my left and then to my right and I did not see a single individual browsing through these books.

I did see a few library personal returning books to the shelves. That was reassuring. And there were a small number of students reading at the largely empty tables on the perimeter of each floor, but not one by a pile of books that they had collected from the stacks or checked out from the library. So many books, so many unopened, untouched books, so few, if any, readers, year after year.

Roberto Calasso

If we continue down this part of my library, it could last for hours, because every book here has a story.

Roberto Calasso has devoted his entire life to books—reading, editing, translating, publishing, organizing, and simply being in their presence. He is director of a prestigious Italian publishing house and author of many books, including the international best seller, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

In an interview in the latest issue of the Paris Review, he is described as, “a writer on esoteric topics, a book collector, a translator of Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, and an editor who oversees the publication of some ninety books a year, in every domain from the scientific to the poetic…”

Calasso’s father was an attorney, a learned legal scholar and most of the books is his library were Latin texts on the theory of law, published between the 16th and 17th century. Calasso recalls how he felt when he was there. “Just to be around them, with their obscure titles and authors, was far more useful to me than reading so many other books later on.”

As they are sitting in his study in Milan, the interviewer asks Calasso to describe it. (What a good question, I thought.) He replies it is like being in paradise. It requires a big table, upon which the books and papers and dictionaries are set in separate piles. Each wall has a different them, one Greece and Rome, another on India, where he has studied Vedic sacrifice.

He is then asked how he organizes his library or to be more exact, his libraries, containing about twenty thousand volumes located in three separate locations in Milan. He replies that to answer the question properly would require an autobiography.

“For me there are several criteria—practical, aesthetic, capricious. The essential thing is to obey what Aby Warburg [founder of the Warburg Library in London] called “the law of the good neighbor.”

Calasso is said to “stand for a lost ideal.” One hopes that there will always be individuals who cherish their books as much as he does, who quite simply want to be around them and enjoy their sensory dimensions. The books I read on a screen have none of that appeal. And I miss that a great deal

One also hopes that there will always be libraries that house books on their shelves, not in the basement or underneath the football stadium. Where are the books in the emerging digital libraries? What will we lose when there are gone?

Here is what will be lost, a collection of some of the most inviting libraries in all the places where they still remain.

Serendipitious Discovery

Early in my freshman year at Stanford I began working at the Library. In those days the great collection of books in the stacks wasn’t open to the students. At the circulation desk I would receive the student request card, try to recall from the book’s call number what level it was on, head into the stacks, down the stairs, through the long and dark aisles, until I came to the right shelf, run my hand along the spine of the books, glancing from time to time at the titles, wishing I could stop to read one or two, scanning the Dewey Decimal numbers, collect the book if it was there, head back down the aisle, up the stairs and pass the book on to the staff to be checked out after stealing a glance at its introductory pages.

That sounds pretty tedious, but it wasn’t. I liked wandering around the shelves, always intrigued by the books that were stored there, the new topics and areas of study that I didn’t know existed, stopping every now and then to grab a book to bring upstairs to read until I had to head down again to fetch one. Eventually I became eligible for one of study the tables located on each floor of the stacks. There I could keep my textbooks and other volumes that I had checked out from the library and do my class work in a setting that is about as favorable as they come.

I spent most of my days and many nights at that table in the stacks of the Library. It was utterly peaceful there, no one else was around and I could come and go as I pleased. Since I was in the throes of academic discovery, it was the best of all possible places.

Every once in a while, I’d take a little “study break” to wander up and down the aisles, checking the titles of the books that caught my eye. This kind of exploration will no longer be possible in the new bookless library. There will no discovery of that unknown book that you subsequently found indispensable. Thomas Benton has recently described the importance of such moments in the process of doing research.

