The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber

Discards

One sunny afternoon in October of 1985, a crowd of librarians and library administrators gathered near the venerable card catalog of the Health Sciences Library of the University of Maryland at Baltimore. It was time for a little celebration. Hundreds of red and blue balloons gently exerted themselves against the acoustical-tiled ceiling. From each balloon hung a piece of string; at the end of each string, tied by its guide hole, dangled a card that had been plucked at random from the library’s catalog. On the back of every card was a stamped message: GENUINE ARTIFACT FROM THE CARD CATALOG OF THE HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND AT BALTIMORE. A TV crew was there, along with a few local dignitaries and a reporter from the Baltimore Sun. The group stood among the hovering cards and listened to some speeches about what a landmark day it was for the library, and about the many decisive advantages of online library catalogs — remote access, a more efficient flow of information, reduced costs, lives saved (for this was a medical institution) — and then Chancellor Edward N. Brandt, Jr., wearing a red T-shirt that said “The Great Discard,” chose a drawer of the catalog and pulled it from the cabinet. With the help of a beaming Cyril Feng, who was then the director of the library, he drew the retaining rod from the chosen drawer and let its several hundred cards ceremonially spill into a trash can decorated with colored paper.

When the applause died down, the onlookers (there were about a hundred of them, including, in addition to librarians, a number of nursing students invited to swell the crowd) gathered as many of the balloons as they could and made their way out to a grassy plaza across the street. Reassembled, at the count of three, they released their balloons. The sunlit bibliographic payloads twirled picturesquely as they rose. Soon the wind caught them, and they disappeared off to the northeast. Some days later, one of the cards was returned to the library from a place across the Chesapeake Bay by some resident who thought, foolishly, that it was of value. Another card floated all the way to Connecticut.

Since then, as universities and public libraries have completed the “retrospective conversions” of their catalogs to computer databases (frequently with the help of federal Title II–C money, as part of the “Strengthening Research Library Resources” program), hundreds of card catalogs, tens of millions of individual cards — cards typed on manual typewriters and early electric models; cards printed by the Library of Congress, Baker & Taylor, and OCLC; cards whose subject headings were erased with special power erasers, resembling soldering irons, and overtyped in red; cards that have been multiply revised, copied on early models of the Xerox copier, corrected in pencil, color-coded, sleeved in plastic; cards that were handwritten at the turn of the century; cards that were interfiled by generations of staffers, their edges softened by innumerable inquiring patrons — have been partially or completely destroyed, many in the past year.

The main subject card catalog of the University of California at Berkeley was thrown out in the summer of 1993 to make way for eight study tables. Bryn Mawr’s main catalog is gone. The University of Hawaii’s main catalog is just about gone. A recycling firm called Earthworm, Inc., carted off the bulk of MIT’s cards in 1989—these now mingle unintelligibly as shoe or cereal boxes, or constitute a kind of electrical insulation known as “creping tissue.” The cards for the Math, Africana, Engineering, and Physical Sciences collections at Cornell’s John M. Olin Library are gone, with others to follow. The subject catalogs at Dartmouth, Kent State, and Boston University are gone. Harvard’s cards are going. Cards representing classical literature and philosophy have been pulled from the University of Chicago’s main catalog; some of the American-literature cards are being tossed out now.

The New York Public Library, ahead of the game, renovated the entire ten-million-card catalog of its Research Libraries between 1977 and 1980, microfilmed it, and threw it out. Stanford is discussing when and how to recycle its catalogs. The cards dating from 1911 to 1975 at the New York State Library in Albany (where Melvil Dewey was librarian from 1889 to 1906) were thrown away last month as a consequence of a historical-preservation project involving the building in which they were stored. The catalog for the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library at Bowdoin College is 95 percent gone. The cards from UCLA’s main library are nearly gone. My own college, Haverford, stored its card catalog in an attic for two years after finishing its retrospective conversion, in 1991. But when I talked to the director of the library in August 1993, the catalog (including many thousands of handwritten cards) was being thrown out, and the cabinets were down at the physical plant being dismantled and scrapped.

One of the odder features of this national paroxysm of shortsightedness and anti-intellectualism (“In a class with the burning of the library at Alexandria,” Helen Rand Parish, a historian specializing in the sixteenth century, said to me) is that it isn’t the result of wicked forces outside the library walls. We can’t blame Saracen sackers, B-52s, anarchists, or thieves; nor can we blame propagandistic politicians intent on revising the past, moralistic book banners, or over-acidic formulations of paper. The villains, instead, are smart, well-meaning library administrators, quite certain that they are only doing what is right for their institutions.

And, incredibly, nobody is making an audible fuss about what they are up to. Nobody is grieving. On the contrary, there are balloons and nursing students; there are festive pictures in trade magazines and industry newsletters of smiling department heads wearing aprons as they dump trays of cards into rolling trash carts. At Cosumnes River College, in California, the card catalog was ceremonially put out of its misery by an official who pointed a gun at it and “shot” it. Dickinson College held a mock wake: veils were worn, hymns were sung, and the doomed catalog was decked with wax flowers and black garbage-bag bunting. “We are only too happy to throw the cards away when we’re finished,” Judith Brugger, Cornell’s catalog management and authorities librarian, told me. As an added publicity flourish during the Great Discard celebration, the Maryland Health Sciences Library published a commemorative chapbook called 101 Uses for a Dead Catalog Card. Some of the suggested uses: tablecloth-crumb scrapers, space-shuttle tiles, garden compost, fish scalers, cat litter, jousting targets, and serial way-markers for spelunkers. Use No. 100 was “Make a bonfire out of them to celebrate the end of the card catalog.”

Is this glee really justified? Is it seemly? I called up Dale Flecker, associate director for planning and systems for the Harvard University Library, and asked him if he felt any regret at the throwing out of card catalogs. “In general not,” he said. “They were a wonderful idea for their time. Their time was about a century, and it’s now coming to a close.” Mr. Flecker is currently overseeing what is perhaps the largest single retrospective-conversion project ever attempted: the transfer of the information on five million pre-1980 cards, taken from approximately a hundred libraries in the university — including millions from Widener, the main library — to Harvard’s online catalog, HOLLIS. The conversion of the Widener catalog is in a fairly early stage, and it is in many ways a model of planning and forethought. Each of Widener’s cards was microfilmed before the catalog was “disassembled,” using a custom-made card-feeding machine. (Microfilming is, of course, a luxury few libraries can afford. Half the cost of Harvard’s campus-wide conversion project is being funded with federal grants and large private gifts.) An image of the front of every card for Widener thus now exists on microfiche, available to users in a room off the lobby. (Any information on the backs of the cards — and many notes do carry over — was not photographed.) Every Tuesday, Harvard sends batches of cards, twenty thousand or so at a time, via UPS, to a nonprofit corporation in Dublin, Ohio (a suburb of Columbus), called OCLC.

These initials once stood for Ohio College Library Center, but now — since the company has grown over the past twenty-three years into an international eminence in the information industry, with yearly tax-free revenues of close to a hundred million dollars — they stand for Online Computer Library Center. OCLC owns the largest database of bibliographic information in the world, and it offers a service called RETROCON, contracting with libraries to transfer old catalog cards to “machine-readable form,” at anywhere from fifty cents to six dollars per card.

The RETROCON business is good right now. When I visited OCLC in September 1993, there were three shifts of sixty operators each, plowing through RETROCONs for about forty different libraries, including, besides Harvard, the Los Angeles Public Library, a consortium of French libraries, Hughes Aircraft, Brown, Queen’s University of Belfast, Northwestern, the library at Kew Gardens, the Cincinnati Public Library, the San Francisco Public Library, and Waseda University in Japan. Each operator, though initially hired as a temp, and, in some cases, no more than high-school-educated, is the survivor of a rigorous two-week training program. (Most hires do not make it through training.) At first their work is reviewed every day by a supervisor, and subsequently it is spot-checked for accuracy at unexpected times. “Our standards are very, very high,” OCLC’s Maureen Finn told me as we stood next to shelves holding hundreds of long gray cardboard boxes that said “Widener.” “Libraries are entrusting us with the history of their library collection. We have to make sure that we’ve got good people who are going to do the work correctly, and that we can trust them.”

Maureen Finn runs RETROCON and, from what I saw, she runs it exceedingly well. Some of her people have been converting catalog cards, with apparent contentment, for ten years or more. It is true that they seldom have formal training in the intricacies of the cataloger’s art: they are not necessarily up on the elaborate Anglo-American cataloging rules, nor are they current concerning the periodic RI’s, or Rule Interpretations, issued by the Library of Congress, which — like hermeneutical dispatches from the IRS or the Financial Accounting Standards Board — adjudicate perplexing cases as they emerge. Most operators have had no library-school courses in the Dewey decimal system (still thriving, by the way, and very big in Europe), or the Sears List of Subject Headings, or Cutter numbers, or the abbreviational niceties of the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) format — but they do apparently pick up a great deal as they go. “I would put any of these people up against an MLS cataloger any day,” Ms. Finn said to me—“MLS” meaning Master of Library Science. “I think that their breadth of knowledge is quite extensive.”

Well, it better be. The next card that a second-shift operator props onto the top of the keyboard, at ten-fifteen at night, could be in any of three hundred roman-type or transliterated languages, about anything at all, covering any period of human or interstellar history. His or her job is to find a match, or “hit,” for that card in OCLC’s huge database. A hit brings up a specially formatted computer record called a MARC record (MARC stands for MAchine Readable Cataloging) — a daunting set of numbered fields and odd symbols developed by the Library of Congress in the sixties, redolent of unfriendly first-generation database interfaces — describing the particular edition of a book (or map, or videotape) which corresponds to the one that the physical card stands for. The hit rate varies from project to project, but it is running at around 70 percent for Harvard.

If the operator does find a matching record, she (there are slightly more women than men) then must make modifications to it onscreen to suit the source library’s idiosyncrasies of call numbering, entering as much or as little of the card’s supplemental information as is required by the contract between OCLC and that particular library. (The more modification a library demands of each MARC record, the more it costs.) In Harvard’s case she typically accepts the record as is, even when the original card bears additional subject headings or enriching notes of various kinds.

If her search through the database does not turn up a match for the card, she must enter the information on it from scratch. This is, or should be, a complex undertaking, demanding judgment as well as accuracy, since not only does the card’s content need to be transferred perfectly, without reference to the book itself, in a way that will accord with records for other books by that writer in that library, but the necessary “access points” have to be tagged correctly with numeric codes — access points being those fields in the record that a library user will be able to search for, such as title, author, corporate author, and subject. If someone has a bad night and creates a flawed access point for the title of a book, library patrons will simply not find the book in the library’s online catalog when they search for it by title.

We shouldn’t leap to the conclusion that just because the RETROCON staff is composed of temps and ex-temps, many without BAs, it will be doing awful things to Harvard’s cards. I can vouch for the devotedness and hard work of (some) temps, having temped for several years myself. And airline pilots, some of whom never went to college either, land jumbo jets a thousand times a day with an exceedingly low error rate. Still, we have to wonder whether the Harvard community is expecting something of Maureen Finn’s staff at RETROCON that the staff can’t possibly deliver — something, in fact, that no outside group of clerical workers, sitting hundreds of miles away from the books in question, no matter how well trained and closely monitored they may be, can deliver. Even OCLC, one of the very best retrospective-conversion contractors in the business, is bound to make thousands of typos in the course of a huge project like the Harvard “recon.” There is of necessity going to be a layer of error introduced into Harvard’s online catalog. (The official error rate is “less than one per cent”—which, for five million cards, is less than fifty thousand records.) And some of the mistakes, though tiny in relation to the extraordinary size of the database, will — in the same way that errors in TRWs database can do vexing things to one’s credit rating — be very significant for individual scholars in quest of a particular book. Nor will there be a wave of compensating corrections as a result of the conversion, since the books themselves aren’t there for a zealous operator to check against.

The Widener Library cards, once they are processed by OCLC, are packed up on Wednesdays and sent back to Harvard. There are no lost cards. (“In seventeen years, we’ve never lost a card,” Maureen Finn said, with justifiable pride.) At Harvard, Dale Flecker’s staff takes random samples from the boxes of returnees, to see whether OCLC is staying within its contractual quality-control tolerances. If the spot-checkers find unacceptable inconsistencies between a card and its computer version, they retain the card for reference and correct the record online.

And what of the rest? What of the cards that resided in their drawers for fifty or a hundred years, some of which perhaps caught the eye of Charles Cutter or Fred Kilgour or one of the other great names in librarianship who trained or worked at Harvard? What of the handwritten ones? (“Library hand” was a special kind of backward-slanting penmanship meant specifically for card catalogs, and taught in library school through the 1920s.) Where are they all going?

There have been a few requests for particular sets of cards as souvenirs. Someone, for example, wants all the cards for the Gutenberg Bible. And some undetermined but large fraction of the totality is being sent to an artist named Thomas Johnston, at Western Washington University. The rest are being “discarded.” “At the end of this project,” Dale Flecker told me, “there won’t be card catalogs left in the university.” I asked him if there were any card catalogs, anywhere in the world, that he thought worthy of preservation. “In general, they’re being discarded,” he said. “I’m not sure I know of anybody who’s decided to preserve them as physical objects.” Maureen Finn said much the same thing to me: “The institutions still want the cards back, and then I think they’re storing them. But most library managers that I talk to will say, ‘We are storing them because it makes the staff feel good, and we will be getting rid of them.’ ”

Online catalogs are wonderful things in principle — things of efficacy, and even, occasionally (as in the case of OCLC’s Online Union Catalog), of grandeur. As a result of the publicly financed expansion of higher education in the sixties, and the boom in academic publishing that followed it, the holdings of the typical university library have doubled over the last twenty years. Without online catalogs, and the circulation and acquisition modules of software with which online catalogs are linked, libraries would simply not have been able to process all the books and journals that were arriving on their loading docks. By the early seventies, there was an ominous arrearage of uncataloged material waiting on herds of rolling carts near the overtaxed cataloging departments of most large libraries. Cataloging had reached a state of crisis similar to the one that forced the financial markets to close early during some of the high-volume weeks of 1969, when Wall Street’s paper-based methods of order processing couldn’t keep up with each day’s orders to buy and sell stock. Computerized stock-execution saved Wall Street (and made program trading and Black Monday possible, too), and computerized cataloging procedures saved libraries.

So card catalogs had to be closed and “frozen.” Nobody can expect a library to maintain sequences of alphabetized cardboard for a collection that is growing, as some currently are, at a rate of five hundred items a day. Even at the beginning of this century, a writer for the Boston Evening Transcript could playfully fret about the unwieldiness of card catalogs:

As these cabinets of drawers increase in number until it seems as if the old joke about the catalogs of the Boston Public Library and Harvard University meeting on Harvard Bridge might become literally true, the mental distress and physical exhaustion suffered by those consulting one of them becomes too important to be disregarded.

