The Way the World Works: Essays (12 page)

So, inspired by the library’s own letterhead, which reads: “Access, Discover, Empower,” I sued for legal access. On June 26, 1996, eighteen drawers from the old card catalog were brought over to the new building, where I was allowed to use them. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors proposed and passed a nonbinding resolution “urging the Library Commission to preserve the card catalog at the Main Library and make it available to the public.” On September 3, 1996, after hours of public testimony, the Library Commission voted to find a way to keep it.

But by the time I was successfully looking up names like Walter Benjamin, John Milton, and J. K. Huysmans on paper cards—and noticing that there were substantially fewer books in the online catalog by these writers than there
were in the card catalog—I had spent over a month talking to members of the library staff. I knew the real story, which is only incidentally about catalogs.

The real story is about what happens—what to a greater or lesser degree is happening in a number of cities around the country—when telecommunications enthusiasts take over big old research libraries and attempt to remake them, with corporate help, as high-traffic showplaces for information technology. Such transformations consume unforecastably large sums of money, which is why the SFPL found itself, just then—despite receiving a goodly percentage of the city budget every year as part of Proposition E’s “Preserving Libraries Fund”—essentially broke, with a one-million-dollar deficit in its operating budget, its new building annotated and beflagged with the names of major benefactors who enabled it, just barely, to open its doors in April.

One of these benefactors is the Pacific Telesis Group (parent to Pacific Bell, the phone company), a corporation that wants to become a “content provider” in the growing fee-for-service information business. Steven Coulter, a vice president at Pacific Telesis, is the president of the Library Commission; he is a proponent of the virtues of informational connectivity and public-private partnerships, and he is a masterful fund-raiser for the library. Kenneth Dowlin, the city librarian—hired away from Colorado Springs, where, as the head of the Pikes Peak Library District, he developed an early dial-up-access catalog called Maggie’s Place—also wants SFPL to become a sort of telecommunications utility: he told members of the American Library Association in 1992 that he envisions the library offering “electronic access to each home, school, and office by the year 2000,” and added, “We intend to generate revenue off of this pipeline.” He also said, “I will
let the planning department ship documents for building permits over my system, but I get my five percent.”

The pipeline metaphor is a useful one, and it exerts an understandably powerful hold on the minds of many library managers these days, as everyone, in and out of the stacks, tries to figure out who gets to adjust the valves and calibrate the pressure gauges, and who will have the privilege of setting tariffs on the ideational flow. Last year, the entrepreneurial SFPL launched Library Express, a service that charged sixty dollars an hour to clients who needed, and could afford, a higher level of research assistance and document retrieval than the unpaying patron.

Not all observers like the privatizing tendencies in the public-library world, but it would be mere churlishness to point out the shortcomings of this self-proclaimed “library of the future,” the outcome of so extraordinary an outpouring of civic spirit and generosity, were it not for one thing: under Dowlin and his A-team (as he calls his cadre of chiefs and special assistants), the SFPL has, by a conservative estimate, sent more than two hundred thousand books to a landfill—many of them old, hard to find, out of print, and valuable.

“I’m sure that at least that many are gone,” one librarian told me. “I would guess that maybe a quarter of them, fifty thousand, should have been thrown out. But I would guess that at least a hundred thousand shouldn’t have been. And another fifty thousand that I just can’t guess. . . . I personally saw at least twenty or thirty thousand books when we were still in the old building that were boxed up and never made it back into the collection.” This man, like most of the staff members I talked to, doesn’t want me to quote him by name, since Dowlin has a way, some assert, of punishing dissidents by exiling them to branch duty (a charge the administration
has denied). What the employees wanted me to know was that the library was undergoing a kind of brain surgery. In the words of one woman I interviewed, “Its EEG is going flat.”

The worst period of book dumping happened late last year, in the months before the library’s move to the New Main, as it is called—a large gray structure with a hole in the middle where the stacks should be. The construction was financed with more than a hundred million dollars in public money; the voters approved this munificent bond issue because the Old Main, they were told, couldn’t hold what it was being asked to hold—a research-level general collection, thousands of specialized periodicals, the Grabhorn Collection on the History of Printing and the Development of the Book, the Schmulowitz Collection of Wit and Humor, city archives, newspaper archives, photo archives, and so on. When appeals went out for money to furnish and outfit the new building, more than thirty million dollars flowed in from private donors and “affinity groups,” representing gays and lesbians, several ethnic communities, and environmentalists.