I remember one time I was writing about Edgar Allan Poe and phrenology when I found a box of ephemera—not catalogued in any detail—that included a pamphlet for a book by an early psychologist who analyzed Poe on the basis of daguerreotypes of the poet. I quickly found the book in another area of the same library, and discovered a sequence of pages that purported to show that Poe was suffering from a disorder that affected only one hemisphere of his brain and that revealed itself in the asymmetry of his face…that accidental discovery—the centerpiece of a subsequent article—would never have been made but for the serendipity and convenience of the stacks.

How often I recall a similar experience in my own research. I would go in search of a particular bound volume of a journal. Accidentally I’d pick out the wrong one and beginning scanning the pages, only to discover another article, perhaps even more important than the one I was searching for and that, in turn, led me on a path of further inquiry that would never had occurred if I was searching for the article online. Who has not had the pleasure of discovering such an article by thumbing through the journals of their discipline?

To be sure searching online can be a rich source of information and unexpected sources do appear sometimes. But the search is a targeted one, a narrow one. You are looking for a particular document and you find it or something close. As a friend wrote to me in describing her own online experiences: “There is no room in that equation for the serendipitous discovery. When all goes well, you find what you are looking for. But sometimes what you need to find is what you are not looking for.”

The London Library

I use the Library almost daily—it’s taken over as my main source of reference and become my main (and now much treasured) place of work. There I can write away in peace—the London Library places me in a convivial atmosphere on, one quietly buzzing with fellow writers. Benedict Allen

When I was in London last summer, I went to visit the London Library. It was something I had wanted to do for years, motivated largely by my dream of establishing a membership library myself one day.

The London Library is said to be the world’s largest independent lending library. It is also one of the most inviting, another way of saying it is a place of extraordinary warmth and beauty.

The library is located on St. James Square, an oasis from the crowded city dotted with shady trees, park benches beside its well-manicured laws, and walkways, all of which are surrounded by elegant townhouses.

The joy of the place is not only the books, however, but also the cast of characters. The dusty fellow next to you might be a proto-Nobel-winning author…and the almost certain knowledge that the person in the next carrel cares deeply about words and ideas, and best of all, has a book to tell you about, in a whisper. Orlando Whitfield

The library collection numbers over one million books plus more than 750 current periodicals and adds over 8,000 new books each year. Members also have remote electronic access to over 1,000 academic journals, as well as a wide collection of literary periodicals, newspapers, and magazines.

The library was founded in Thomas Carlyle in 1841 and its members have included Dickens, Tennyson, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, George Bernard Shaw, etc. and T.S. Eliot who served as its President for many years. However, you don’t have to be a literary luminary to belong to the library, as membership is open to anyone for a relatively small annual fee.

I joined the library for myself when I was about eighteen and soon the place became an addiction, an obsession.” Orlando Whitfield

During a period of major cuts in funding public libraries and in some cases the closing of many branch libraries, there is an increasing need for independent private libraries. The extremely wealthy, whose income has risen of late at a dizzying pace are more than capable of establishing these libraries.

Their resources and in many cases excellent libraries can readily serve as their foundation. That was how these libraries originally came into existence. What better way to maintain the culture of reading and scholarship than by assuming a major role is founding these “houses of reading once again?”

Bookless Libraries

A friend sent me word of yet another library that is replacing its books with computer work stations. In this case it is the library at Cushing Academy, a New England prep school. The school is spending millions to build a digital learning center filled with computer stations, laptop friendly study carrels, and large flat screen TVs that will project data from the Internet. The headmaster reports he sees books as an “outmoded technology.”

Still more and more books are being printed each year. However, the number of library books in circulation is not growing in tandem as most librarians report that their circulation figures are holding steady or decreasing. In contrast, digital use has increased significantly with a dramatic increase in “hits” to library electronic databases.

Another result of the digital revolution is the allocation of library funds with a major shift away from books to electronic resources. In 1998 the library at the University of Texas in Austin spent roughly 5% percent of its annual materials budget on electronic resources and 30% on monographs. In only three years, those allocations were reversed so that in 2001 20% was spent on electronic materials and only 15% on monographs. Virtually every library in this country reports comparable trends.