And online catalogs, despite their neolithic screen displays and excruciatingly slow retrieval rates, offer many amenities. They do not grow mold, as the card catalog of the Engineering Library of the University of Toronto once did, following water damage. And they are harder to vandalize. Radical students destroyed roughly a hundred thousand cards from the catalog at the University of Illinois in the sixties. Berkeley’s library staff was told to keep watch over the university’s card catalogs during the antiwar turmoil there. Someone reportedly poured ink on the Henry Cabot Lodge cards at Stanford. The huge frozen card catalog of the Library of Congress currently suffers from alarming levels of public trauma: like the movie trope in which the private eye tears a page from a phone book at a public phone rather than bothering to copy down an address and a phone number, library visitors — the heedless, the crazy — have, especially since the late eighties, been increasingly capable of tearing out the card referring to a book they want. Indeed, one of the reasons that the New York Public Library had to close its public catalog was that the public was destroying it. The Hetty Green cards disappeared. Someone calling himself Cosmos was periodically making off with all the cards for Mein Kampf. Cards for two Dante manuscripts were stolen: not the manuscripts, the cards for the manuscripts. Card catalogs attract vandals because they are expressive of needful social trust and communal achievement, as are other common targets, such as subway cars, railroad bridges, mailboxes, and traffic signs. To the extent that a cluster of computer terminals linked to an online catalog protects a room full of older card cabinets by marginalizing them, they are performing a great service.

And of course an online catalog is, when viewed in just the right flattering light, extremely convenient. “It’s wonderful,” said Julie Miran, of Swarthmore’s circulation desk, enamored of keyword searching: “It’s like watching the war on CNN.” I began the research for this article by dialing up an online university catalog from my computer and printing out a sixty-eight-page list of volumes relating to LIBRARIES — AUTOMATION — CASE STUDIES, LIBRARIES — AUTOMATION — CONGRESSES, and so on. Though it took ten times as long to view and reject a given irrelevant book or subject heading onscreen as it would have if I had a drawer of cards in front of me, and was able to riffle through it at medium thumb-and-finger speed, I didn’t have to drive to campus and find a place to park and walk to that particular drawer in order to arrive at a useful preliminary idea of the domain of locally available knowledge concerning the demise of card catalogs. Online catalogs are wheelchair-accessible in the best possible way, and now — through Gopher software on the Internet — I can poke around in the catalogs from hundreds of libraries all over the world, despite the fact that I am not affiliated with a single one of them.

Why would I want to take a look at the online catalogs of libraries I may never actually visit? To find out what clever-clever names their administrators have given them, for one thing — possibly out of their belief that people get exasperated at CRT terminals in libraries, and curse at them, simply because people suffer from a subcortical fear of technology, and that an evocative human or animal or mythopoeic name, hallowed by the vernacular, will make everything better. Thus, the New York Public Library has CATNYP. There is BEARCAT (Kutztown University) and ALLECAT (Allegheny) and BOBCAT (NYU’s Bobst Library) and CATS (Cambridge). There is VIRGO (the University of Virginia), FRANCIS (Williams College), LUCY (Skidmore), CLIO (Columbia), CHESTER (the University of Rochester), SHERLOCK (Buffalo State College), ARLO (the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs), FRANKLIN (the University of Pennsylvania), and Harvard’s appropriately Eustace Tilleyish HOLLIS. There is BISON (SUNY Buffalo), OASIS (the University of Iowa), ORION (UCLA), SOCRATES (Stanford), ILIAD (Butler), EUCLIDPLUS (Case Western), LUMINA (the University of Minnesota), and THE CONNELLY EXPLORER (La Salle). MELVYL (the University of California system) is named after Melvil Dewey; the misspelling was reportedly intentional, meant to emphasize the difference between Dewey’s cataloging universe and our own. SUNY Brockport’s Drake Memorial Library greets its users with a typographically generated image of a card catalog:

Your automated catalog, by DYNIX.

Copyright (c) 1992 by DYNIX, Incorporated.

Meanwhile, the cards from Drake’s actual card catalogs are, according to a reference librarian I talked to in October of 1993, being used as scrap paper. The reference man gave a small, embarrassed laugh when he passed this piece of news on to me. And he is quite right to be embarrassed. Drake’s physical catalog has been replaced by an eager-beaver screenful of exclamation points and bracketed equal signs, as if to insist on equivalency, when in fact there is no equivalency. The unfortunate truth is that, in practice, existing frozen card catalogs, which just sit there, doing no harm to anyone, are typically being replaced by local databases that are full of new errors (an early OCLC study found 1.4 errors per record input), are much harder to browse efficiently, are less rich in cross-references and subject headings, lack local character, do not group related titles and authors together particularly well, and are in many cases stripped of whole classes of specific historical information (e.g., the original price of the book, its acquisition date, its original cataloging date, its accession number, the original cataloger’s own initials, the record of any copies that have been withdrawn, and whether it was a gift or a purchase) that existed free, using up no disk space or computer-room electricity, requiring no pricey software updates or daily backups or hardware service calls, right in the original Remington or Brodart wooden cabinets.

Think of yourself as a successful literary agent, with a big Ferris wheel of a Rolodex on your desk. You and your Rolodex go back fifteen years. It holds hundreds of names and numbers, many of which you have updated by hand when a writer or an editor has moved or got married or had a child or hired a new underling. Fond though you are of your Rolodex, it is hardly portable, and you are doing a lot of business on the other coast now. So you decide to get one of those electronic calendar-spreadsheet-address books — something along the lines of a Psion Series 3a, say. After careful planning, you freeze the Rolodex, and then you assign one of your interns the exacting task of keying into the Psion all the up-to-date information that your Rolodex contains. It takes the intern a solid week — there are four hundred and sixteen names. You spot-check the project as it progresses. The intern has made a few screwups here and there, reversed some numbers, made some typos in foreign addresses, but in general it’s surprisingly clean work.

When this retrospective conversion is complete, however, a question arises. What do you do with the big frozen Rolodex? Burn it, pulp it, shoot it? It does take up a lot of desk space. Do you have a big party, and invite all the people in your Rolodex to join you on the roof of your building to drink champagne and tie their address cards to helium balloons and release them over West Fifty-seventh? No, because you are a literary agent, after all, not a publicist. And you quickly see that it would be an error to throw away your Rolodex cards right now, since you are going to want to refer to them from time to time in the months ahead, when there is a question of an electronic address’s correctness. At one point, looking up someone’s name in your Psion, you find that it isn’t there: an undetected typo made by your assistant has displaced the record somewhere, hiding it from you. You find the address easily on the Rolodex. Not only that: the démodé Rolodex, you discover, groups things in a way that is at times more useful to you than Psion’s rote technique. Rather than alphabetized solely by name, for instance, the old paper-based system offers you all your friends at Simon & Schuster together in one clump, a form of what librarians call “collocation.”

Also, in a more reflective moment it occurs to you that there is considerable information on the Rolodex cards that didn’t make its way into your new toy: old, crossed-out addresses, old phone numbers, old spouses, old editorial assistants who are now publishing titans in their own right. The very degree of wornness of certain cards that you once flipped to daily but now perhaps do not — since that author is drunk and forgotten or that magazine editor has been fired and now makes high-end apple chutneys in Binghamton — constitutes significant information about what parts of the Rolodex were of importance to you over the years. Your new Psion can’t begin to tell you that: its addresses are ageless, as fresh and yellowy-gray as the current in a diode. Your Rolodex is a piece of literary history, in a way. It is also the record of some of the most cherished connections you have formed with the world. Would it be stretching things too much, you suddenly wonder, to call your Rolodex a form of autobiography — a manuscript that you have been writing these fifteen years, tinkering with, revising? Perhaps it is the only manuscript you will ever write. Throw it out? No, you will donate your Rolodex to your alma mater’s library, valuing it at several thousand dollars in order to get a tax write-off, and the librarians there will recognize its importance to future scholars of late-twentieth-century publishing practices and will lovingly catalog it online, assigning it a Library of Congress call number and an appropriate list of subject headings.

Now imagine something just a little larger than your Rolodex. Think of an unbound manuscript, the only one like it, composed of a great many leaves of three-by-five-inch cardboard — a million of them, in fact — each leaf covered recto and sometimes verso with detailed descriptions of certain objects that the world has deemed worthy of organized preservation. The authors of this manuscript have worked on it every day for a hundred and twenty years. It is, then, the accreted autobiography of an institution whose job it is to store and retrieve books and book-like materials. Many of its authors were smart and careful people — perfectionists, wide readers, though by predilection keeping themselves as anonymous in their authorship as medieval cathedral builders. Some of them had specialized knowledge and idiosyncratic enthusiasms, which they worked into the pages of their creation by employing thousands upon thousands of “See” and “See also” pointers to other pages. Together, over the years, they achieved what one of their early masters, Charles Ammi Cutter, called a “syndetic” structure — that is, a system of referential links — of remarkable coherency and resolution.

The authors made one serious mistake, however. Although they had taken great pains to be sure that within their massive work every book and manuscript stored in their building was represented by a three-by-five page, and often by several pages, describing it, they had forgotten to devote any page, anywhere, to the very book that they had themselves been writing all those years. Their card catalog was nowhere mentioned in their card catalog. Dutifully, they had assigned call numbers to large-type Tom Clancy novels, to magnetic tapes of statistical data, to diskettes full of archaic software, to old Montgomery Ward catalogs, to spools of professional-wrestling magazines on microfilm, to blueprints, wills, contracts, and the archives of electronic bulletin boards, to pop-up books and annual reports and diaries and forgeries and treaties and realia of every description, but they left their own beloved manuscript unclassified and undescribed, and thus it never attained the status of a holding, which it so obviously deserved, and was instead tacitly understood to be merely a “finding aid,” a piece of furniture, wholly vulnerable to passing predators, subject to janitorial, rather than curatorial, jurisdiction — even though this catalog was, in truth, the one holding that people who entered the building would be likely to have in common, to know how to use from childhood, even to love. A new administrator came by one morning and noticed that there was some old furniture taking up space that could be devoted to bound volumes of Technicalities, The Electronic Library, and the Journal of Library Automation. The card catalog, for want of having been cataloged itself, was thrown into a dumpster.

Now some history. In 1791, in Paris, the Revolutionary government, having confiscated a number of private and monastic libraries throughout France, became curious to know what interesting books it suddenly possessed. The Imprimerie Nationale issued an Instruction pour procéder à la confection du catalogue to those charged with watching over new state property in outlying departments. Inventorists were told to number every book in a library, and then to write down, on ordinary playing cards, each book’s number, its author, its title, a brief physical description, and the name of the library where it could be found. (Aces and deuces, it was suggested, might be pulled from the deck and set aside for books with wordy titles.) These cards were to be alphabetized by author, strung together, and sent on to Paris.

In 1848, Anthony Panizzi, Keeper of Printed Books for the British Museum, had a similar notion:

By an alphabetical catalogue it is understood that the titles be entered in it under some “headings” alphabetically arranged. Now, inasmuch as in a large library no one can know beforehand the juxtaposition of these headings, and it would be impossible to arrange them in the requisite order, if they cannot be easily shifted, each title is therefore written on separate “slips” of paper … which are frequently changed from one place to another as required. It is self-evident that if these “slips” … be not uniform, both in size or substance, their arrangement will cause mechanical difficulties which take time and trouble to overcome.

Slips of paper and decks of playing cards eventually gave way to drawers of annotated cardboard; these were employed, through the 1860s, not as ends in themselves, to be browsed by patrons interested in finding books, but as a convenient means for the staff to keep track of what it had, or to prepare for the publication of a formal catalog. For the ornate, expensively produced catalog in book form was the traditional way a library presented itself to the public — the way it entered, as it were, the library of libraries. And, as it happens, a more than perfunctory catalog of a library’s holdings is an exceedingly difficult book to edit and publish. Charles Coffin Jewett, the librarian of the Smithsonian Institution, in his Smithsonian Report on the Construction of Catalogues of Libraries (1853), wrote:

The preparation of a catalogue may seem a light task, to the inexperienced, and to those who are unacquainted with the requirements of the learned world, respecting such works. In truth, however, there is no species of literary labor so arduous and perplexing. The peculiarities of titles are, like the idiosyncrasies of authors, innumerable.

In 1850, the librarian of the American Antiquarian Society was asked to produce a new catalog for the society. “Men have become insane,” the agitated librarian responded,

in their efforts to reduce these labors to a system; and several instances are recorded where life has been sacrificed in consequence of the mental and physical exertion required for the completion of a catalogue in accordance with the author’s view of the proper method of executing such a task.

One Sunday, feeling only semi-sane myself, I called up Jim Ranz, retired dean of the Libraries of the University of Kansas, from whose immortal monograph The Printed Book Catalogue in American Libraries: 1723–1900 (1964) this last quotation is taken, and I asked him to comment on the passing of card catalogs. Mr. Ranz was not terribly concerned about their fate. “Retention of a card catalog would have to be a pretty low priority in most libraries,” he said. What he really wanted to talk about was Charles Ammi Cutter (1837–1903), the author of what is in Mr. Ranz’s opinion the finest library catalog ever made. Cutter’s masterpiece is the five-volume catalog of the Boston Athenaeum, published between 1874 and 1882. “I’m not sure he wasn’t the greatest cataloger that lived,” Mr. Ranz told me. The work is 3,402 pages long, and is elaborately and commonsensically cross-referenced; it cost the Athenaeum almost a hundred thousand dollars to produce. It is still of interest and utility to historians — as is the card catalog for the Athenaeum, which Cutter also developed. So far, the library has held on to its original cards.

Surely, I insisted to Harvard’s Dale Flecker, the Boston Athenaeum’s card catalog, at the very least, ought to be preserved. “Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Flecker replied. His indifference makes sense, in a way, since he couldn’t very well advocate the preservation of the Athenaeum’s catalog and at the same time defensibly jettison the older and equally rich public catalog at Harvard. The young Charles Cutter had given his energy to Harvard’s cards, too; while working for Ezra Abbot, who was Harvard’s assistant librarian from 1856 to 1872, he had refined his theories about how people actually perform subject searches and what they require from a library’s finding list. In 1861, Ezra Abbot instituted one of the first card catalogs that were “freely and conveniently accessible,” in his words, “to all who use the Library.” By the turn of the century, the traditional bound catalog had become a technical impossibility for large libraries, and card catalogs, predominantly handwritten (despite the existence by then of early typewriters), were everywhere.