From the outside, the building looks enormous—and inside, too, the visitor can enjoy sweeping expanses of carpeting, vistas of distant gift shops and security checkpoints, multi-story works of public art, the Chevron Corporation Teen Center, the BankAmerica Foundation Jobs and Careers Center, and uninterrupted sight lines in almost every direction. Throw back your head, and you stare upward through a “glittering void” (as its principal architect, James Ingo Freed, describes it) that extends to a conical cornea of white glass eighty-six feet above you. But space, from the point of view of an existing collection of books, means something quite different from floor space, or atrium space, or bandwidth in a telecommunications cable, all of which the
New Main has in relative abundance. Space, to a book, means shelves: the departments of the library were supposed to get enough shelves to hold their collections, with plenty of room to grow. And yet most of the departments still do not have enough shelf space to hold what they have.

Even before the influx of hundreds of thousands of new books, bought with Proposition E money, some staff members had serious doubts about the building’s capacity. In 1991, when the administration passed around plans for the New Main, thirty-one library employees signed a letter contending that “of the 375,000 square feet promised, much of it will be all but useless. . . . Obviously the current plan for the new building is not meeting the needs set forth to voters to justify the expenditure.” But the gravity of the problem only began to dawn on the A-team late in 1995, when individual librarians began mapping potential book arrangements prior to the move. Tape measures came out, calculators were turned on, rules of thumb were invoked. Suddenly it was abundantly clear: the collection in the Old Main Library was not going to fit in the New Main Library. Kathy Page, chief of the Main, wrote in Progress Report No. 34, dated December 1995, “Several surprises and errors were discovered that are proceeding to be solved or mitigated.” How were the errors solved or mitigated? The collection itself was hastily reduced in volume. It was “weeded.”

—

Weeding
is a term of art in librarianship, and it is a necessary part of what librarians do. If you have five copies of an old edition of Samuelson’s
Economics,
or of Booth Tarkington’s
The Gentleman from Indiana,
your librarianly obligation may be to reduce the number, so that there will be space for
other books. The library sells them or gives them away—or even throws them away, if nobody wants them—so as not to be choked by the foliage of what was once heavily in demand but is no longer. But beyond such obvious examples, weeding a rich old collection such as San Francisco’s takes time and careful thought. If your potential weed is a little out of your main area of knowledge, you have to look it up in standard bibliographies. You must be mindful of the traditional strengths and weaknesses of your library, and the myriad secondary ways in which an out-of-date book may enlighten the historically curious. If the book under your eye is an old edition of something that has been republished, you have to ask yourself whether that old edition has some intrinsic merit—something about its annotation, or the eminence of its editor—that the new one may lack. And even then there are differences of opinion, of course. To quote from a book called
Garden Friends and Foes,
by Richard Headstrom, “If you were asked to prepare a list of weeds and compare it with one prepared by someone else, they would probably not be in complete agreement.”

Kenneth Dowlin himself offered a defensible theory of discarding to a questioner at a meeting in 1992. He said, “We have many books where we may buy two hundred copies of that book because there are thousands of people who want to read it. It makes no sense to keep all two hundred copies for the rest of our life. So at the time that the usage of that particular book drops, we will retain one, two, five, whatever the appropriate number is.” Except for the inflated figure of two hundred, that is a fair description of what went on before Dowlin took command, when the volume of junked books was relatively small. But what has gone on at the San Francisco Public Library over the last year was not weeding
in this specialized sense. I found
Garden Friends and Foes
this spring, in a room near the shipping-and-receiving entrance in the Old Main Library—a windowless, high-ceilinged room, measuring maybe ten by twelve feet. It’s called the Discard Room. On most Tuesdays, until this past January, a Department of Public Works truck—a five-ton flatbed truck with wooden sides of the kind used to pick up brush and old washing machines—drove down to the Discard Room and two, sometimes three men threw the books, which were often tied with string in bundles of eight or ten, into the back. Sometimes the truck held other things, too, like an old chair or a shopping cart left on library property by a street person or hundreds of out-of-print phonograph records, and sometimes it just held books. When it was loaded (and it could hold perhaps 2,500 bundled volumes), the truck drove to a transfer station, where the books were shifted to big rigs, along with the rest of the day’s garbage, and then taken to a landfill. In fairness to the current administration, book dumping, on a much smaller scale, has gone on for decades. (The administration sometimes says that a surplus-property law forced them to throw away all discards until 1989, but it is also correct to say that it was not until 1989 that the library sought official permission from the city to sell some of its surplus books through the Friends of the Library bookstore.) Things got especially bad this past winter, however, when Kathy Page put out the call to all stations:
Weed
. Sometimes the crew arriving from the DPW would crack open the door of the Discard Room and close it fast, afraid that an eight-foot-high pile of books would collapse on them.

