Stacks’ Appeal

I have heard that one of the rites of passage for undergraduates at Harvard University is to have sex in stacks of the vast, labyrinthine Widener Library. It’s sort of an academic version of joining the “Mile-High Club.”

I suppose sex in the stacks is meant to lampoon the library’s aura of high-minded seriousness and Puritanical chastity. Harvard used to keep Leaves of Grass in a locked case in order to guard the moral virtue of undergraduates. And that was in the days before Harvard admitted women.

That copy of Leaves is now in the Houghton Library. The more erotic passages have been underscored and commented upon by James Russell Lowell, the very man who promised one concerned parent that he would “keep it out of the way of students.”

There is nothing in Harvard’s online library catalog to indicate the significance of that copy, and an electronic version of the complete text -- already available via the Whitman Hypertext Archive -- cannot tell us about the unique qualities of individual books with long histories in the collections of major libraries.

As I recall, I learned about the existence of the book by browsing the university’s old card catalogues, which had not been destroyed, as they have been at most other libraries. Many of the cards had notations on them by librarians and scholars stretching back more than 100 years.

For the record, I have never had sex in the stacks, and -- even after many years of lurking in several major collections -- I have never had to discreetly avoid anyone else in flagrante delicto. But I have had many moments in stacks of great libraries that were almost erotic in their intellectual intensity.

I have had moments in reading a text -- an ordinary one that might now be found online -- when I noticed a minor reference in the margins that sent me a few shelves down to find a much more obscure book that was packed with unexpected clues that changed my project entirely.

I remember one time I was writing about Edgar Allan Poe and phrenology when I found a box of ephemera -- not cataloged in any detail -- that included a pamphlet for a book by an early psychologist who analyzed Poe on the basis of daguerreotypes of the poet. I quickly found the book in another area of the same library, and discovered a sequence of pages that purported to show that Poe was suffering from a disorder that affected only one hemisphere of his brain and that revealed itself in the asymmetry of his face. That was demonstrated by a pair of bisected, overlapping pages that probably would not make sense in a digitized format, unless the technician was aware of the importance of copying multiple views of those pages. In any case, that accidental discovery -- the centerpiece of a subsequent article -- would never have been made but for the serendipity and convenience of the stacks.

Other times I have made connections in the stacks based on simple adjacency, the similarity of bindings, and the suggestions of scholars who frequented the same aisles. I once had a useful, relevant book fall on my head like Newton’s apple. Perhaps it was pushed there by some ghostly scholar, one of my forebears whom I might consider myself privileged to join in the posthumous academy of spectral stack walkers.

Old books are memento mori. Like any conservationist, I am appalled by the fragments of brittle pages that collect on the library photocopiers. Dust to dust. They remind me that I have a body and am not immortal. Where will the library ghosts go -- along with the furtive lovers -- when all the books have been made immaterial and antiseptic through digitization?

What is the message of this new medium? What does it mean when the University of Texas at Austin removes nearly all of the books from its undergraduate library to make room for coffee bars, computer terminals, and lounge chairs? What are students in those “learning commons” being taught that is qualitatively better than what they learned in traditional libraries?

I think the absence of books confirms the disposition to regard them as irrelevant. Many entering students come from nearly book-free homes. Many have not read a single book all the way through; they are instead trained to surf and skim. Teachers increasingly find it difficult to get students to consult printed materials, and yet we are making those materials even harder to obtain. Online journal articles are suitable for searching and extraction, but how conducive is a computer for reading a novel?

I also suspect that retrieval of books in the context of food service and roving helpers inculcates in students a disturbing combination of passivity and entitlement, as if they are diners in a fancy restaurant rather than students doing their homework. The “learning commons” seems consistent with the consumerist model of education that we all recognize: “I deserve an ‘A’ because I’m paying a lot of money to come here (even if I spend all my time playing video games and hanging out at the new campus fitness center).”