In January 1901 the Library of Congress began printing its catalog cards in quantity and selling them in sets to any library that wanted them. These cards — elegant in their own way, accurate, highly readable, and cheap — took off. Even Cutter himself (with good grace, since his advocacy implied the eventual death of his own artful system of subject classification) recommended the purchase of Library of Congress cards, writing in 1904 that “any new library would be very foolish not to make its catalogue mainly of them.” And libraries obeyed. A 1969 study of 1,926 randomly selected cards, all plucked from drawers of the shelf list at Rice University’s Fondren Library, found the following kinds:

15

handwritten

1,275

unmodified Library of Congress

68

modified Library of Congress

472

typewritten

96

miscellaneous, describing maps, musical scores, serials, etc.

(This same pre-computer-age study, published by MIT, determined that the average number of cards in a drawer was 826, that the typical book represented by a card was 276.6 pages long, and that the growth rate of Rice’s library holdings closely tracked that of the United States gross national product.)

The Library of Congress’s handiwork dominated card catalogdom through the early seventies. In 1968, it was distributing about a thousand cards a minute, for around five cents a card. Meanwhile, Fred Kilgour, a chemist turned librarian, sensing that the Library of Congress was failing to exploit the full possibilities of its newly developed machine-readable cataloging techniques, formed OCLC and became, among many other things, the catalog-card printer for the world. (OCLC sprang up in Ohio, according to Kilgour, because “in Ohio, and in the eastern Midwest, people in general are more willing to accept calculated risk with reference to innovation.”) Since 1970, OCLC has printed 1.8 billion catalog cards on its high-volume line printers: they’re the ones with the distinctive, slightly jaunty typewriteresque typeface. Though they cost slightly more than Library of Congress cards, OCLC would automatically sort your duplicates any way you wanted — all together in one alphabet, say, or separately alphabetized for the subject catalog, the author-title catalog, and the shelf list. (A shelf list is a card catalog arranged in call-number order; catalogers use it to help them shelve like books with like.) Since the labor involved in filing cards is an enormous part of the cost of maintaining a card catalog, OCLC’s adaptable presorting was a real advantage, and for years OCLC was esteemed as a card-printing service even by universities that (like Princeton) sniffed at the quality of its growing database.

But it was the massive database itself that became OCLC’s real triumph. For a fee, a library became an OCLC member and got one or more dedicated Beehive terminals (advanced for their time, able to handle the diacritics that catalogers needed, when other computer interfaces generally offered only capital letters), each linked to Ohio. For two dollars per title, a member cataloger could look through OCLC’s records to see whether the book before her had already been cataloged by somebody else — either by the Library of Congress (whose MARC records OCLC bought and loaded into its database) or by another member library. (Each library was identified by a three-letter tag.) If she found a record, and the record looked good, she would request that OCLC print up a set of cards for it and send them to her. In this way, a library could eventually relegate a good deal of the cataloging work that had once been performed by degreed professionals to lower-paid clerks and student assistants.

And the brilliance of Kilgour’s enterprise was that if the cataloger did not find a record, she could undertake to describe the book herself, and contribute her work to the system as a “master record” for that book, for the good of all members. She wrote a sort of poem, following a set of rules more rigorous than a villanelle’s; she sent it off to people in Ohio who published it for her; and then she got paid a few dollars — in the form of a cataloging credit against future OCLC charges. The more fresh “copy” a cataloging department offered OCLC, the cheaper its use of OCLC was, and thus there was plenty of incentive for all libraries, engaged in the creation of a kind of virtual community long before there were such things as Usenet and listservs, to pump up the burgeoning database. What began mainly as a handy, unilateral way of delivering the Library of Congress MARC files to member libraries turned into a highly democratic, omnidirectional collaboration among hundreds of thousands of once-isolated documentalists: currently, there are close to thirty million records in the database, only a quarter of which originally came from the Library of Congress, the majority being the work of nearly seven thousand member libraries.

But amid this public-spirited hubbub there were some signs of trouble. “Distributed computing,” in the recent words of Paul Lindner, one of the architects of Gopherspace on the Internet, “is like driving a wagon pulled by a thousand chickens”—and distributed cataloging, although its principal database is anchored in central Ohio, exhibits a similar noisy, gabbling, drifting quality. Quality was, indeed, a serious problem from the start: predictably, some libraries were much more careful and skillful at describing books than others. Wright State University, out of misguided zeal or a lust for cataloging credits, reportedly pushed thousands of unwholesome records into the OCLC database — at least, Wright State is often dumped on now, perhaps undeservedly, by the folklorists of OCLC history. Libraries began to “blacklist” institutions whose three-letter tags were sure signs of bibliographic corruption. “The scuttlebutt got around fast as to who did sloppy cataloging,” one librarian told me. In truth, though, everyone made mistakes. The interactive, cooperative group authorship of a resource of this complexity was something utterly new, and since OCLC exercised no editorial control over the contributions pouring in from its members, the cumulative perils of Fred Kilgour’s forward-thinking system took perhaps longer than they should have to emerge.

One source of entropy was OCLC’s laissez-faire concept of the “master record.” The very first attempt to catalog a book on the database, no matter how unmasterly, how inadequate it might be to the needs of other libraries, became by default the “master record” for that book. For years — until, in 1984, OCLC granted a small group of libraries enhanced-member status, allowing them to improve upon faulty or skimpy records they encountered on their own — any sort of change to the master record was a laborious manual process. If a cataloger noticed the typo herself a week after she had conclusively pressed the send key at her terminal, she could not (if another library had tagged the record with its initials by then) correct her mistake onscreen; she had to fill out an error report and mail it (not electronically but with a stamp) to OCLC. I have heard librarians and professors of library science mention errors enshrined in the OCLC database that they haven’t bothered to take the time to try to fix — in some cases, serious errors affecting the retrievability of books to which they themselves have contributed.

The other serious weakness of the OCLC database was its lack of “authority control”—librarianship’s grand term for the act of naming entities (people, churches, government departments, periodicals, subject headings, and so on) consistently. Assume, to take a simple example using a university database, that you are assigned the task of cataloging an eminently hummable document by a person named Pjotr Iljics Csajkovszkij. Who is he? Is he perhaps the same individual as P. I. Cajkovskij? And does P. I. Cajkovskij bear some intimate relation to P. Caikovskis? Could it be that Peter Iljitch Tschaikowsky, Peter Iljitch Tchaikowsky, Pjotr Iljc Ciaikovsky, P. I. Cajkovskij, Peter Iljitsj Tsjaikovsky, Piotr Czajkowski, P. I. Chaikovsky, Pjotr Iljics Csajkovszkij, Pjotr Iljietsj Tsjaikovskiej, Pjotr Ilitj Tjajkovskij, P. Caikovskis, Petr Il’ich Chaikovskii, 1840–1893, Peter Illich Tchaikovsky, 1840–1893, Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky, 1840–1893, and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1840–1893, are actually all the same man? If so (and this degree of title-page variation is by no means unusual for voluminous authors, many of them less well known than Tchaikovsky), the computer has to be informed of that fact outright; otherwise, symphonies and string serenades will be sprinkled haphazardly over the alphabet and a searcher won’t have any idea what he is missing.

Authority control has always bedeviled the makers of catalogs, and the bigger the catalog, the more eras of publishing history it covers, the hairier things become. For Sirine and Sirin and Nabokoff-Sirin, see Nabokov. For House & Garden, see HG. For Alexander Drawcansir, Petrus Gualterus, Conny Keyber, Scriblerus Secundus, John Trottplaid, and Hercules Vinegar, see Fielding, Henry (1707–1754). For Ogdred Weary and St. John Gorey, see Gorey, Edward (1925–). In the late seventies, the second version of the Anglo-American cataloging rules caused a convulsion of despair in libraries when it demanded that Samuel Clemens be officially called Mark Twain, just because more of his books appeared under his primary pseudonym than under his real name. The whine of power erasers was heard through the land. (In librarianship, “eraser lung” was the seventies equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome.) It is safe to say, however, that the apostles of St. MARC completely failed to foresee how abysmally poor the computer would be at grasping the concept of human identity. A person — even a fairly inattentive person-paid to file cards in a card catalog all day can tell that “Alexander the Great, 356–323 B.c.” is the same man as “Alexander, the Great, 356–323 b.c.” and “Alexandria the Great, 356–323 B.C.”; we would also expect him to sense the unitary presence behind cards for “Montagu, Lady Mary (Pierrepont) Wortley, 1689–1762” and “Montagu, Mary (Pierrepont) Wortley, Lady” and “Montagu, Mary Pierrepont Wortley, Lady, 1689–1762”—to use examples from one online catalog. “The card catalog,” as Tom Delsey, of the National Library of Canada, wrote in 1989, “exhibited a relatively high tolerance for deviation from literal and logical norms.… Typographical errors or inconsistencies in headings could be silently corrected in the process of filing the card; added entries that did not match exactly the corresponding main entry on the card to which they were related could nevertheless be placed in their proper sequence in the file.”

The OCLC database, on the other hand, was, until quite recently, intolerant of deviation. Authors get married, they receive honorific titles, they die and have a year put to the right of the hyphen. Or suddenly The New York Times starts spelling Mao Tse-tung “Mao Zedong.” In the face of all this bewildering variability, the object of a catalog, as Charles Cutter himself suggested in his Rules for a Printed Dictionary Catalogue, is to group together, or collocate, all the works by a given writer, and all the editions of a given work by a given writer, and all the works about a given writer’s work, and all the biographies of a given writer, in the proper groups and subgroups, rationally.

For instance, we would prefer (this example is from a search of Harvard’s HOLLIS, which I did in October 1993), when attempting to view the books written by Alfred Tennyson, that they weren’t arbitrarily distributed under three separately alphabetized, unpunctuated headings: TENNYSON ALFRED TENNYSON BARON 1809 1892 and TENNYSON ALFRED TENNYSON 1ST BARON 1809 1892 and TENNYSON ALFRED TENNYSON 1809 1892. Moreover, it would be nice if the first work listed as by TENNYSON ALFRED TENNYSON BARON 1809 1892 (in response to the command “Find Au Tennyson”) were in fact a work by Alfred Tennyson, and not a work by Tuningius, Gerardus (1566–1610), called Apophthegmata graeca, latina, italica, gallica, hispanica (“Imperfect: title-page slightly mutilated”), that happens to be autographed on the front endpaper by Tennyson. And we would prefer that the second work listed as by Alfred Tennyson were not The Kraken: for solo trombone, by Deborah Barnekow, 7 pp. (1978). (Ms. Barnekow is right, though: if Tennyson’s sea monster played an instrument, it probably would be the trombone.) It would be nice, too, if Neuronal Information Transfer, co-edited by Virginia Tennyson, didn’t intrude between several books published by the Tennyson Society and a tempting entry for a work called “Tennysoniana”—an entry that, when I accepted it, plucked me from the Tennyson list and dropped me into a list of twenty-three books by SHEPHERD RICHARD HERNE 1842–1895, none of which was “Tennysoniana.” (Many of these oddities mysteriously disappeared shortly before this article went to press, but there are thousands more. A quick check of HOLLIS on March 21, 1994, revealed that Bolingbroke, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Bernard Berenson all have works wrongly segregated under at least three different forms of their names. Charles George Lamb’s Alternating Currents and Charles W. Lamb, Jr.’s The Market for Guayule Rubber come between editions of Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia. And 462 records for works by Thomas Macaulay are separately alphabetized under eight versions of his name.) I have no doubt that Dale Flecker believed what he was saying when he told me that “the machine catalog is in almost no cases worse and in most cases better than the card catalog was.” But in my experience, five minutes with any online catalog is sufficient time to uncover states of disorder that simply would not have arisen in what library administrators call a “paper environment.”

When I visited OCLC, some of the staff freely admitted to me that card catalogs currently do a better job of collocation than online catalogs do. “We’re only partway there,” Barbara Strauss, then a senior product support specialist at OCLC, told me. (Ms. Strauss “knows cataloging like your tongue knows the inside of your mouth,” one of her colleagues said.) Her boss, Martin Dillon, the director of OCLC’s Library Resources Management Division, recently told an interviewer that browsing the OCLC database using “keyword indexes, author indexes, and subject-term indexes sheds a harsh light on misspellings and errors of all types.” A random sample in one 1989 OCLC study found a hundred and ten separate records for Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker in the database, nearly half of which were potential duplicates, kept separate by minuscule variations and typos. You have to feel sorry for the sophomore accounting major who is hired as a part-time “copy-cataloger” by his university’s library, given a week’s training, and handed an old edition of Clinker left to his university’s library by an alumnus; you have to forgive him when, having drifted for a time through some of the seemingly endless, code-disfigured series of records, looking for a hit, he swears, gives up, and decides that it’s faster just to make up another record on the fly, further cluttering the system with the hundred and eleventh “edition” of The Expedition of Humphry Clinker.

In the past few years, fortunately, OCLC has done a lot of automated cleanup. (The cleanup has to be automated, for, laments Martin Dillon, “when databases get as large as ours the contribution of individual humans is severely limited. The task is so large that no practical number of humans could handle it.”) OCLC’s “DDR” software—“Duplicate Detection and Resolution”—which was first installed in 1991, compares two records at as many as fourteen points and decides whether they stand for the same book, and thus should be fused, or not: if they differ only by an ellipsis (…) at the end of a truncated subtitle, say, or if one calls the publisher “Wiley” and the other calls it “John Wiley & Sons,” the two become one. Common but hard-to-see typos like “Great Britian” and “Untied States” no longer force fictional duplicates. Over six hundred thousand redundant records are gone as a result of this work. And OCLC is now refining authority-control software that becomes more experience — crisscrossed by more specific links among separate forms of the same person’s name, for example — the more it works through new data. Millions of orphaned records have been united since 1990. (There have been a few embarrassments along the way, naturally: “Madonna” was globally altered by OCLC to “Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint” as part of an authority-control routine — a change that, before it was corrected, caused problems for libraries interested in cataloging the recent work of Ms. Ciccone.)

But no matter how clever and successful OCLC’s new quality-control efforts are, they mainly benefit those libraries that have not yet converted their catalogs. Countless old errors and inconsistencies are out there still, doing indolent mischief to scholarship in the local online catalogs of the libraries that “reconned” early on. Having paid millions in fees to OCLC for the use of its database, university libraries must now scrape up the cash to pay for authority-control software just so that their online catalog will perform the minimal tasks that Charles Cutter expected of the card catalog as a matter of course. The University of Chicago, even as it pays OCLC’s RETROCON department to convert cards relating to the classics, philosophy, and American literature (at a cost of around two dollars a card), is contemplating paying Blackwell North America, Inc., a database processor, at least a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a onetime authority-control grooming. (Errors and inconsistencies that appear after Blackwell is finished will persevere, of course.) The CARL Corporation, in Denver, Colorado, charges in the six figures to license its authority-control application to a major university library. This can all suddenly seem very unfuturistic and sad — sad because the cost of technology now consumes nearly 30 percent of the typical American library’s budget, according to one 1992 estimate, forcing it to cut book purchases, reference staff, and skilled catalogers, and sad because the technology that libraries are actually buying turns out to be remedial software meant to correct the hash that earlier technologies have made of information once safely stored on paper.