Here is what two librarians who had been part of a weeding team told me one Sunday at a coffee shop:

LIBRARIAN A
: They said, “Get rid of as much as possible.” And they said, “Anything that doesn’t look like we should have it in the New Main Library, if it doesn’t look good, if it needs to be repaired . . .” And then there was the question whether when you sent things to be repaired, was it actually being repaired, or were they tossing it?

LIBRARIAN B
: There seemed to be a reluctance to send things to Repair because they [in Repair] were “overwhelmed.”

LIBRARIAN A
: People were beginning to think, “Wait a second, these are just being tossed.”

LIBRARIAN B
: Actually, we don’t know what happened, because the librarians weeded their areas but a senior librarian had the final word. We don’t know what she did.

LIBRARIAN A
: She started putting everything on the same truck, and I said, “This is not to be thrown away, it’s not to be discarded.” She said, “No, just put it on.”

There are now no copies of
Garden Friends and Foes
on the shelves of the San Francisco Public Library. There are no duplicates of it at the University of California at Berkeley, or at Davis, Stanford, or UCLA. There are copies of a number of Headstrom’s other books in SFPL’s collection
—
he has written about spiders, lizards, birds, insects, and even a
Complete Field Guide to Nests in the United States—
but this sole copy of his work on weeds was weeded. Why? Its binding was slightly torn, and the weeders, as they are called, have at times been urged to weed quickly and in quantity, basing their decisions in large part on looks.

I hasten to say that many of the books in the Discard Room which I have personally checked do have duplicates on the shelves, or at least are represented by later editions of the same work. The
1983 Arco Civil Service Exam Book for
Sanitation Workers,
of which the library has twenty copies
—
I found it in the Discard Room two months ago under ten books about ethics and a mint Clarendon Press edition of Leibniz’s
Logical Papers—
makes sense to discard. (Question 67 on
page 90
of
Sanitation Workers
asks you to choose the last phrase of the following jumbled sentence: “the book / the top shelf / of the bookcase / wanted was on / which she.” The answer is “of the bookcase”: “The book which she wanted was on the top shelf of the bookcase.” Not in the back of a DPW truck.) But here are some of the other books I left with, after one unannounced visit, which either have no record online at all, or say “Ask librarian for holdings information,” a phrase that is often, especially in the case of older circulating books, code for “I am a last copy, and I have been purged.” There is
Crumbling Idols,
by Hamlin Garland; a lovely little Knickerbocker Press book with color plates called
The Way to Study Birds,
from 1917; a 1907 edition of
Rivers of North America
, by Israel Russell, with a complete chemical analysis of a water sample taken from a hydrant in Los Angeles on September 8, 1878, along with similar results for other samples from the Hudson, the Cumberland Reservoir, the Mohawk River, and the Rio Grande; and
Handbook for the Woman Driver,
by Charlotte Montgomery, which devotes a whole chapter to “Clothes and Beauty En Route.” (“Dark glasses are a
must
.”)
Studies of Abnormal Behavior in the Rat,
by Norman Maier, was another last copy. (On page 19: “An electrified grill was interposed between the jumping platform and the canvas net. Now the rat was punished not only for staying on the platform, but also for jumping from the platform. As a control the same grill was used in the case of the female rat. This technique failed to produce neurotic attacks in either animal.” Give it time.)