OK, I have really, truly lost it. Two moves back and forth across the country, I swore I would jettison every bit of baggage unnecessary to my life, particularly everything heavy; I cussed I swore I kicked things, I frightened poor dear Blair and Abby who helped with my storage. I have crap in Mom’s storage and mine and Aunt Patti’s basement and Dad’s and Grandma Dee’s garage and here in the apartment where I am housesitting and at work and in the basement doctoral lab and even now the puppet studio has my childhood Lite Brite, and probably a hundred other squirrel-holes I’ve totally forgotten (Catherine – your garage?!)
And yet here I am arse-up in dumpsters again, not just again but EVERY DAY, with a disturbing amount of brownish-red organic substance all over my clothes and up to my elbows, hauling away poundage. Sneaking into the library basement on the way to and coming back from work, emerging from a door that only I and this one Asian kid who’s always out for a smoke seem to know about.
I am having feelings I have not had since I maxed out my library card at the age of seven.
The Teachers College Library is throwing out dumpsters upon dumpsters of books. Really, really old books. Today I counted them down from 1925 to 1890 to 1866 to 1845 to 1819.
There are books in Arabic and Romanian, and I am dying because I don’t even know what is in them. There are books to teach Ukrainians and Japanese people English, which can’t possibly have changed that much since 1945. There are pamphlets and other ephemera from Montana and Arizona and California and Nebraska, Harvard and Yale and the Tuskeegee Institute. And there are volumes upon years of notes from meetings of the Headmistresses’ Association.
I have rescued some half-dozen copies of a small volume titled “Practical Examination of Urine” and given them away to friends. My own copy has dubious-looking water stains on the cover. I have an inch-and-a-half thick copy of the New York State “Manual of Patriotism.”
I started to get hysterical about the books the other day up in our loft on the library fifth floor, and was quickly silenced by my boss. It’s a huge can of worms you don’t want to open, he warned. Apparently the books have already been vetted and cross-referenced by the library staff to see if anyone wants them.
Did they ask Prelinger? I asked. I found books on California, I know they have a special collection.
Yes, they asked Prelinger, they tend to ask Prelinger. (UPDATE: I wrote to Prelinger. They are taking a small box of books on conservation and stuff related to California from me; they did not seem to remember being contacted by TC.)
What about eBay?
Look, it’s just not cost-effective to try to sell all these. So many ephemera. Some of the books predate ISBN numbers.
What about the professors? Some of this is primary source material, I’m sure the historians would be interested, we have professors who have written some of the best histories of educational systems –
The problem is, Gus, books come back. You give them to a professor; the professor dies; his collection gets returned to the school, and you’re back where you started.
Apparently, books are like boomerangs. Like the crazy man told Hugo, “they come back and hit you, you know.”
Something in me wasn’t taking this for an answer, particularly the primary-source dodge, and that thing in me sat down and wrote a letter to Robbie McClintock before my forebrain caught up and thought better of it. Robbie wrote back:
Loss of this kind of material is a perennial problem for historians. Libraries do have real storage problems so winnowing collections is something that they continually do. I have been buying from AbeBooks.com and am surprised at how many listings are discards from libraries. I’d like to see a standard operating procedure set up by which anything taken out of a library collection would be digitized before being discarded.
Our library doesn’t want a collection anymore. We have a digitization depot (though I don’t think these books went through it on their way to the dumpster.) The head of the libraries sat us down the other day and told us the story of how he nearly lost the whole building to the machinations of other departments a few years back, when an outside assessment determined the library of the future could be fruitfully shrunk down to almost no physical collection at all.
They say when you have a baby – when you hold it in your hands and feel how tiny and fragile it is — certain feelings well up in you that you have never felt before, which change you forever. I say when you look at a dumpster full of ancient books, you can’t possibly come away the same person. I have stood in front of mountains of discarded clothing higher than my head; I have seen warehouses of food sloughed off by supermarkets to go to food pantries; I have eaten freegan bagels and revived dumpstered computers; and I was not prepared for this.
Today I held a book in my hands from 1829 that was bound in leather – in actual dead animals. Its cover was scarcely bigger than my hands. The grain of the leather was so fine and soft. Its spine was torn away, leaving a mass like the inside of a squash. I opened it and could barely turn the pages out of fear I would kill its ideas with my clumsy futuristic hands.
OK, yes, book collectors will not want it because the cover has been worn to incomprehensibility. They are throwing this book out because it is too fragile to live. It doesn’t matter how old it is, it will not survive handling.
But so help me, there are notes inside the cover. Notes in fountain-pen script. I write notes in my books. I see myself in that dumpster. This isn’t about holding a baby, is it.
I knuckled like a soft old grandma at the dog pound tonight, and came away again with two armloads to add to the half-dozen stacks I already have. I threw out my old criteria of grabbing stuff with lovely Art Deco and Art Nouveau covers – I’ve had this idea I might hand them off to the guy who makes furniture out of books and the folks on Etsy who turn books into purses – and broke down and just took anything from before 1900, regardless of subject matter. And oh, I don’t have time for another crafts and small-business project. Still haven’t worked through all those shirts I dumpstered at the end of the school year.
On the way back there was a dump truck taking the first two dumpsters that slipped out of my grasp, the ones that had already been taken out among the stacks of discarded cardboard boxes. Can they really recycle these? The books are already recycling themselves, rubbing down into leaf mulch in their indecorous piles. Can you recycle a leather cover? Can 50-year-old books from Romania be turned into industrially-acceptable paper waste?
What if they are going to the landfill? We are supposed to be sending less stuff to landfills. Libraries and colleges are supposed to be too smart to contribute dumpsters upon dumpsters of dead-tree bricks to a landfill.
Does anyone want some books? If I can find a post office that will weigh boxes, give me an answer about the cost of media mail, and actually sell me stamps without making me wait in line for an hour (and you’d be surprised how hard that is – not only is the line at the 112th St. station around the block, not only have Teachers College and Columbia proper both gotten rid of their stamp vending machines in the past month, but the 112th station doesn’t have a vending machine anymore, and the self-service station won’t do media mail!) – if I can do that, I will send you some.
I am not a Luddite, I swear to god. I have not been a book fiend since I was very young. I barely read anything non-digital that’s not for school now, not out of snobbery, just because I spend my life being nothing but a pair of eyes gorging itself constantly on text and images, and I am tired. I was not up for trawling at random through the Gulick Hygiene Series or Swinton’s Progressive English Grammar until I found them in the trash. And I touched them, and they nearly fell apart. And now I will end up carrying them to my new apartment in September, and who knows where from there.
UPDATE: Check out my Flickr stream — the books I’m trying to save show up there.
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In other news, I maded you a puppet show about advertising and stuff. I will maded it for you hopefully most every week after this one, for quite some time if all goes well.
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