What we have already begun seeing, in fact, especially at state universities with dwindling budgets, is a kind of self-inflicted online hell, in which the libraries are forced to continue to pay paraprofessionals to convert their huge card catalogs, since they’ve already pillaged the paper database to the point where its integrity is unrestorable, and yet they aren’t able to afford the continuous hardware and software upgrades necessary to make the growing mass of online records function together adequately. They can’t go back, and they don’t have the money to go forward.

I’m thinking, for instance, of U.C. Berkeley. Berkeley has one of the best research collections in the world, and the quality of its cataloging over the past hundred and twenty-five years has been unusually high. Thus its card catalog and its shelf list were filled with richly detailed, accurate, intelligent cards, many of which were sent to Maureen Finn’s RETROCON staff for conversion, sent back, and scrapped. But higher education is in serious trouble in California, and, as a result, Berkeley has chosen not to pay Maureen Finn for a premium RETROCON job. For about two dollars a card, Berkeley is getting a middling RETROCON — better than Harvard’s but still very plain. Typically, an OCLC operator takes a Berkeley card, finds a match in the database as fast as he or she can, and accepts what the database offers, without being able to spend additional time entering the supplemental (or superior) information — the notes, the subject tracings, the holdings records — that the original card may contain. “The standards of conversion were, of necessity, because of lack of funds and lack of staff, not exquisitely high,” one Berkeley employee told me. Because it can’t afford better, Berkeley (like Harvard, like hundreds of other libraries) is paying OCLC not to improve but to denature and often to mediocritize its records of old and out-of-print material. “No matter how good it is,” the employee said, “you throw away that card and, in some cases, accept something that’s inferior.”

Berkeley’s subject catalog is already gone. Though it was more or less frozen in the 1980s, it was nonetheless very efficient for some kinds of searches: if the primary sources in your field were published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, you don’t want your retrievals spread among the thousands of irrelevant records that a mechanical database subject haul brings up. Any drawer of an out-of-date paper catalog represents the equivalent of a filtered computer search, a Boolean date-limited search, of a very sophisticated sort — in fact, one drawer represents the outcome of a kind of search that most online catalogs can’t and won’t ever be able to perform, since it offers clues to what books were in the library during different eras. If in seventy years a historian of science (say) wants to know whether some Nobel-laureate physics professor could possibly have seen and been influenced by a certain out-of-the-way Dutch mathematical monograph from the thirties that bears important similarities to the professor’s work — whether, that is, it was part of the library’s collection during the period when the professor was developing his ideas, or was acquired only after the professor’s papers were published (perhaps acquired by the library as a gift from the professor’s estate, because the professor was sent the monograph by the Dutchman himself, anxious to establish primacy) — the historian of science will have little chance of finding an answer to his question now, because the computer record will bear the (to him) meaningless date of the retrospective conversion of the card, i.e., sometime in the late eighties or early nineties, which has no relation to the time that the card was originally produced (and the book placed on the shelf), whereas the original card, even if it bore no direct date of creation, would have exhibited distinct features (typewriter style, format, cataloging conventions) that might have enabled a catalog-card paleographer to place it within a five-year period.

Why, then, did library administrators order the Berkeley subject catalog destroyed? Was it really just to have the space for eight study tables? Admittedly, eight study tables, incised with the inevitable obscene drawings, declarations of love, and reciprocal ethnic slurs, and populated with thirty or forty pre-midterm Psych 101 students making soft sighing noises with their pungent highlighters and burping like moss-gorged moose from time to time for comic effect, is a noble sight to have in a library. But is it a reasonable trade-off? Library administrators always use the magical phrase “out of space” when they want to get rid of something, but this in no way constitutes an argument. Libraries have been running out of space since the Sumerians first impassioned clay, because tablets and scrolls and manuscripts and books and microforms and computer disks tend to take up space, and their numbers inevitably grow. There are countless duplicates of old textbooks from the sixties and seventies on the shelves of most university libraries; scholarly and scientific journals probably pump more non-unique paper into Berkeley’s library system every few months than was contained in its unique subject catalog. A library continues to buy books, and it selects what it throws out, on the basis of what it judges is of value to present and future users of the library: the need for space is merely a constant, ^SNEED, in every decision to acquire or discard.

Administrators are singling out card catalogs, I think, not as a last resort but as a first resort, because they hate them. They feel cleaner, lighter, healthier, more polyunsaturated, when all that thick, butter-colored paper is gone. (One Berkeley administrator was heard saying, “Oh, we’re just going to get rid of those junky old cards. Nobody uses the subject catalog anyway.”) “Resist the impulse to burn those old cards,” gaily cautions one article on retrospective conversion, since “the staff will experience withdrawal symptoms.” The impulse to burn is there, it seems to me, because library administrators (more often male than female) want so keenly to distance themselves from the quasi-clerical associations that surround traditional librarianship — the filing, the typing, the shelving, the pasting, the labeling. Librarianship, they think (rightly), hasn’t received the respect it deserves. The card catalog is to them a monument, not to intergenerational intellect, but to the idea of the lowly, meek-and-mild public librarian as she exists in the popular mind. The archetype, though they know it to be cheap and false, shames them; they believe that if they are disburdened of all that soiled cardboard, they will be able to define themselves as Brokers of Information and Off-Site Digital Retrievalists instead of as shy, bookish people with due-date stamps and wooden drawers to hold the nickel-and-dime overdue fines, with “Read to Your Child” posters over their heads and “February Is Black History Month” bookmarks at their fingertips. The proponents of computerization are such upbeat boosters of the library’s potential role in the paperless society (Fred Kilgour once wrote that “not having to go to a library is a very important improvement in providing library service,” and when asked in an end-of-career interview whether he felt there was any possible downside to library automation, he thought for a moment and replied, “I can’t think of any negative effect”) that library managers are encouraged to forget — are eventually frightened even to admit — that their principal job is to keep millions of used books dry and lend them out to people. When we redefine libraries as means rather than as places — as conduits of knowledge rather than as physical buildings filled with physical books — we may think that the new, more “visionary,” more megatrendy definition embraces the old, but in fact it doesn’t: the removal of the concrete word “books” from the library’s statement of purpose is exactly the act that allows misguided administrators to work out their hostility toward printed history while the rest of us sleep.

Again, lest we become confused and forgetful, the function of a great library is to sort and store obscure books. This is above all the task we want libraries to perform: to hold on to books that we don’t want enough to own, books of very limited appeal, unshielded by racks of Cliffs Notes or ubiquitous citations or simple notoriety. A book whose presence you crave at your bedside or whose referential or snob value you think you will need throughout life, you buy. Libraries are repositories for the out of print and the less desired, and we value them inestimably for that. The fact that most library books seldom circulate is part of the mystery and power of libraries. The books are there, waiting from age to age until their moment comes. And in the case of any given book, its moment may never come — but we have no way of predicting that, since we are unable to know now what a future time will find of interest.

So the incremental value of any one library book, even a rare and costly book, is tiny. The value of a huge collection isn’t immeasurably increased by the acquisition of some out-of-date 1943 monograph on, say, granary design. And, conversely, the loss of any one book does no obvious harm to the whole. If an operator reverses two numbers in transferring the call number for a book from a card, causing you to look for the book on a shelf where it isn’t, how terrible is that? The numerical typos and coding errors in online catalogs that (particularly in our era of closed, unbrowsable stacks) result in the complete disappearance of a title for the seeker — in its effective, though not physical, loss, its total unfindability, its sinking from view — can’t compel outrage, or make headlines in academia, because most titles are in the minds of no more than five or ten people at a time. Sometimes the only person who has devoted fifteen minutes of mental receptivity and appreciation to a book, aside from its author and (with luck) its publisher, is the cataloger at the library who described it for the OCLC database. If a hundred thousand volumes disappeared at random from the shelves of a major university library in a single night, it might take weeks or months before graduate students compared their puzzling shelf experiences and slowly realized that something big, something on the order of Fahrenheit 451, had taken place. And yet, despite the insignificance of any individual wheat stalk of a book in relation to the total Nebraska of print, we demand that libraries exercise extraordinary care to preserve the ephemera they have on their shelves; we want them to get right to work microfilming or digitizing whatever starts crumbling; we want to trust that when we pass through a university library’s entrance turnstile we aren’t going to be missing too much of the inspiringly miscellaneous assembly of all that has been done and thought.

We certainly don’t think that because a book may wait a decade or three between checkouts the library should necessarily cull it. And even if we do consent to the culling, and forgive the library for laying it out on the twenty-five-cent table, we are unlikely to agree that all copies of that book, in all libraries, private and public, ought to be rooted out and destroyed. We want the book to continue to exist somewhere, not to go extinct, because in some later ecosystem of knowledge it may be put to some surprising use — a cautionary use, a comic use, a cultural-historical use. And unforeseen secondary uses await the book that every library is certain to have self-published, as well. By studying Haverford’s card catalog, Michael Stuart Freeman, librarian of Haverford College, was able to determine when his predecessors deployed their first typewriter (it was during the summer of 1916) — a tiny fact, perhaps, but one of sufficient interest to Freeman that he published a brief, thoughtful paper that discussed the history of typewriters in libraries. Freeman kept several handwritten cards as samples (“I save a few, because I’m a sentimentalist,” he confided to me); but once his own passing curiosity was satisfied, he dumped the rest of his catalog.

Put in mind of mass extinctions and systems analysis, I got in touch with Jim Bradley, a programmer-analyst at the Computer Services department of Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources and the author of an unfinished entomological dissertation entitled “Computer Tools for Pest Management: A Case Study of the Codling Moth.” I asked him about retrospective conversion. “At universities, people get financial support if they’re doing something sexy, and an awful lot of people that are running the over-all library operation today are not so much reference librarians as promoters of sexy modern technique,” he promptly said. “The people who pay the bills want to get out of the stuff business. They don’t want libraries to have anything in them.” I fulminated ineffectually about the new typo layer in online catalogs, and he replied by making a point that seems to me undeniable: “I guess what we’re really doing is we’re having a short Dark Ages of scribalism as we transcribe from the original records into the electronic form. There’s going to be that same blot on the historical record in our age as there was in the Middle Ages.”

We should know better than to do this to ourselves. Or, if we do do this to ourselves — make a gigantic software upgrade of sorts from a paper database to an electronic one, because it’s inevitable — we should, good systems managers that we are, have the sense to keep the old “software” around as a backup, in case Rev. 2.0 has strange bugs and doesn’t perform as claimed. Charles Hildreth, a big name in library automation, said in a 1985 interview that “comparing the … card catalog to the online catalog is like comparing a bicycle to a space vehicle; they’re both modes of transportation but that’s where the similarities end.” And the question is: Don’t both modes have characteristic and complementary virtues? Which mode do you really want to ride to school? Which is going to have the brittle O-rings? Which is costlier? Which is likelier to drift aimlessly off into outer darkness? Which would you prefer to have your fourth grader ride? In a study of some fourth, sixth, and eighth graders carried out at the Downers Grove Public Library, in Illinois, Leslie Edmonds found that 65 percent of the kids’ card-catalog searches were successful, versus only 18 percent of their online searches. No fourth graders used the online catalog successfully. (They were asked to look up things like “Fire Stations,” “Insects — Poetry,” “Octopus Pie,” and “The Curse of the Blue Figurine.”)

And grown-ups have problems, too. There are many more ways to go astray if you must type your way to the call number for a book than if you can flip mutely through cards to one. In 1984, Jean Dickson, in An Analysis of User Errors in Searching on Online Catalog, found that users of Northwestern’s LUIS failed 39.5 percent of the time to type in a title at a terminal in a way that would bring up the record for something that actually existed in the database. She mentions, as one class of keyboard entries, “expressions of frustration” such as “Bleahh!” and “I hate this computer!” and various obscenities.

Under the “Bleahh!” subject heading may be adduced the Problem of Accelerating Typos. First, you type in a name and get no record. You think, Is it me, or is it that the library doesn’t have anything by this person? You look at what you’ve typed. No obvious mistakes. You try again, several ways. Could this library possibly not have anything by this person? You have to decide whether it’s a question of your having given a bad command, or a matter of a harder-to-spot typo, or a variant form of the writer’s name. Some online catalogs require “A” as the author-search command, some “A=,” some “FI PA” (for “Personal Author”), some “FI PN” (for “Personal Name”), some “FI AU,” some “AUT” or a number from a menu. Some screens respond as soon as you’ve typed the magical letter, some want you to press Return to deliver the command. It’s as if you walked up to a card catalog you hadn’t used in a while and weren’t sure whether, in order to open a drawer, you were supposed to pull on the drawer handle, push on the drawer handle, twirl the brass end of the holding rod, or fart twice and sing “God Bless America” in a hoarse falsetto. Anger builds. You’ve forgotten whether you’ve already tried some variant, because your previous tries have disappeared off the screen. With anger comes poor typing. You can’t know it, but you have finally found the proper command and the right form of the name — it’s just that now you’re so steamed that you’re making basic typos every time. Finally everything gels, and you get 123 RECORDS RETRIEVED BY YOUR SEARCH, and then you learn, to your further dismay, how extremely long it takes to page through that seemingly small number of records (“at the simple touch of a button”), hitting Enter, Enter, Enter, or M, M, M, or F, F, F.

And if you persist in wanting to perform an online subject search, prepare for real uncertainties and dashed hopes and deep screen-scrolling tedium. The big technical push in the early development of online catalogs was for “known item” searching, in part because some card-catalog studies seemed to show that library visitors don’t do all that much in the way of subject queries. Most of us come to the library, it was thought, with a specific writer or title in mind. In a monumental yearlong survey published in 1970, Ben-Ami Lipetz and his research assistants approached 2,134 pedestrians in the area of the card catalog at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, clipboard in hand, and politely said, “Please tell me precisely what you were about to do at the catalog the moment I interrupted you.” Eighty-four percent had a title or an author or a specific bibliographic goal in mind, and only 16 percent were interested in browsing a set of subject cards. At least, that is what the respondents said. Subject searches are somewhat embarrassing, especially if you’re a graduate student, and a graduate student at Yale (Yale graduate students used the catalog more than undergraduates, according to the survey, and faculty used it least): it sounds better to say that you want to take a second look at some curious laudanum stains on the endpapers of the Surtees Society’s Catalogi Veteres Librorum Ecclesiae Cathedralis Dunelm than to say that you’ve got to quick get some call numbers for a whole bunch of books under the heading of “Feudalism.” Subject searches are obvious confessions of ignorance; author-title searches aren’t, or aren’t so straightforwardly.

