Library Lament

A few years ago my college library replaced its old style bookshelves with new electronic shelves that run on tracks—three feet to the right, three to the left—and snuggle up to the shelves on either side so that when they all are parked properly, there is a solid wall of shelves for about fifteen feet and a single three foot aisle down which a reader might walk in search of a book.  It is a marvel of efficiency enabling the library to nearly double the number of books it previously housed in the same space.  With a push of a button, I can move as many shelves as I wish, enabling me to get to any shelf I desire.  Of course sometimes I have to move four or five shelves to get to the aisle where the book I am after resides.  But then I push the button and off the shelves go on their three foot journey.  What power! With my index finger I move a thousand books as if they were weightless.

One of the small pleasures of my life from the time I was seven or eight has been browsing in libraries, starting out in search of a particular book but then getting side-tracked by another title or spotting an old favorite author I haven’t read in fifteen years.  I can still do that here—at least down one aisle, books on both sides—and I tried it the other day with great success.  I ran into Thomas Wolfe—not Tom Wolfe the contemporary novelist—but Thomas Wolfe, he of Look Homeward Angel fame, he of the rapturous descriptive sentences that unravel like vast bolts of colorful material as easily and beautifully as a landscape unfolds as you ride down a highway.  So I picked up a couple Wolfe’s books and checked them out.  The librarian who checked them out to me looked at the date they had last been checked out, smiled and said, “It’s been a long, long time since anyone read these.”

I was saddened by the experience and not just because nobody is reading Wolfe anymore, for I realized that while I was browsing in my aisle, no one else was able to browse any other aisle in the area.  And even more because I realized that no one wanted to browse in the stacks. I sat at a desk by the stacks and read for a half hour, but no one came by in search of a book. I suspect that students rarely use books these days.  The electronic media is all. 

I think of those books on that one shelf—thousands.  I think of all those writers of books sitting at their typewriters, pecking out the words one letter at a time, millions of words, thousands of books on that one shelf.  But no one reads them.  I remember reading about Thomas Wolfe walking about in the Harvard Widener Library in a near state of panic, mumbling something like “so many books, so little time to read them.”  Are there young Wolfes still haunting libraries desperate to read everything?  I hope so, but I wonder.

Ah yes, I sound like an over-the-hill English teacher—which is what I am.  I have sometimes imagined writing an English teacher novel—you know, Good bye Mr. Chips, To Sir with Love, Up the Down Staircase.  I doubt I will ever do it—it’s an overworked genre—and I am not a novelist.   But if I did, I think I have the perfect ending—especially if I write in the highly symbolic style of someone like Hawthorne.  The old English prof, in despair after receiving a scornful email from his prize English student, seeks solace in the school’s very modern library browsing in the stacks, when someone inadvertently pushes the button that causes the shelves to move in and he is crushed  by books and dies under an avalanche of 19th century novels.