by Jerry
And what the hell did this have to do with a tornado in Alabama—and what did either one have to do with selling The Dionne Quintuplets in Hollywood?
The blonde was still trying to persuade Fran to come in, even though a glance at my watch showed me it was nearly three o’clock and hardly worth the effort. Bookstores closed at five, didn’t they?
“Well, can you think of anybody else?” she asked.
Apparently Fran couldn’t because the blonde snapped her phone shut, stood there tapping her foot and looking down at her phone for a minute, and then went through the door.
As soon as it shut behind her, I racketed down the stairs, feeling like Alice chasing after the White Rabbit, and over to the door. As I put my hand on the doorknob, it occurred to me that what I was doing was beyond stupid. If Ozymandias’s was a front for a smuggling operation or the NSA, then there were likely to be guns—or Bengal tigers—beyond that door.
But neither the blonde nor the chubby guy were criminal types, and spies didn’t talk about Carnegie libraries and nieces from Cupertino even in code.
You don’t know that, I thought as I turned the knob. And if there is a Bengal tiger in there, nobody will ever know what happened to you. Nobody knows you’re here. I pulled out my phone to call Brooke and tell her, but I didn’t have any coverage, and if I took the time to text her, I might lose the blonde.
There wasn’t a tiger behind the door. There was another staircase. This one was neither rickety nor Dickensian. The steps were solid and cement and so were the walls, and it looked exactly like those stairwells in a parking garage, except that this one was brightly lit and clean, and there were books piled on nearly every step.
I went down a few stairs till I was at eye-level with the stack on the top step. They seemed to be more of the peculiar mix that I’d seen in the store—Remodeling Your Patio, Edgar Allan Poe’s Deep in Earth, Stewart Meredith Keane’s The Lone and Level Sands, a biography of Rutherford B. Hayes, and a banged-up paperback of Follow the Boys with Connie Francis on the cover—and just as randomly organized. Maybe Ozymandias’s didn’t have a storeroom, so this stairway had to double as one, with the blonde sitting on one step and using another as a desk.
Or not. Because as I stood there, looking at the titles, I could hear the staccato of the blonde’s heels far below me, obviously going someplace. I took off down the stairs after her, trying not to make any noise and to calculate how far below me she was. Three levels at least, though the head of the stairs was already at basement level. Did Manhattan building foundations go down that far?
I doubted it. More likely, the cement walls were making it sound like she was farther away than she really was, and the bottom was only a single level below me.
It wasn’t. I passed one landing and then another, and no floor, no blonde. Just lots more books, and, as I descended, more and more of them. At first there’d been only a single stack of half a dozen or so books on any given step. But as I went down, the stacks got higher and more numerous, and I had to work my way carefully between them so as not to knock one of them over and alert her to my presence.
Her clattering footsteps came to a stop far below me, and a heavy door slammed. I waited a minute to make sure she’d gone through it and then hurried down after her, no longer caring whether I made noise or knocked over some of the books. I didn’t want to lose her.
The door she’d gone through had sounded like it was at least two flights below me, but either she was better at maneuvering between the maze of book piles or I’d misjudged the distance again, because by the time I made it down to the next door, the landing outside it and the steps below were completely blocked by books. There was no way I could make it down another dozen steps, let alone down another floor.
And there was no way she could have picked her way through these books quickly enough to have made it to the next landing. She must have gone through this door.
I worked my way to it, stepping over and around the piles of books, and pushed on the heavy handle.
It opened onto another staircase, almost as filled with stacks of books as the first one, but this one had open metal steps that zigzagged down at least two more floors into a vast, cavernous warehouse filled with aisle after aisle of books stretching in all directions for what seemed like miles.
I stared down at it, stunned. It was huge. It had to extend the length of the entire block, and, according to my calculations, it was at least five levels below the street. What the hell was this?
It must be a company like Amazon, which did most of its business by mail order. But if so, why hadn’t I ever heard of it? And since when was there that big a market in used books? According to everybody I’d interviewed, public domain downloads of ebooks and Google Books had cut into their sales so much that even Powell’s was being forced out of business.
And if this was a mail-order operation, where were their shipping facilities? All I could see was Receiving, which consisted of a long metal slide that looked like a cross between a post office mail chute and an airport baggage carousel. Books were coming down it in a steady stream.
The blonde stood next to the carousel with a clipboard, supervising three burly workmen in overalls who were scooping the books up as they came down the chute and piling them onto big metal library carts. But not fast enough. The men were working at top speed, but they still weren’t able to keep up. Books were piling up on the carousel and beginning to fall over the edge.
In my surprise, I had let go of the door, and it shut behind me. The blonde glanced up hopefully, as if she thought I might be the late-to-work Jude.
Shit. What would she—or worse, the burly workmen—do when they saw me? I backed against the door and felt for the handle, ready to make a quick getaway, but the blonde only looked disappointed that I wasn’t Jude and then mildly annoyed. She started briskly over to the staircase, frowning. “What are you doing in here?” she called up to me. “This area is restricted to employees only.”