After online catalogs began appearing, though, it was possible to analyze searches without interviews, by studying the computer’s transaction logs. And scholars like Pauline Atherton Cochrane, of Syracuse University, found that people were very interested in subject searches — more interested now, possibly, because they (erroneously) thought that the computer would be better at them than cross-referenced card catalogs were. Sadly, online catalogs are still terrible at subject searches; their noise level, in the informational sense, is incredible. Card catalogs have the sense not to shuffle together alphabetically the myriad subheadings for “labor” in the medical sense and “labor” in the AFL–CIO sense; the online catalogs I’ve seen don’t. Card catalogs don’t lump subheadings for traffic control in Alexandria, Virginia, together with ones for the lost library at Alexandria, Egypt, either. The “See also” card at the beginning of a set of subject entries in a card catalog didn’t yank you to another part of the catalog, and abandon you there; it just suggested that you might want to expand your search in various directions if you didn’t find enough where you stood. There is nothing like this yet in any but the best online catalogs, and even these have peculiarities. (If you look up “Greyhounds” on HOLLIS you won’t be advised to see also “Dogs”; and if you look up “Dogs,” and choose selection 1, which “retrieves information on the use of the above headings,” you will puzzle over this brief note: “subdivision Dogs under groups of Indians, e.g., Indians of North America — Dogs.”)

Nor is there an equivalent for guide cards — those beauties that stick up above the rest, with typed headings — which form a sort of loose outline of knowledge built into the trays, and help you to keep your bearings, and teach you as you go. Card catalogs are “precoordinated,” whereas online catalogs are still almost entirely “postcoordinated,” which means that the burden of figuring out how the universe of subjects ought to be organized has been shifted away from the cards and onto you, the user, who must now master Boolean “AND NOT” filters and keyword trickery and crabwise movement by adjacent call numbers merely in order to block avalanches of irrelevancies.

I have no doubt that it will all get better. That’s the wonderful thing about software: it gets better. Soon it will be possible to browse big subjects like the Bible or Film or the Mafia or Pollution in a productive way, as we formerly could, instead of despairing when we get a message saying YOUR SEARCH RETRIEVED 1,028 RECORDS. A thousand records, remember, is only a little more than one card drawer. My fingers could arpeggiate Lisztlessly through them, the lead hand’s fingers feeding card clumps to the trailing hand, scanning, rejecting, repositioning, in a minute or two. But online, a thousand records is instant death right now. “Studies of online catalog use and users have uncovered a pair of problems that seem to be endemic in today’s online catalog systems,” Ray Larson, a professor at Berkeley’s library school (or, as it is now called, the School of Information Management and Systems), wrote conclusively in 1991:

These are: (1) a large percentage of subject searches fail to retrieve any bibliographic records; and (2) when subject searches succeed in retrieving records, they often retrieve too much material for the user to evaluate effectively.

Larson cites an earlier study of his own in which he found that the average number of online records retrieved in his sample was 77.5, whereas the average number that users actually took a look at was 9.1. The “futility point” in online searches — the point at which you give up and go with what you have — is, because of screen fatigue and the sequential lethargy of system response, much lower than in card-catalog searches. The life of the mind suffers as a result.

Not so for experienced onliners, you may contend — those who have developed a feel for Library of Congress subject headings, and may even have the now indispensable four-volume Library of Congress Subject Headings open beside their keyboard — but if this is the case it is because, as Professor Larson neatly points out, “part of the experience acquired by ‘experienced users’ is frequent search failure and information overload when subject searching.” Larson goes as far as to say that online catalogs “are, in effect, conducting a program of ‘aversive operant conditioning’ against subject searching by their users.” You could, in fact, go Larson one better by hypothesizing that online catalogs are acting to reinforce the tendency toward mindless academic hyperspecialization, since any attempt to venture into areas in which one is a novice, using the library’s basic search tool, is met with the sharp electric shock of a long search warning. Certainly it is truer now than ever that if you want your scholarship to be read, you had better find a way to maneuver it into the early letters of the alphabet, because online, nobody’s getting much past the “G”s and “H”s.

Software engineers are clever and adaptable people. They have, more than most of us, profited speedily from their mistakes. We have leaped ahead from, say, the late-seventies computer catalog at the University of Toronto Library, which reportedly included a program to rotate any “Sir” beginning a name entry to the end of the name: the program not only moved all the stand-alone “Sir”s but bestowed involuntary knighthood on writers like Ernest Sirluck (who was a professor at the University of Toronto at the time and an editor of, among other things, Milton’s Areopagitica), turning him into “Luck, Ernest Sir.” Any day now, information retrieval will be a new and amazing experience: “For the first time the catalog user will be freed from the tyranny of the linear sequences of A-Z and 0–9,” Michael Gorman headily writes, in an anthology called Closing the Catalog. We will cast off our letter fetters, he seems to promise, and soar. Envisioning what Gorman calls the “New Jerusalem” of the online catalog, I can fantasize about one that would include an aging-and-fading component, so that the older a given database record is, the yellower (or pinker, or ocean-bluer) the screen would be at its corners, thereby offering us some of the instantaneous secondary information that cardboard offers us now. (Word-processing packages would also benefit from what might be called AGE or OLD utilities — for Advanced Geriatric Engine and Optional Latent Dogearing, respectively.) And the more times a bibliographic record is called up by the users of the database, the darker will be the accumulation of random “grime pixels” in the top margin — though never so dark that they would interfere with legibility, of course, and every tenth retrieval might remove one grime dot rather than add one, since handling wears away previous deposits, too. We will be able to tour mind rooms full of three-dimensional representations of catalog cabinets by gesticulating with our data gloves like armchair Shivas, so that we will have some intuitive sense of the size of the collection we are interrogating, just as we do now when we walk into the lobby of a library we haven’t visited before and size up its rows of card cabinets; we will have ways to maintain a sense of where we are in the database, as we do now through drawer and cabinet labels, through guide cards, and through our subconscious feel for where the rest rooms and the circulation desk are; we will have screens whose resolution will be the equal of Library of Congress printed cards, or even of handwritten cards; we will be able to look at five or six records at a time, and to move forward and backward through 826-unit clusters of retrieved records with the rifflingly variable speeds we now attain over semi-pliant paper. All this and more will be ours in the years to come, assuming there is money to pay for it. But it isn’t ours yet, and Michael Gorman and his colleagues in Closing the Catalog were foretelling the ways that online techniques would free information retrieval from various alphanumeric tyrannies almost fifteen years ago. Today, if I take a stool in front of a University of California MELVYL screen and type, for instance, BROWSE SU CENSORSHIP (meaning “Please show me the subject headings relating to Censorship”), this is what I get back:

LONG SEARCH

: Your search consists of one or more very common words, which will retrieve over 800 headings and take a long time to complete. Long searches slow the system down for everyone on the catalog and often do not produce useful results. Please type

HELP

or see a reference librarian for suggestions.

If I type in BRO SU ROME — HISTORY, I get the same thing. So, too, if I’m curious about AIR POLLUTION or BIRTH CONTROL or PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY or HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, or BIBLE — HISTORY, or even INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL. If I need some books on LINGUISTICS or FOLKLORE and ask MELVYL what it has, and I do so during normal working hours, I get a slightly different message:

PEAK LOAD RESTRICTION

: Your search consists of a common word which would retrieve over 6,400 headings and would slow down the system. During peak load periods, your search cannot be completed. You may reissue your search to make it more specific, or try again during the evening or early morning.

And if I try to narrow the search by typing, say, FI XS ROME — HISTORY (meaning “Please show me only those subject headings that begin with the words ‘Rome — history’ ”), I will be sure to miss many excellent books, including Robert Brentano’s Rome Before Avignon, which is cataloged under “Rome (Italy) — History—476–1420.” Nor will title-keyword searching solve my Roman history problems with MELVYL: to get one possible sample of things I will miss if I place too much confidence in keywords and exact subject headings, I can type FI SU (ROME HISTORY) AND NOT XS (ROME HISTORY) AND NOT XS (ROME ITALY HISTORY) AND NOT TW (ROME) AND NOT TW (ROMAN) AND LANG ENGLISH, which translated means, “Please show me all the books with subject headings that contain ‘Rome’ and ‘history,’ but whose subject headings do not begin either with ‘Rome — history’ or ‘Rome (Italy) — history’ and that do not contain either the word ‘Rome’ or ‘Roman’ anywhere in the title, and that are in English.” Even after this narrowing-down (which takes 97 search cycles and should only be performed after midnight, when few are roaming the system), I will see over 130 books, among them Peter Brown’s Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity and Gillian Clark’s Women in the Ancient World—books I would have missed had I been too uncritical a keyword devotee. And MELVYL is, in fairness, a much more flexible and powerful system than many, especially in its ability to marshal long chains of Boolean exclusivity: if you do an analogous FI KSH search (KSH refers to Keywords of the Subject Heading) on Harvard’s catalog (which cheats by defaulting to a limited, initial-word subject search very similar to MELVYL’S XS, and which disallows commands longer than one line), HOLLIS too will choke on topics like ROME — HISTORY, or ETHICS — HISTORY, or AGRICULTURE — HISTORY, or COSMOLOGY, or BOOKS AND READING, or COINS, or TEXTILE (but not TEXTILES), or TOBACCO, or LIBRARIES, or our friend INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL. Each time, HOLLIS comes back with its HELP OVERFLOW screen, saying in boldface: “Your search retrieved more than the maximum number of items the system can display.”

None of those general headings deserve a system rebuff. All of them are eminently reasonable ways to begin a search — a search that we who have research papers, or dissertations, or mere essayistic tirades due might like to begin in the next few days, not two or five years from now, when the online catalog has been improved to the point where it can comfortably accommodate this sort of inquiry. If there is already a big wooden machine in the library that is able to point us quickly in a few directions without calling us users of “common” words and thereby hurting our feelings, maybe we should keep it. The fact that the card catalog is no longer the necessary first stop in a visit to the library shouldn’t doom it. If nobody uses it for months at a time, stuff it away in the rare-books wing, or sequester it on a seldom visited subbasement floor, crowded humbly among the Z shelves (Z is the call letter for bibliography and library science), like Mike Mulligan’s obsolete steam shovel. Or it could be pushed off to the far end of the reference room (one row of cabinets bolted on top of another to halve its footprint, the entire structure festooned with warnings that its information is not current), where it will gather exactly the same amount of dust as other big and usefully out-of-date library catalogs: Cutter’s, or the British Museum’s General Catalog of Printed Books, or the magnificent pea-green-and-gold wall of the 756-volume National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints.

There are still some librarians who do what they can to save the card catalogs under their care. The librarian of the small, separate library-school library at Berkeley, Patricia Vander-berg, stores her two card cabinets in the stacks, out of range of the administrative eye, but she has kept them. They were edited by a now retired librarian named Virginia Pratt. Ms. Pratt “did some special things to that catalog,” Patricia Vanderberg told me. The university, however, which is in a self-mutilating mood these days, plans to merge the library-school library with the main library, and before the merger there will be a severe culling; the card catalog will almost certainly be thrown out. But for the time being, if some afternoon, depressed by thoughts of cardnage now in progress, you were to travel to the stacks of the library-school library, you could restore your good spirits by contemplating an unharmed, unshrunk, fully operational (though frozen) subject catalog.

Fifty drawers compose it. They are made of blond wood. Pull out one of the “C” drawers, the one labeled “Catalogs.” Here are several guide cards: one for “Catalogs,” one for “Censorship,” one for “Children’s Literature.” Before you have read or touched a single card, you have learned something important about the library-school library, and even possibly about librarianship in general: the edges of the cards following the guide cards for “Censorship” and “Children’s Literature” are dark with handling, whereas the ones following “Catalogs” are not. Thus “Censorship” and “Children’s Literature” have over the years been of more interest to library-school students than “Catalogs” has. This is a surprise — at least, it was a surprise to me. Maybe it’s one reason we’re in this pickle.

And abruptly you realize, looking at these expressive dirt bands, that even the libraries, like Harvard and the New York Public Library and Cornell, who microfilmed or digitized some of their cards prior to destroying them, have — by failing to capture any information at all about the relative reflectivity of the edge of each card — lost something of real interest, something eminently studiable. Who knows what a diligent researcher who photographed (from above, on a tripod) each close-packed drawer of Harvard’s Widener catalog with a high-contrast camera might find out, were he to correlate his spectrographic dirt-band records with the authors that, as distinct clumps, exhibited some darkening? Of course the “Kinsey” cards would be thoroughly dirt-banded — but which others? This is, or was, a cumulative set of scholarly Nielsen ratings for topics at twentieth-century Harvard that is perhaps more representative than any other means of surveying we have. Instead of tossing its catalog out, Harvard ought to have persuaded a rich alumnus to endow a chair for dirt-band studies.

If, though (back at Berkeley’s library-school library), you now take a glance at those two other major subjects in the still-extant subject catalog, the ones more popular than “Catalogs,” and begin by flipping the “Censorship” guide card toward you, you will note that Virginia Pratt has prepared some helpful “See also” material, typed with a red typewriter ribbon on several different models of typewriter:

Censorship

SEE ALSO

Libraries — Censorship

Liberty of the press

Expurgated books

Prohibited books

Condemned books

Books and reading for youth — Censorship

Government information

Children — Books and Reading — Censorship

Book burning

Pornography

A second card goes on, still in red:

Censorship (continued)

SEE ALSO

Freedom of information

Audio-visual materials — Censorship

Libraries — [Place name] — Censorship

Young adults — Books and reading — Censorship

Textbooks — Censorship

School libraries — Censorship

And then in black there follows:

For additional material on this subject see:

Vertical file: Intellectual freedom

MELVYL will retrieve all the subject headings in this helpful list that have the word “censorship” in them, because that is what it mechanically does, but it will not give you any of the others, since their access relies on the perceived relationship between two categorical concepts rather than on rote text strings. As a result, once this subject catalog is thrown out, Milton’s Areopagitica, a work of brilliance and occasional syntactic impenetrability protesting the 1643 act of Parliament that required the seizure of “scandalous, unlicensed, and unwarrantable” books and pamphlets — a work, surely, of some small importance to the history of political censorship-will, because MELVYL lists it under “Liberty of the Press” and “Freedom of the Press” instead of under “Censorship,” not come to the attention of a library-school student, or any student, interested in writing a paper on the topic.

