Back Talk — My Glorious Library Career: Part 2 Column Editor: Jim O’Donnell (University Librarian, Arizona State University) <jod@asu.edu>
F
ew things have been as magical in my life as my introduction to a serious academic library. A bookish kid, I’d always haunted the libraries within reach, but in the desert southwest those were few and modest: Quonset hut on an army base, a neighborhood public library in El Paso, our high school library (where my library career began, as I wrote a few months ago), and, when I was a senior in high school, the main downtown El Paso Public Library. I went to the downtown branch to write a Shakespeare paper in senior English class and there found books of a kind I’d never imagined — like the one that explained carefully that Shakespeare’s plays were all written by Queen Elizabeth herself, including the ones first published and performed in the years after she died. Even at age 17, I found the argument for that a little sketchy. This was in a city whose best bookstore had a special section reserved for the publications of the John Birch Society.
But then I went off to college and found myself in the open stacks of a library about to buy its three millionth book, and I was enraptured. In graduate school I would study with the real life model for the Nowhere Man in the Yellow Submarine film, but before I ever met him I knew the power of his mantra: “ad hoc, ad loc., quid pro quo, so little time, so much to know!” I wandered the stacks endlessly, stuck my nose into disciplinary reading rooms, and realized that the world I had imagined was a pale shadow of what was really there. But it was my senior year when things got serious. I was eligible for work-study jobs and did a couple of years as “administrative assistant” in various university offices, but senior year I discovered that Professor Fine in the classics department, who had just been teaching me Herodotus, had a research assistant job that I applied for and got. The nature of the job was essentially assistant classics bibliographer/selector. These were the old days, and it had transpired that Professor Fine volunteered his time to serve as the classics selector, with an essentially unlimited budget. He could order anything he thought worthy, which in practice meant that he didn’t order popularizations in foreign languages or translations from Greek and Latin into languages other than French, German, and
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Italian, but beyond that he could be voracious. (In those days our library had its unique local cataloging number system, as a few universities still did. When the time came to convert the collection to LC, Professor Fine in retirement was still doing the selecting work, and he insisted that until he gave up the task, the classics books would still be cataloged the old way. He thought — rightly, I still think — that the local system was superior to LC for handling classics disciplines. He at least could play the role of King Canute facing the tide for a while, but of course the tide has now long since rushed in and the coherent classics collection has been scattered among the Cs, Ds, and Ps of LC’s arid taxonomy.) My job? Well, Professor Fine would review publishers’ catalogs and a German journal that published detailed bibliographical updates of new books, and he ticked with a pencil the things he thought we should have. I took those notes, sat down at my typewriter with the small three-part carbon copy order slips that the library used, and typed them up one at a time. Since typing was and still is my only truly marketable skill, I could make efficient work of it. In a way, I was like a medieval scribe, copying out the Bible and imbibing as I did the wisdom of the text. In this case, it meant I was getting a pre-graduate school crash course in the history and state of current scholarship in the field. I remember most vividly learning first of the Thracian “rider gods” worshipped in what is now Romania and Bulgaria — gods on horseback, unique to that region and known only from archaeology. In the decades since, they have only marginally come back into my view, but I was the better then and now for knowing something about how complicated and rich the ancient worlds around the Mediterranean could be. As I did the work, I had the pleasure of seeing my carbon copy slips appear in the drawers of the card catalog indicating a book on order, and even by the end of the year I got to see volumes I had typed up appearing on the new book shelf in the classics reading room. As jobs go, it was pretty ordinary and just fine, and I got my $2/hour for it. What interests me now is that the job itself was an artifact of the cutting edge technology of that age — the need for ten fingers to recreate data to make the book order happen. Automation long since has made that job obsolete in a variety of ways — not least by the outsourcing that came with approval plans and ordering profiles. But in that historical moment, it was a job that was immensely educational for me and laid down a part of the foundations of my career. We were all closer to the physicality of books, to the geography of their publication, and — when far fewer books were published than nowadays — more readily able to get a direct sense of a wide field of knowledge from the mechanics of selection and acquisition. Now the books flood in magically, when we still get them in print. When we get them electronically, they never even really appear in our spaces or minds unless we go look for them, because the records, silent and invisible, are just added to the overwhelming database. Books didn’t disappear so easily in those days, and I’m glad they didn’t. Almost everything is easier for the young nowadays, but some important things are harder.
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