I clattered down the steps to her. “The guy at the desk told me to come tell you that Jude had trouble getting a taxi. Because of the weather. Wow, this is some operation. How big is this place?”
“Not big enough,” she said disgustedly. “Did he know how soon Jude would get here?”
“No.”
“Oh, of all days for this to happen,” she said, and at my questioning look, “We’re absolutely swamped. Two used bookstores went out of business yesterday, and three libraries had their annual book sales.”
“And you bought all the books that were left over?”
“No,” she said.
They must have given them away. That would account for the motley assortment. “And you grabbed them for your bookstore to sell?” I said.
“This isn’t a bookstore,” she said.
I stared at her as if she were crazy. Not a bookstore? Then what the hell were all these books doing here?
“Then what is it?” I asked finally. Some kind of library?” The New York Public Library was in midtown, wasn’t it? Could this be some sort of storage annex? Or the place where they processed books that needed to be checked in? Though if the ones on the shelves I was standing next to were any indication, there wasn’t much processing going on. They were as randomly shelved as the ones upstairs. An ancientlooking New Theories of the Atom, The Vagabond Boys Go to Yosemite, Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure, Iris R. Bracebridge’s The Daring Debutante. “Is this part of the public library? Or Columbia’s library?”
“Hardly,” she said scornfully. “Libraries are one of the biggest reasons we’re here. Do you know how many books they destroy every year?”
“Destroy?” I said. “I thought librarians were all about preserving books.”
“They believe that in principle,” she said, “but in practice, they destroy hundreds of thousands of books a year. They don’t call it that, of course. They call it ‘retiring books’ or ‘pruning’ or ‘culling.’ Or ‘de-acquisition.’”
“De-a
cquisition?”
“Yes, it’s supposed to sound like the benign counterpart of ‘acquisition,’ but it actually means getting rid of works that no longer ‘serve the needs of the reading public.’” Like The Daring Debutante and half the books upstairs? I thought, unconvinced that a little selective pruning was a bad thing. And it wasn’t as if they were eradicating them. “Selling them isn’t exactly destroying them,” I said.
“They only sell a tiny percentage of them,” she said, “and they’re swamped with donations they can’t use and not enough space for the books they already have, so most of the ones they discard end up getting sent to landfills—or recycling centers where they get pulped. And it never occurs to them that they might be the last copy of a book.”
“And so the purpose of this place is to make sure that doesn’t happen?” I asked, but she’d turned away to confer with one of the guys from the baggage carousel.
I didn’t really need an answer. It was obvious from what she’d said and from the hodgepodge assortment of volumes coming down the chute that this place was some kind of home for books nobody else wanted, like those no-kill shelters for abandoned cats and dogs, and to a certain extent, I could sympathize. Much as I tout digitizing books, there’s still something disturbing about the idea of shredding a physical book and/or dumping it in the trash. It’s way too close to Hitler and his book-burnings for comfort.
But high-minded as the idea of saving orphaned books was, even an enterprise this size couldn’t take in a fraction of the books that must get thrown out. There were thousands of libraries in the country, not to mention all those independent bookstores the radio guy had said had closed. And she’d made it sound like they took in books from people who’d died, too. There was no way a single warehouse could accommodate all of those.
Though this place was bigger than I’d first thought, I realized, walking to the end of the row of bookshelves to peer down the cross-aisle. Rank after rank of crammed-full, twelve-foot-tall bookshelves stretched into the distance on either side of it.
What must the rent on this place be? And in Midtown Manhattan, too, let alone the equipment and the staff. Some eccentric book-loving millionaire must be bankrolling it. But if that was the case, why hadn’t anybody heard of it?
“Stunning, isn’t it?” the blonde said, coming back over to me. “Would you like a tour?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I thought you said you were swamped.”
“We’re always swamped. Hang on another minute, and I’ll get someone to cover for me.” She walked over to the carousel, calling to the guys, “Were you able to get in touch with Anthony?”
“Yeah, and he said he’d try to get here, but he’s over in Brooklyn, and the rain . . .”
“What about Thaddeus? Is he here?”
“Yeah. He’s downstairs.”
Downstairs? How many levels did this place have? I definitely wanted a tour. “Well, tell him he needs to come up and fill in for me.”
“But, Cassie, the Wallace estate sale just came in—”
Cassie, I thought, glad to know her name. Was it short for Cassandra?
“I know.” She said. “Tell him it’s only till Jude gets here, and that I’ll send somebody down as soon as we finish with Mrs. DePalma’s books.” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I suppose it should be libraries. I can show you what I’ve been talking about. Come this way.”
She walked quickly along the bookshelves I’d been standing next to, gesturing toward the baggage chute and carousel as she went. “This is where the works come in, and these rows of shelves are where we store them till they can be catalogued.”
She strode to the end of the row and turned down a cross-aisle that seemed to stretch for miles, with aisle after aisle of bookshelves.
“Wow,” I said. “How many books—I mean, works, do you have here?”
“Too many,” she said, and turned left into an aisle that looked exactly like the one back by the baggage chute, with the books just as randomly shelved. “This is still part of the unprocessed section, right?” I asked.
“No, this is Private Collections.”