Similarly, the “See also” card that Virginia Pratt wrote for “Children’s Literature” lists sixteen sensible cross-references, including pointers to “Fairy Tales,” “Storytelling,” “Biblio-therapy,” and “Juvenile Literature”; MELVYL, on the other hand, offers an unmanageable and indiscriminate list of 745 subject headings, none of which is “Fairy Tales” or “Storytelling”—though MELVYL will obligingly refresh your screen with another disorderly list of 306 subject headings for “Fairy Tales” if you think to ask it to. Ms. Pratt’s card catalog is good, it is smart, it knows what we need to know — it wants to help us be better librarians. Before we junk it, forcing students to depend instead on subject headings bought in bulk from pooled databases that have been edited not by minds but by iterative software routines, perhaps we should read a little of Areopagitica, since the cards were kind enough to refer us there:

We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of publick men, how we spill that season’d life of man preserv’d and stor’d up in Books; since we see a kinde of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdome, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kinde of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elementall life, but strikes at that ethereall and fift essence, the breath of reason it selfe, slaies an immortality rather than a life.

It is not just crankish and extreme to say that a “kinde of massacre” is going on in libraries right now. There is the exuberant recycling of the card catalogs themselves; and then there is the additional random loss of thousands of books as a result of clerical errors committed in disassembling each card catalog, sorting and boxing and labeling its cards, and converting them en masse to machine-readable form — a kind of incidental book burning that is without flames or crowds and, strangest of all, without motive. If a great research library, in the process of converting two million cards, loses track of one tenth of 1 percent of them, say, severing our access to two thousand books that offend nobody, we can only shake our heads in astonished perplexity. “A few things”—i.e., cards—“that weren’t converted got dumped, but, you know, that’s the nature of life,” Judith Brugger, of Cornell, said to me; and every cataloger and technical-services person I asked admitted that there are now books in their library that, owing to inevitable slipups of one sort or another, aren’t in the online catalog that is supposed to help you find them. Or there is an online record, but the book isn’t on the shelf where the computer says it is. Barbara Strauss, formerly of OCLC, told me that the flaws in online catalogs have created a whole new class of in-house dislocation specialists: people who, like the editors of corrupt codices or of early editions of Shakespeare, are able to divine from the existing computer record what sort of text-entry mistake might have been made, and hence where they should begin to look in the stacks for those ghost books that they know they own but just can’t find.

The current situation is not without a few hopeful signs. Cornell’s Judith Brugger was nearly ready, I felt when I talked to her, to recognize why her own university’s card catalog — whose brutal pollarding proceeds apace — deserves to be spared. Ms. Brugger has degrees in Russian and English as well as in library science, is capable of a passing reference to Derrida, and is full of ideas about how to modify the Anglo-American cataloging rules so that librarians can venture forth and catalog the Internet, which needs it. Twice, she startled me by using the words “art form” in reference to card catalogs, something that nobody else had done. And she mentioned, as an example, the Library of Congress catalog, so “brown and beautiful and round” that it could “bring tears to your eyes.” She spoke reverently of the tiny catalog at the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome, which is “quaint and perfectly specific and completely comprehensive.” She has even kept some handwritten cards as souvenirs of an earlier job. And yet, amazingly, of her own library’s cards she said simply, “They have to be burned.” Cornell possesses what is, in her estimation, “the Velveteen Rabbit of card catalogs.” It has mismatched cabinets. It has broken drawers. It is incorrect.

Mightn’t it, I asked, develop a hint of saving quaintness over the next fifty years? Mightn’t there be ways that future historians could extract unexpected insights about life and thought and prevailing mental taxonomies by analyzing how Cornell once classified books, and how it revised its classifications over time? “We don’t see any research value in archaic card practice,” Ms. Brugger told me. “User studies are the thing now, not particularly strategies for recording data.” (A few days later, she called to be sure I understood that she was speaking on her own behalf, and not on behalf of Cornell, which, it seems, has no official policy vis-à-vis its card catalog — although it’s hard to see how a dumpster can be construed as a value-neutral storage site.)

But when Ms. Brugger said that user studies were the thing now, I thought I heard her waver: Woopsie, she seemed to be thinking, maybe user studies won’t always be the thing? Maybe paper database strategies will be very hot in twenty-five years? What I took to be a truly hopeful sign, though, was Ms. Brugger’s unexpected metaphor: Cornell’s card catalog equals Velveteen Rabbit. That beat-up, brown-and-white spotted, sawdust-stuffed hero of Margery Williams’s book for children is a sympathetic figure, who becomes more precious and indispensable to the Boy who owns him the more his fur wears away and his tail comes unsewn and his boot-button eyes lose their luster. The only way for a possession, a toy, to become “Real,” the Skin Horse explains to the Velveteen Rabbit, is for it to be loved:

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

When the Boy falls ill with scarlet fever, and the doctor orders the gardener to burn the threadbare, germy Velveteen Rabbit, the Velveteen Rabbit grows sad and sheds a tear on the ground. Out of the tear, a flower grows, and out of the blossom of the flower there appears a magic fairy, who saves the Velveteen Rabbit from being burned by changing him into a real rabbit. This may or may not be a sappy story, but as an allegory of card catalogs it works fairly well. It goes something like this. The User loves his Velveteen Catalog so much that it begins to show signs of wear and tear: broken drawers, mismatched cabinets, out-of-date subject headings, worn cards. The User sickens financially, and he is unable to keep a watchful eye on the Velveteen Catalog. A Doctor of Technical Services orders the Velveteen Catalog burned for the User’s own good, and replaced with a new, more antiseptic reference toy. Awaiting its fate, the Velveteen Catalog lets fall a single drawer, out of which blossoms a savioress, who helps the Velveteen Catalog escape into the stacks by transforming it from a Real catalog into an even Realer art form. A moment’s reflection suggests that Judith Brugger secretly sees herself — unbeknownst even to her — not as the cold-hearted torcher of Cornell’s cards, but as their salvation.

And it’s a good thing, too, since even non-Cornellians may remember one especially eminent, especially studied user of the Cornell catalog during its glory days: V. Nabokov. He and his fictive friend Timofey Pnin would regularly withdraw the heavy Slavic Literature card trays from the “comprehensive bosom of a card cabinet” back in the forties and fifties, and, on the wings of a hundred typewritten, time-and-space-spanning cross-references, would overleap the irrelevant ocean and return for an hour or two to green, mythic, pre-Revolutionary Russia, inhabited by lost leading lights like “Kostromskoy” and “Zhukovski,” and Aleksandr Pushkin. The very cards that Nabokov turned and pondered while he worked on his translation of Eugene Onegin are, as far as I have been able to determine, still in place in Cornell’s shabby-genteel catalog. The library would be well advised to keep them there.

But the real reason to protect card catalogs is simply that they hold the irreplaceable intelligence of the librarians who worked on them. Kathryn Luther Henderson, a professor at the library school of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me, “I’ve made catalogs I’ve been very proud of, or had a hand in making them.” Her work, and Virginia Pratt’s work, and the work of all those other people who spent every weekday thinking about the interconnectedness of the books around them, deserves praise and admiration, not clear-cutting. “It’s going to be another generation before we realize that we’ve done this, and what we’ve done,” Professor Henderson said. When I talked to her, she told me that she had some cards that were produced, she thought, in the 1850s for the Harvard catalog. “If somebody came into my office and I weren’t here, they’d probably throw them out,” she said.

There are other, higher-volume card hoarders, too. One of Maureen Finn’s operators at OCLC worked on the retrospective conversion of chunks of a catalog from the University of Washington. The university didn’t want the cards returned — they wanted OCLC to toss them out on the spot. But this operator (too reticent to consent to an interview with me) didn’t go for that. He had looked carefully at the words on those cards; he had reached an understanding with them. He is, according to Maureen Finn, currently storing portions of the University of Washington’s card catalog in his apartment.

But the biggest and most heroic hoarder of them all is Tom Johnston. Mr. Johnston is the painter and conceptual artist who, simply because he asked for them, is receiving hundreds of thousands of cards from Harvard’s Widener Library. The real treasures, in a sense, of the now incoherent Widener catalog are or will be his, for he is currently being sent the cards representing, in part, seldom borrowed books that the library is moving to off-site storage. I reached Mr. Johnston in October of 1993, at a number in France, and asked what he plans to do with them all. He was spending several months at a huge, empty château in the Sauternes region; the pieces of the Widener catalog, however, were arriving steadily (much to the dismay of his secretary) at the Department of Art at Western Washington University, where Mr. Johnston teaches. Of course he could, he said, have them forwarded to France, and paper the rooms of the Château Suduiraut with them, or dig a trench a mile long and bury them there, but so much of contemporary art destroys things, and he has decided that he isn’t interested, this time, in destruction for artistic ends. Still, he does want to “get them in front of the public,” somehow. There is a beautiful museum in Bordeaux; he was considering writing a proposal to create a “really nice” conceptual installation with the cards there.

Exactly what sort of installation he hasn’t figured out yet. (He has the cards, but Harvard, with its finely tuned sense of relative worth, kept the cabinets.) Mr. Johnston’s previous work has often played with bibliographic themes: he made, for example, a series of large, geometric paintings that were hung in pairs. “If you look at them a certain way, you might see a book,” he told me. More recently, he solicited pieces of hair — strands, braids, and dreadlocks — from strangers and acquaintances and taped them onto selected pages of a Gallimard edition of Camus’s L’Etranger. (The book still closes, but not completely.) When one of the “C” boxes arrived from Harvard, just before Johnston left for France, he looked up the cards for Camus. “There’s no rod holding them in. You just pull it out, read it, turn it over, sometimes there’s notes on the back.…” He doesn’t think, however, that he will be taping hair to the Camus cards, because of his personal vow to do no harm. He is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara. (UCSB, incidentally, finished throwing out its main catalog in the summer of (1993.) The Harvard cards come packed in old memos from OCLC’s RETROCON folks announcing softball games, potluck dinners, and paper-airplane contests, and Johnston is saving these crumpled communiqués, too, true antiquarian that he is.

He is weighing the possibility of inviting international artists and “thinkers” to send him their ideas about what should happen to his sizable collection. Though he is pleased to have it—“Think of all the people who have touched those cards!”—he is concerned about how much of his studio it will eventually occupy, about the hundreds of boxes getting out of order, about whether he’ll go crazy having taken on this responsibility, and about the substantial cost of postage, which he, rather than Harvard, is voluntarily bearing. “I think I owe them money,” he said. He wonders what the reaction will be when the world learns what he now legally owns. Maybe Harvard will suddenly decide that it misses this large, conveniently packaged core sample of its history and will ask for it back. “That would be fine, too,” Mr. Johnston said.

Maybe, in fact, the riskiest, most thought-provoking piece of conceptual art that anyone could create out of these found materials is the original card catalog, enclosed in its own cabinets, sitting undisturbed somewhere within the library it once described.

(1994)

Books as Furniture

On the cover of a recent mail-order catalog from a place called The Company Store, a man and a woman in white pajamas are posed in the middle of a pillow fight. But there isn’t one feather in the air, because The Company Store, of La Crosse, Wisconsin, sells new pillows — not stale, corrupt, depopulated pillows from some earlier era of human insomnia, but fresh, unashamedly swollen dream-bags corpulent with clean, large-cluster white goose down of a quality that only European white polar geese can grow. The Company Store also sells things like new flannel blankets, new bed wedges, and new baffled-box comforters. They are not in the business of selling beat-up editions of forgotten nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century books.

But in another way The Company Store is in fact a used-bookseller — or at least the people there are committed book propagandists — since more than twenty old volumes appear in the pages of the catalog. On top of a pile of five folio-folded Wamsutta sheets in Bluette, Black Cherry, Ivory, Sunset, and Onyx, there sits a worn oblong shape that looks to date from about 1880, with a pair of wire-rimmed glasses resting on it — glasses that might be used to read the pages they surmount. Sadly, it isn’t quite possible to make out the title on the book’s spine. But the title in another picture in this catalog — a very small photograph on page 66—does, just barely, cross the threshold of decipherability. The catalog designer has reversed the negative, so that the letters are backward, and the words they spell are partly covered by a finger, but if you look closely you can still identify which book, out of all the books that have ever been published, is lying open facedown on a white-pajamaed thigh — the thigh, it seems, of the woman who was first seen pillow-fighting on the cover. Now she is alone, lost in a fiction-inspired reverie, leaning against a vertical pillow prop with low, stumpy arms that is helping her sit up in bed: one of those readers’ pillows that my wife and her college friends used to call “husbands.” The woman is in the middle of reading The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus, published in 1904 and written by someone named Mary E. Waller.

I went to a big library and took the elevator to the lowest level of the underground stacks, and found there a copy of The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus identical with the one in the picture. The novel is about an unsophisticated high-altitude apple farmer named Hughie, who lives in the Green Mountains of Vermont, on Mt. Olympus — or Mt. ’Lympus, as the locals call it. A falling log has left Hughie crippled in some serious and vaguely Hemingwayesque way, so Hughie, with marriage now out of the question, teaches himself wood carving, aided from afar by cultured friends. They forward him trunkfuls of books and reproductions of European art: he reads Carlyle and George Sand and Browning and Bret Harte, and he stares attentively at a photograph of Michelangelo’s David; and, little by little, under this mail-order tutelage and influence, Hughie succeeds in elevating himself from limping amateur whittler to Olympian panel artist and wainscoteur. One of his correspondents, Madeline, on her way through northern Italy, sends him a set of carved black-oak bookshelves. She writes him, “I like to imagine all those books you have been gathering and making yours on these special shelves.”

I’ve been thinking about bookshelves myself lately, and imagining the shelves one might fill by searching through mail-order catalogs for the books they use as props (often searching at extremely close range: part of the delight comes in figuring out, with the aid of tiny clues and keyword computer searches, the identity of a book whose title at first seems totally illegible), and I’ve been thinking, too, about what our mail-order catalogs and our bookshelves, those two affiliated regions of cultural self-display, reveal about the sort of readers we are, or wish we were. We are not, clearly, whatever The Company Store would have us believe, casual bedtime consumers of the novels and travel books of Mary E. Waller. The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus went through at least twenty-three printings after 1904, according to the copyright page — which would have made it a big book for Little, Brown — but my copy was last checked out on January 19, 1948, and was returned on January 20: too promptly, one suspects, to have been read. The model in the white pajamas and I could be the only two people who have read, or pretended to read, this work in several decades. And yet a very small image of it has been delivered by bulk-rate mail to thousands of households. In another picture in the catalog, the pajama woman is asleep, embracing a seventy-two-inch-long body pillow: she is dreaming, needless to say, of disabled mountain men and the bookshelves full of Carlyle that taught them everything they know; The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus waits on her bedside table.