Computer technology is an invaluable supplement for research, but it becomes inefficient when it is used as a substitute for the hands-on investigation of the stacks. In any large, old library, there are unknown quantities of printed materials that cannot be found in electronic catalogs. Some of them were missed during the shift from cards to databases; others were never cataloged at all.

Sometimes librarians think a book that hasn’t been checked out in decades is seldom used. But many books are consulted in the stacks without being borrowed; if those books are not there, they will have to be obtained by more labor-intensive and costly methods. Most of my discoveries as a researcher come from the efficiency of being able to spend 10 seconds glancing at the contents of nearby books instead of having to make an elaborate and time-consuming plan to track down tangential leads.

Obviously there are multiple ways of searching for information. Computers are helpful, but the stacks cultivate intuitive bookish instincts. Those instincts may not be quantifiable, but they produce discoveries that the rational structure of electronic databases almost inevitably preclude. It’s like in Star Wars when the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker to turn off his computerized targeting system and “use the Force” instead.

I am not a Luddite. Computer technology is indispensable to my research. But I favor hybridity, complementarity, and cautious, reversable experimentation. I do not want to see libraries -- institutions that I treasure -- embark on some kind of drastic transformation that cannot be undone.

Library administrators have had to make hard choices as costs have risen, their missions have expanded, and their budgets have failed to keep pace. But I am not so sure that the techno-spa model should be adopted so uncritically. Who will profit most from the transformation now and in the future, as fees and updates for new technologies continue indefinitely? Is that transformation really about the demands of students? If so, should we conform to their expectations, or make an effort to reshape them against the grain of the culture?

Alas, at many institutions, there is no longer much room for books on our central campuses. But we do have room for coffee bars, sports facilities, and a collection of other expensive, space-consuming amenities.

For that reason, I find it hard to accept that digitization is motivated primarily by constrained budgets and limited space. The money is there, and so is the space. It’s just that colleges want to spend the money and use the space for something else that, presumably, will make them more competitive among students who are, perhaps, more interested in amenities than education.

Is there no reason to suspect that the digitization craze is comparable to the panic about brittle books and necessity of microfilm replacement described by Nicholson Baker in Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (Random House, 2001)?

In 1999, Baker attempted to persuade the British Library not to sell several thousand bound volumes of American newspapers, including complete runs of the Chicago Tribune and hundreds of brilliantly illustrated volumes of the New York World. In the United States, most copies had already been destroyed after they were replaced by nearly illegible black-and-white microfilms. The British Library’s copies would have been disbound and dispersed by book dealers and providers of birthday keepsakes. Fortunately, Baker was able to obtain the newspapers and store them long enough for Duke University to decide to preserve them in its Special Collections Library.

I never miss library sales, and I learn about past ones all the time from the inventories of book dealers. A year ago at a local library sale I acquired a first edition of Schliemann’s Troja, which is worth nearly $1,000. I paid $1 for it. I recently obtained an ex-library edition of Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature from a dealer for $200. Poole’s is indispensable for Americanists, and it would have been cheap at twice the price. The dealer probably carried the books away from a library sale in a copier-paper box marked $10.

The recurrence of such incidents makes me think that many libraries are not all that concerned about the money -- as well as intellectual resources -- that are being lost.

While the shift toward the techno-spa seems to be proceeding all over the country, it is gratifying to realize that a countermovement is also under way.

The University of Chicago is undertaking a major expansion of the Regenstein Library that will house more books in the stacks of one building than any other library in the United States. According to the provost, Richard Saller, “The library should be the heart of this campus. At some universities, the football field is the center. Here it is books rather than athletics. The library expansion reflects our values as an institution.”

I am grateful that my graduate alma mater had browsable stacks. That was the foundation of my education. The books were more important, by far, than the superstar scholars who, like books in an off-site warehouse, were available for consultation only with great difficulty. In the future, I will encourage more of my students to consider universities with open, centrally located library collections -- such as Chicago -- above other comparably prestigious institutions with different priorities.

I wrote this column on a computer in a room filled with books. In five years I will have a new computer on which most of my old software and storage media will not run. The books will still be here, and my children will be able to read them. And so will their children.