“You mean like the stuff they sell at Sotheby’s?” I asked. “Lord Such-and-Such’s priceless collection of first folios?” They didn’t look like it. Half the books appeared to be paperbacks or old textbooks, and they certainly weren’t leather-bound. Or organized in any way I could see. They definitely weren’t in alphabetical order. Or Dewey Decimal. I spotted Shakespeare’s Cardenio next to Irwin’s Maida’s Little Market as we passed.
Cassie was still walking along the row. “We occasionally acquire works from a bibliophile’s or a rare-book collector’s estate, but the vast majority come from books people had in their attics or cellars or in an old trunk.” She stopped next to a trio of clothbound books. “These were Everett Hudson’s, 34 Mott Street, Greenwich Village.” I remembered her talking about Mrs. DePalma and Mrs. Westport dying. “He died?” I asked.
“No. Dementia. He had to be moved into a nursing home, and his only son lives in Tokyo and couldn’t get time off to come clean out his apartment and get it ready to sell, so he hired a removal service to dispose of the contents. And these,” she said, pointing at the books next to them, “came from a barn.”
She leaned over, I thought to take one of the books out to show me, and instead pulled out a stiff manila card tucked like a bookmark between it and Everett Hudson’s books. “Barn, Rouse family farm,” she said, reading from the neatly typed print on the card she was holding, “Clay County, Nebraska.”
She tucked the card back in its place between the two groups of books and walked rapidly on, indicating various shelves as we passed. “These are from garages and attics and these over here are from hoarders.”
Hoarders. I hadn’t even thought about all the books they’d have, though whether they’d be salvageable was another question. I’d known a guy who was a hoarder. Between the dirt, the rat feces, the cat urine, and the mildew, I wouldn’t have even wanted to set foot in his house, let alone scrabble through the disgusting mess for books. But from the number of shelves we passed, these people must have.
Unless these volumes were from some other kind of private collection. They had manila bookmarks dividing them, too, but there was no time to read their labels. Cassie was walking too quickly.
After several more aisles, she turned into a side aisle, went down two aisles, turned into the third, and stopped. “Here we are,” she said.
“So these are the books the libraries got rid of to make room for Nicholas Sparks’ latest romance novel?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said bitterly, “plus the ones that didn’t pass the double-fold test and the ones that were deemed to be ‘too old,’ as if books were like cartons of milk and had a sell-by date after which they went bad. And,” she said, moving farther down the aisle, “the ones discarded during library relocations and renovations.”
There were divider cards here, too, each with the name and location of the library and a date, presumably of when they’d acquired it. But what a bizarre way to catalog books: by the place they’d gotten it from. It had to be hopelessly inefficient.
Though Cassie seemed to know where every single one was. “Blackthorne Public Library,” she said, without even looking at the identifying cards. “Lincoln Park Library, Franklin County Library.”
“Nothing from the Library of Alexandria?” I asked jokingly.
She didn’t even crack a smile. “We’re English language only,” she said. “And they wouldn’t be in this section anyway. They’d be in Fires.”
No, they wouldn’t, I thought, because the whole place had gone up in flames. There hadn’t been anything left to save.
“East Lake Library in Paul Harbor, Florida,” Cassie was saying, pointing at sections. “Mitchell Library in Sydney, Australia, Golden Library at Eastern New Mexico State University—”
“University? Colleges and universities de-acquisish, or whatever it’s called, too?”
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“Yes, especially since the advent of InterLibrary Loan. They assume their students can borrow the work from some other library, so there’s no reason to keep their own copy, and it doesn’t occur to them till too late that theirs might be the only one. And Project Gutenberg and Google Books have made it even worse.”
Oh, here we go, I thought. “You don’t approve of digitizing books.”
“Oh, no, I’m grateful for it. Without it, we’d be even more swamped. But the libraries assume that all books are online and that therefore they don’t need to have a physical copy, and they dispose of theirs. Only they’re not all online. Just a fraction of them are. And there’s also the problem of data corruption. And of putting books onto microfilm, which cracks and deteriorates, or into a digital format that can be accessed only through technological means, and then those means becoming obsolete, like the floppy disk or twelve-inch video disks, like they did with The Domesday Book. Putting books on an inaccessible platform is nearly as effective at destroying books as the shredder.”
I was afraid from here she’d go off on accidental deletions and the dangers of putting all your eggs in one basket like the guy at WMNH had. I said hastily, “But there’s always the Cloud. And the Library of Congress. They have a copy of every book that’s been published in the U.S., right?”
She shook her head. “They didn’t start doing that till the 1860s, and more than seventy thousand works are lost to decay and disintegration every year. Plus, they’ve had three major fires, with a combined loss of three hundred thousand volumes,” she said, “quite a lot of it due to the water damage that occurred when trying to put out the fires. Water damage is the second most common cause of book destruction.”
“What’s first?” I asked, but she’d already turned down another aisle.
“Water damage is along here,” she said. “Leaky roofs, broken plumbing, flooded basements. And down there are the floods—the Ohio River, the Republican River, Yancey Creek, North Carolina . . .”