Nor is The Company Store alone among mail-order catalogs in giving prominence to the old or little-known work of literature. I counted thirty-six hand-me-down books, none with their original jackets on, in fifteen different settings, in the Crate & Barrel catalog for the spring of ’95. The books lie open on chairs, on hammocks, on the floor, as if whoever was reading them had left off briefly to check the status of an earth-toned lentil soup; on their pages rest studiously haphazard placeholders — a shell, a twist of ribbon, an apple, a daisy. The Crabtree & Evelyn catalog for spring offers a pair of three-and-a-half-ounce containers of Southampton Rose Home Fragrance Spray, which is a kind of highbrow air freshener, for seventeen dollars; its dignity is enhanced, and its price defended, by its placement next to a fancily bound Italian biography of Queen Elizabeth from 1965, whose title, translated, is Elizabeth I of England: The Virgin with the Iron Fist—itself not such a bad name for an air freshener. On page 28 of the spring Tweeds catalog, a woman wearing a nice cotton sweater holds open an unidentifiable clothbound book bearing visible, and quite beautiful, mildew stains. In one of the latest J. Crew catalogs, there is a literary interlude on page 33: a man in shorts and plaster-dusted work boots, sitting in a half-remodeled room — on break, apparently, from his labor of hammering and gentrifying — is looking something up in what close inspection reveals to be a Guide Bleu to Switzerland, probably from the forties, in French.

What is it with all these books? Isn’t the Book supposed to be in decline — its authority eroding, its informational tax base fleeing to suburbs of impeccably edged and weeded silicon? Five minutes with the tasteful Pottery Barn catalog of March 1995 may be somewhat reassuring. A closed universe of about fifty books circulates decoratively in its pages. The Pottery Barn catalog’s library may have been selected for the alpha-wave-inducing beige and blue-gray and dull red of its bindings, but the actual titles, which are nearly but not quite unreadable, sometimes betray reserves of emotion. In the tranquillity of a cool living room, a cream-colored book entitled Tongues of Flame appears, minus its jacket, on a shelf of the Trestle Bookcase, near the Malabar Chair. Then it shows up in some peaceful shots of iron end tables. Next, on the page that offers what the Pottery Barn’s furniture-namers call a Library Bed—“a bed whose broad panels suggest the careful woodworking found in old English libraries”—a historical novel called A Rose for Virtue makes its quiet entrance, underneath a handsome ivory-toned telephone. Three pages later comes the big moment, the catalog’s clinch: for, lying at the foot of the Scroll Iron Bed, open facedown on the cushion of the Scroll Iron Bench, as if it were being read, is a half-hidden volume that can be positively identified as Tongues of Flame, and leaning fondly, or even ardently, against it, at a slight angle, is A Rose for Virtue. Whether the rose’s virtue survives this fleeting flammilingus, we are not told; it’s enough to know that the two books, after their photographic vicissitudes, are together at last.

So I went to the library again, and checked out Tongues of Flame. It’s a collection of short stories, by Mary Ward Brown, which was published by Dutton in 1986. (There is also a novel called Tongues of Flame, by Tim Parks, set in England, that came out in 1985, but the large pale-gold letters on the binding of the Dutton edition are unmistakable.) The title story is about a married woman who wants to help a stuttering drunk reform his life by taking him to church. Her program seems to work at first, but one evening the preacher delivers a sermon so potent it sends the alarmed man right back to the bottle; in a matter of hours, his clumsy cigarette-smoking has set fire to the church. “Save the Bible!” hollers one of the parishioners as the flames rise from the roof, and it is eventually saved. The author writes:

The wet pulpit, with the Bible still on it, had been brought out into the churchyard. Pews sat haphazardly about. Songbooks, Sunday School books, and Bible pictures for children were scattered on the grass.

Were it not for the color-coordinating book lovers at Pottery Barn, I would never have read Mary Ward Brown’s short story — and it’s worth reading, more flavorful, perhaps, for having been found circuitously. Nor would I ever have troubled to determine which hymn it is that contains the simple but stirring phrase “tongues of flame.” It’s from “Father of Boundless Grace,” by the prolific Charles Wesley (Methodist, brother of John Wesley, and inspirer of William Blake), and it was probably written sometime in the 1730s:

A few from every land

At first to

Salem

came,

And saw the wonders of Thy hand,

And saw the tongues of flame!

And if I hadn’t read Tongues of Flame, I might never have been reminded of the story of another, bigger book fire. It took place in London on Saturday, October 23, 1731, at two o’clock in the morning. What was to become the library of the British Museum — a set of about a thousand books and manuscripts, which included the collection of the old Royal Library, along with the fabulous accumulation of Robert Cotton — was shelved, far too casually, in a room in a house in Westminster, and was overseen (according to Edward Miller’s That Noble Cabinet) by the son of the by then aged classical scholar Richard Bentley. The room below the library caught fire; tongues of flame found their way up through the wainscoting and reached the backs of the bookcases — or book presses, as they were often called — and, as the conjoined libraries began to sigh and crackle, the Speaker of the House of Commons, who lived nearby and had hurried over when he heard the clamor, plucked warm and smoking bundles of ancient parchment off the shelves and tossed them out the window to save them. Like Chuck Yeager, smoke-smirched but ambulatory after his plane crash at the end of The Right Stuff, Dr. Bentley himself emerged from the conflagration with the Codex Alexandrinus, the priceless fifth-century manuscript of the Greek Bible, in his arms. He was dressed in his nightgown, but he had apparently taken a moment, in the name of scholarly dignity, to slap on his wig. A hundred and fourteen books were ruined or lost that night — some of them “burnt to a Crust,” many of them irreplaceable — and a number of the ones that had been flung out the window to safety were swept together into heaps of shuffled and water-damaged pages and boxed away. Librarians didn’t succeed in restoring order to some of the surviving fragments until a century later.

And if I hadn’t been reminded of that British Museum fire I wouldn’t have been moved to reread the great book-fire scene in Mervyn Peake’s novel Titus Groan, published in 1946, which uses some of the elements from the mythical pre-history of the British Museum. Here’s how Peake describes the passing of Lord Sepulchrave’s library at Gormenghast:

The room was lit up with a tongue of flame that sprang into the air among the books on the right of the unused door. It died almost at once, withdrawing itself like the tongue of an adder, but a moment later it shot forth again and climbed in a crimson spiral, curling from left to right as it licked its way across the gilded and studded spines of Sepulchrave’s volumes. This time it did not die away, but gripped the leather with its myriad flickering tentacles while the names of the books shone out in ephemeral glory. They were never forgotten by Fuchsia, those first few vivid titles that seemed to be advertising their own deaths.

Fuchsia and the others escape out the window, and the next morning we view the library’s desolate remains:

The shelves that still stood were wrinkled charcoal, and the books were standing side by side upon them, black, grey, and ash-white, the corpses of thought.

Umberto Eco seems to have been inspired by this scene, right down to its studded book spines, and inspired, too, by the story of the British Museum fire, in writing the description of burning books which ends his big book, The Name of the Rose. “Now I saw tongues of flame [lingue di fiamma] rise from the scriptorium, which was also tenanted by books and cases,” says Eco’s narrator. And then, revisiting the ruined abbey years later, he reports:

Poking about in the rubble, I found at times scraps of parchments that had drifted down from the scriptorium and the library and had survived like treasures buried in the earth; I began to collect them, as if I were going to piece together the torn pages of a book.…

Along one stretch of wall I found a bookcase, still miraculously erect, having come through the fire I cannot say how.… At times I found pages where whole sentences were legible; more often, intact bindings, protected by what had once been metal studs.… Ghosts of books, apparently intact on the outside but consumed within.

How thoughtful of the Pottery Barn catalog to send its customers back on this short but fiery thematic mission, and at the same time to rescue Mary Ward Brown’s Tongues of Flame from the prospect of absentminded immolation — flinging it out the window, as it were, toward us, simply by photographing it. Bookstores and book reviews deal with new books, and even antiquarian booksellers can only align old books on their silent shelves, where they wait for buyers. But the junk-mail catalogs — sent out by the millions to people who never asked for them but nonetheless look through them from time to time and puzzle over the versions of life they present — go further, extending to past books the courtesy of present inclusion, and surrounding printed fiction with life-size fictional rooms that resemble our own real rooms except that they are a good deal neater, costlier, and more literate.

We know that it’s a lie. One of the larger pieces in the Pottery Barn catalog is the Sierra Armoire, made of wormwood and machine-flagellated pine. The armoire, pictured with one of its double doors ajar, is stuffed with a miscellany of books whose bindings glimmer from its shadows: a textbook of pathology from before the Second World War, an original hardcover of Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March, Paul Horgan’s Citizen of New Salem, a bound German periodical from 1877, and also — so deeply shadowed that only its width and the faintest hint of a typeface give it away—Tongues of Flame. There isn’t a self-help book or a current best-seller to be seen, because the men and women who live in the rooms of the mail-order catalogs never read best-sellers. In fact, they never read paperbacks. Next to the picture, the description says, “Long before there were closets to house clothing, linens and books, armoires did the job.”

Well, this is true. Bookcases, or book cupboards, were called armaria as early as the first century, when some books were still published — that is, multiply copied — on rolls (volumina) and stored on their sides, with little tags hanging from their ends that bore their titles. Seneca, who died in the year 65, rather scornfully mentions book-bearing armoires inlaid with ivory in his essay “On Tranquillity of Mind.” And in one of the earliest surviving pictures of a book armoire, found in a manuscript called the Codex Amiatinus, from the eighth century (but possibly copied from an earlier, now lost manuscript, the Codex Grandior), the books, large and bound in red, lie flat on the shelves, with the doors of the armarium open. The picture is reproduced in John Willis Clark’s The Care of Books, a monumental history of the bookcase, first published in 1901. Professor Clark also quotes from the Customs of the Augustinian Order, which required that the armarium be “lined inside with wood, that the damp of the walls may not moisten or stain the books,” and that it be “divided vertically as well as horizontally by sundry shelves on which the books may be ranged so as to be separated from one another; for fear they be packed so close as to injure each other or delay those who want them.”

In English, the word “armarium” relaxed into “almery” or “aumbry,” as in this sixteenth-century account of life at Durham Cathedral:

And over against the carrells against the church wall did stande certaine great almeries of waynscott all full of bookes, wherein did lye as well the old auncyent written Doctors of the Church as other prophane authors with dyverse other holie mens wourks, so that every one dyd studye what Doctor pleased them best.

Eventually, armoires came to look more like modern bookshelves, shedding their cupboard doors, but thievery and misshelving led to the collateral invention of another deterrent: book chains. The books were flipped around, with their fore-edges rather than their bindings facing outward on the shelf; rings were clipped or riveted to their front covers; and these rings were linked to surprisingly thick, dangling, Jacob Marleyesque chains, some short, some several feet in length, whose other ends encircled iron rods that ran horizontally in front of a shelf or across the top of an angled lectern. Michelangelo designed a chained library. A bookcase historian named Burnett Hillman Streeter, who was a canon of Hereford Cathedral in the 1930s, and a loving restorer of its chained library, reports that libraries at Cambridge remained on leash until the early part of the seventeenth century, while at Oxford the practice persisted until 1799. Samuel Johnson would have read chained books; and when Coleridge some-where laments the impossibility of escaping the fetters of language — when he says, “Our chains rattle, even as we are complaining of them”—perhaps he has the memory of book chains specifically in mind.

So the Pottery Barn catalog is invoking centuries of monastic and academic tradition when it observes that books were once stored in armoires, as were clothes and linens. But can its copywriter truly believe that anyone is now going to keep a book collection behind the closed pine doors of a $999 cupboard? No. Catalog designers long ago learned for themselves and put into earnest practice the observation that one of Anthony Powell’s characters made when he drunkenly pulled a glass-fronted bookcase down on himself while trying to retrieve a copy of The Golden Treasury in order to check a quotation: “As volume after volume descended on him, it was asserted he made the comment: ‘Books do furnish a room.’ ” Catalog designers know perfectly well that books, if we are fortunate enough to own any, should be out there somewhere, visible, shelved in motley ranks or heaped on tables as nodes of compacted linearity that arrest the casual eye and suggest wealths of patriarchal, or matriarchal, learnedness. Books entice catalog browsers, readers and nonreaders alike, into furnishing alternative lives for themselves — lives in which they find they are finally able to perform that contortional yoga exercise whereof so many have spoken, and can “curl up with a good book.”

What, then, will the Pottery Barn’s armoire hold in practice? The catalog copy quietly goes on to note that this piece of furniture is “roomy enough to hold a 20”-deep television or stereo equipment (holes must be drilled in back).” Now we see: it makes a nice decorative envelope for a TV — but it can’t be pictured performing that primary and perfectly legitimate duty, because that would interfere with the catalog browser’s notion of him- or herself. What will make the browser pause and possibly lift the phone is the promise, the illusion, that the armoire is magical, that the spirit of those beautiful shadowy books in the picture will persist after delivery, raising the moral tone of the TV — in other words, that the armoire’s bookish past will give the TV a liberal education.

It’s undeniable that books furnish a room, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. They require furniture, in the form of bookshelves, but they are themselves furniture as well. “No furniture so charming as books, even if you never open them, or read a single word”—so Sydney Smith, one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, and a devoted Victorian reader, told his daughter as they had breakfast in his library. By chance, the book immediately to the right of The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus where I found it in the library was something called Bits of Talk, in Verse and Prose, for Young Folks, published in 1892, by Helen Jackson. She devotes a chapter to tips on making rooms pleasant to live in. She recommends sunlight first, and then color, especially the color red:

In an autumn leaf, in a curtain, in a chair-cover, in a pin-cushion, in a vase, in the binding of a book, everywhere you put it, it makes a brilliant point and gives pleasure.

She goes on:

Third on my list of essentials for making rooms cosey, cheerful, and beautiful, come — Books and Pictures. Here some persons will cry out: “But books and pictures cost a great deal of money.” Yes, books do cost money, and so do pictures; but books accumulate rapidly in most houses where books are read at all; and if people really want books, it is astonishing how many they contrive to get together in a few years without pinching themselves very seriously in other directions.

Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb, the Two Bad Mice in Beatrix Potter, try their best to maneuver a dollhouse bookcase holding a faux Encyclopædia Britannica, bound in red, into their mousehole, but it doesn’t quite fit. At the age of eighty and between Prime Ministerships, William Gladstone became fascinated with the problems of book storage, and during a visit to All Souls College, Oxford, he “launched out on his theme one evening in the Common Room,” in the words of one observer, “and illustrated his scheme of bookshelves by an elaborate use of knives, forks, glasses, and decanters.” Gladstone was not entirely sure how England was going to shelve all the books it produced without its citizens’ being, as he writes, “extruded some centuries hence into the surrounding waters by the exorbitant dimensions of their own libraries.” But one thing Gladstone was sure of: bookcases should be plain. “It has been a fashion to make bookcases highly ornamental,” he says. “Now books want for and in themselves no ornament at all. They are themselves the ornament.”

Books are themselves the ornament. A tenth-century Arabic-speaking scholar learned the truth of this proposition as he was browsing in the book bazaar in Córdoba, Spain. Córdoba was a literary capital; it held what was then the largest library in the world. Our scholar (whose name I don’t know) was looking for a particular manuscript that he hadn’t yet been able to find for sale. Finally, to his inexpressible joy, he came across a copy, written in an unusually fine script. He bid for it eagerly. “But,” he writes,

always the auctioneer returned with a higher bid, until the price far exceeded the actual value. Then I asked the auctioneer to show me the competitor who offered so much. He introduced me to a gentleman in magnificent garments and when I addressed him as Doctor, telling him that I was willing to leave the book to him if he needed it badly, as it was pointless to drive the price up higher, he replied: I am neither a scholar nor do I know what the book is about; but I am in the process of installing a library, in order to distinguish myself among the notables of the city, and happen to have a vacant space which this book would fill.

Books fill vacant spaces better than other collectibles, because they represent a different order of plenitude — they occupy not only the morocco-bound spine span on the shelf, but the ampler stretches, the camel caravans of thought-bearing time required to read them through. If you amass a private library of hundreds of thousands of volumes, as the great Caliph Hakim II of Córdoba did before he died, in the year 976, you can feel confident that you have secured a kind of implied immortality: you die owning in reserve all the hours and years it would take those who outlive you to read, not to mention copy over, the words each book contains — and that bank of shelved time is your afterlife. And if you will your books to a cathedral library, or to a university, with the firm injunction that the books you give be chained in perpetuity (a stipulation that a number of English and Italian library benefactors included in their wills), you can’t truly die, or so you may secretly believe: you can’t sink to infernal sub-basement floors or float off to some poorly lit limbo, because your beloved delegation of volumes, the library that surrounded you in life, and suffered with you, and is you, is now tethered firmly to the present; you will live on, linked by iron and brass to the resonant strongbox of the world’s recorded thought. One testator of 1442 asked that his rare books be chained in the library at Guildhall, so that, he says, “the visitors and students thereof be the sooner admonished to pray for my soul.”

But no deterrent, including chains, is a guarantee of immortality. Books can burn, and they can suffer depredations under various kinds of zealotry, and they can simply get sold off for cash or mutilated by misguided conservators. The particular manuscript that the tenth-century Arabic scholar coveted and couldn’t afford (he doesn’t tell us what book it was) was very probably a casualty of several attendant centuries of civil war and turmoil in Spain. A satisfyingly heavy blue tome from 1939, called The Medieval Library, tells us that by the time Philip II of Spain was fitting out the library of the Escorial, not a single Arabic manuscript, nothing from the glory days of Córdoba, could be found anywhere in the kingdom. (“Fortunately, the capture of a Moroccan galley in which a considerable number of Arabic books and manuscripts was found relieved the royal librarian’s embarrassment,” writes S. K. Padover.) In England, tens of thousands of manuscripts — works that would have been dusted with foxtails by dynasties of whispering attendants in the Vatican if they had been fortunate enough to escape there — perished during the suppression of the monasteries in the sixteenth century. They died slowly in some cases: used to polish candlesticks and boots, to wrap pies, to press gloves flat, or to repair broken windows. Manuscripts of Duns Scotus, who later became Gerard Manley Hopkins’s preferred scholastic philosopher, were nailed to the walls of outhouses and torn off page by page, forced to become, as one proud library purger wrote, “a common servant to evere man.”

All this distant adversity has one positive effect, however: the books now on our shelves become more ornamental and more precious — regardless of their intrinsic worth — by the charged, Lindisfarnean absence of the books that could have influenced or improved them, directly or at many removes, but can’t because they are lost. This explains why some of us, like eager high-school science students doing a unit on fruit flies, are drawn to study up close the short-lived images in catalogs or magazines, in search of tiny, attractively arbitrary points of literary embarkation. These books happen to be the books we have now. They’ve made it — made the leap from library catalog to mail-order catalog. They’re survivors. I haven’t yet ordered one of the tall revolving-shelf bookcases that the Levenger company, that very successful maker of “Tools for Serious Readers,” sells, but I did recently look up the multi-volume Biographical History of Massachusetts, published in 1909, that Levenger has shelved for display in the revolving bookcase shown on the cover of its early-summer catalog. I found, in Volume II, the story of Henry Albert Baker (no relation), a nineteenth-century dentist and lecturer on oral deformities, who in 1872 discovered the principle of the pneumatic dental mallet, a device used for forcing wads of silver amalgam into excavated molars. Baker, in the words of his biographer,

happened to have in his hands a tube such as boys use for bean-blowers. At the same time he had in his mouth a round piece of candy which dissolved rapidly. He playfully put one end of the tube between his lips and accidentally the candy slipped into the tube. He covered the lower end of the tube with his finger to prevent it from dropping. As soon as he felt it touch his finger he sucked the candy back and to his surprise it flew up the tube with such force that he thought he had fractured one of his front teeth. He lay awake nearly all the following night trying to evolve a plan to utilize the force so mysteriously concealed. The next morning he was at the machine-shop bright and early and within three days he had the pneumatic mallet complete.

What could be more worth knowing than this? We could do worse than accept the reading suggestions that fall unsolicited through our mail slots.

There is a surprising further development in the history of the book and the bookcase. Not only is the book the prop of commonest resort in the world of mail order; but objects that resemble books — nonbook items that carry bookishly antiquarian detailing — are suddenly popular. The book as a middle-class totem is in fashion to a degree not seen since Joseph Addison in 1711 encountered a private library containing dummy books of “All the Classick Authors in Wood,” along with a silver snuffbox “made in the Shape of a little Book.” (“I was wonderfully pleased with such a mixt kind of Furniture,” he wrote.) Catalogs now offer book-patterned ties, book brooches, and settees covered in trompe-l’oeil-bookshelf fabric. Pier 1 recently advertised a round glass-topped table whose base is a fake stack of nine large leather-bound books. The latest Horchow Home collection includes, for $869, an entire coffee table made in the image of two immense faux books hewn from chunks of beechwood; the top one is pretending to be Volume I of an Italian edition of Homer. The catalog for See’s candies sells the Chocolate Classics, a book-shaped box of candy bars. The Paragon gift catalog offers a fairly awful table clock with one fake gold-tooled book perched on top and two fake books underneath, bearing the legend, in gold script, “Times to Remember.” Paragon also has an ex-libris frame for snapshots, in printed fabric, showing many shelves of black- and red-bound books — black and red being the colors, we remember, of the poor scholar’s books in The Canterbury Tales. A catalog called Ross-Simons Anticipations has a three-hundred-dollar mirror whose frame consists of several “shelves” of artificial old-style book spines, so that when you check your tie you’ll be thronged with literary feelings.

And then there is the Eximious of London catalog, which began appearing in American mail pouches several years ago. (“Eximious” is an archaic word meaning “distinguished” or “select.”) It carries a four-volume set of book coasters (water-resistant), and a book pencil pot covered with precise replicas of Volume IV of an old edition of the collected works of Racine. I spoke with Cricket, of Customer Service, who told me that the Racine pencil pot was probably their best faux-book seller. And there is the so-called “scholarly magnifying glass with faux bookspine handle.” The handle is a vividly lifelike mold taken from a book called Ramsay’s Poetical Works. It’s a provocative choice. Allan Ramsay wrote verse in what to an American ear is intolerable Scottish dialect, but he also has the distinction of having opened, in Edinburgh, in 1725, the first circulating library — a place where, as in a modern video store, you rent what you can’t afford to buy. Ramsay thus initiated the great change in the demography of readership that takes us from eighteenth-century Gothic chambers of sensationalism to the nineteenth-century coronation of the novel as the preeminent literary form, and, eventually, to the complete subordination of leather-bound books of poetry like Ramsay’s own.

Finally, there is the Faux Book Cassette Holder. Several companies sell false fronts for cassettes, CDs, and videotapes, but this is the only one that made me want to read some Shakespeare. The product turns “an unsightly situation into a stunning bookshelf asset,” Eximious says. “The mellow row of books looks exactly like a set of leather-bound antique volumes, because the resin mould was actually taken from such a set.” What set is it? It’s the Pickering’s Christian Classics collection, published in the 1840s by the bibliophilic William Pickering, who had a thing for miniature books, or what librarians call “tinies.” His tiny of several Latin poets drew the attention of Gladstone himself, who noted with approval that it weighed only “an ounce and a quarter.” I couldn’t put my hands on a copy of Saltmarsh’s Sparkles of Glory, the eleventh volume in Pickering’s row, or on Hill’s Pathway to Piety, but I did read some of the ninth volume — Christopher Sutton’s Learn to Die, a reprint of a work first published in 1600, in black-letter type. Those embarrassing multicassette pop-music anthologies you may have bought (or, rather, I may have bought) on impulse, by phone, while watching Court TV — the ones with titles like Forever ’80s, or The Awesome ’80s, or Totally ’80s—can now reside, shielded from inquisitors, behind the binding of a book that contains morbidly helpful thoughts such as this:

Seeing therefore, that on every side, wee have such urgent occasion, to passe the dayes of this wearysome Pilgrimage in trouble, and pensivenesse of minde, may wee not thinke them thrice blessed, who are now landed on the shoare of perfect Securitie, and delivered from the burden of so toilesome a labour: May wee not bee refreshed, in calling to minde, that this battaile will one day be at an ende, and wee freed from the thorowes of all these bitter calamitites?

As for beauty, Sutton writes:

Doe not some few fits of a feaver, marre all the fashion? The inconstancy of all worldly glory! All this stately and pageantlike pompe shall vanish away, and come to nothing, as if it never had bene.

Just the right note to strike in a cassette holder. As I read Learn to Die, I began wondering whether Christopher Sutton had been spending time at the Globe Theatre: variations on phrases and metaphors from Shakespeare’s late plays, especially from soliloquies in Hamlet, kept cropping up. Even the opening words of the book—“That religion is somewhat out of joynt”—recall Hamlet’s announcement that “the time is out of joint.” So I got down a copy of Hamlet, and soon saw that I was mistaken. It wasn’t that Christopher Sutton had been hearing Shakespeare; it was that Shakespeare had been reading Christopher Sutton: Learn to Die came out in 1600, while Hamlet wasn’t produced until about 1602. And yet Sutton isn’t listed in any study of Shakespeare’s sources that I checked, or in the Arden Hamlet, or in the nineteenth-century variorum edition of Hamlet by Horace Howard Furness. Could the Eximious catalog be giving us, for only $51.50 plus shipping, an admittedly minor but nonetheless significant and as yet undissertationed source for Hamlet’s death-fraught inner sermons? Could a mail-order catalog be sending us to graduate school?

It is a little disorienting, though — the wish to disguise one’s cassettes or one’s videotapes behind this extreme sort of leathery surrogacy. Better, truer, braver it would have been for Eximious to market a set of faux Penguin paperbacks, intermingled with a few faux Vintage Contemporaries. Our working notion of what books look like is on the verge of becoming frozen in a brownish fantasy phase that may estrange us from, and therefore weaken our resolve to read, the books we actually own. Hamlet, who was tolerant of bad puns, might have been tempted to point out that when a book turns faux it may cease to be a friend.

If we momentarily resist the gold-filigreed leather archetype, we may discover that the essential generous miracle of the bound book — which is the result of its covert pagination (that is, its quality of appearing to have only two surfaces when closed but in fact fanning forth dozens or hundreds of surfaces when opened) — is, right now, undergoing more technical experimentation and refinement and playful exaggeration than at any other time in its history. The book, considered as a four-cornered piece of technology, bound on one side, is still surprisingly young. Signs of its youth are to be found, naturally, in the children’s section of the bookstore, where a brilliant corps of paper-engineers have lately made their mark. The children’s section has third-generation pop-up books that arch and pose under the stress of page-turning like protégées of Isadora Duncan. There are lift-the-flap books, which carry subordinate pages on their pages, offering further surprises of surface area, and yet allow their flaps to be torn off without protest. (My son, who is one and a half, spends an hour each day reviewing his now flapless lift-the-flap books.) On these shelves you’ll find letter-pouch books, like The Jolly Postman, and up-to-date variations on the old textural pat-the-bunny and feel-daddy’s-scratchy-face theme; you will encounter rows of miniature, stiff-paged Chunky or Pudgy books, and the foam-padded Super Chubby series from Simon & Schuster, and the patented double-wide House Books from Workman Publishing, all of which boldly make a virtue of the necessary thickness of the non-virtual page. Even Goodnight Moon is now a board book. And there are books here with neo-medieval tabs to hold them closed, and real wheels to roll on, and books that have a hole in every page and a squeaking pig in their heart. There are books that are really toy kits with pamphlets, like Build Your Own Radio, published by Running Press, which when opened reveals circuitry, not words; or the Make Your Own Book kit, with paper and binding glue; or consummations like The Mystery of the Russian Ruby, which includes its own Sherlock Holmesian hinged bookcase disguising a secret stairway and a disappearing high-heeled foot; or the folio-size construct that calls itself a book, and is published by St. Martin’s, a reputed book publisher, but that upon opening burgeons into a 360-degree two-story Victorian dollhouse. Upstairs, near the fireplace, there is a small lift-the-flap book cupboard holding six weighty, untitled volumes.

Several times lately, encouraged by this foliated ferment in the children’s section, or by the confident bibliophilia to be found in the bulk-mail catalogs, I have stood before my own six undistinguished bookcases, and regarded the serried furniture they hold with a new level of interest and consideration. The best bookcase moment, I find, is when you reach up to get a paperback that happens to sit on one of the higher shelves, above your head. You single it out by putting a fingertip atop the block of its pages and pulling gently down, so that the book rocks forward and a triangle of cover design appears from between the paperbacks on either side. The book’s emergence is steadied and slowed by the mild lateral pressure of its shelved peers, and, if you stop pulling just then, it will hang there by itself, at an angle, leaning out over the room like an admonishing piece of architectural detail; it will not fall. Finally the moment of equilibrium passes: the book’s displaced center of gravity and the narrowing area it has available for adjacent friction conspire to release its weight to you, and it drops forward into your open hand. You catch the book that you chose to make fall. And, with any luck, you read it.

(1995)