New library designs, as well as renovations of older ones, call for storing books in buildings apart from the library computer centers. A major renovation at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities library eliminated the libraries book stacks and moved them to the basement or elsewhere on the campus to provide space for computer labs and a digital media center.

What will be gained and lost by the digital transformation of libraries? When I used to study in the library, every once in a while I’d take a little “study break” to wander up and down the aisles, checking the titles of the books that caught my eye. This kind of exploration will no longer be possible in the new bookless library. There will no discovery of that unknown book that you subsequently found indispensable. Thomas Benton has recently described the importance of such moments in the process of doing research.

I remember one time I was writing about Edgar Allan Poe and phrenology when I found a box of ephemera—not catalogued in any detail—that included a pamphlet for a book by an early psychologist who analyzed Poe on the basis of daguerreotypes of the poet. I quickly found the book in another area of the same library, and discovered a sequence of pages that purported to show that Poe was suffering from a disorder that affected only one hemisphere of his brain and that revealed itself in the asymmetry of his face…that accidental discovery—the centerpiece of a subsequent article—would never have been made but for the serendipity and convenience of the stacks.

How often I recall a similar experience in my own research in the library. I would go in search of a particular bound volume of a journal. Accidentally I’d pick out the wrong volume and beginning scanning the pages, only to discover another article, perhaps even more important than the one I was searching for and that, in turn, led me on a path of further inquiry that would never had occurred if I was searching for the article online. Who has not had the pleasure of discovering such an article by thumbing through the journals of their discipline?

A few months ago I went back to the library to try to locate the date of an article in The New Yorker that I had copied many years ago. Fortunately, the bound volumes of the magazine that has been published week after week since 1925 were still on the shelves in the stacks. I thought for more than a moment about the remarkable treasures contained within those pages--Capote, Cheever, Flanner, Nabokov, O’Hara, Thurber, Salinger, etc. And then I ploughed into the volume that I thought might have the article I was seeking.

I opened the cover, and began reading the Talk of the Town, the section where I was certain the little piece was located. I started reading and kept reading, page after page that I know I had read before but seemed as timely and as fresh as they first did at first reading. I didn’t find the article. It didn’t matter for I was overtaken by the pleasure of reading once again those few pages in but a single issue in one bound volume on the shelf along with countless other bound volumes of the magazine. I wonder what will become of all those priceless volumes in the new bookless library?

On Reading: A Footnote

Publisher’s Weekly recently reported that bookstore sales dropped thirteen percent last November, the latest month surveyed. At the same time, not a week goes by when we don’t hear about another bookstore closing often a very fine one that you’d never expect to close or want to learn they had to.

How are we to reconcile these two facts with the apparent rise of literary reading discussed in yesterday’s posting?

The widely reported “surge” in library circulation, one that has been observed at libraries throughout this country, is one very plausible explanation. According to the Seattle Times, the Seattle area’s two library systems each loaned more that a million more items in 2008 than in the previous year.

The article cites the director of the King County Library System in Seattle who commented: “It’s an adage in the library world that the level of use or circulation at public libraries is inversely proportionate to the state of the economy. When the economy’s down, when things are tough, people come to libraries.”

Similarly, a headline in the Wall Street Journal yesterday read: “Folks Are Flocking to the Library.” The article then describes several libraries throughout the country that have experienced a sharp increase in library attendance and circulation

These leaves open the question of what individuals are doing at the library. Are they checking job listings on the computer or doing their e-mailing? Are they watching videos on You Tube or downloading their favorite music album? Or could it be that they are actually going to the library to read a book or to check one out?

Perhaps then the NEA report of an increase in literary reading is occurring in spite of all those bookstore closings and the declining sales at those that have managed to remain in business. People may be a going to the library to check out the books they would like to read or that they can no longer afford to purchase. As the president of the American Library Associated observed the other day “people are discovering that you don’t have to spend anything to read a book if you have a library card.”