by Jerry
I looked at the books as we passed. Most of the sections had only two or three books, and Yancey Creek had just one, which was, fittingly enough, Noah’s Ark on Ararat.
It didn’t have any signs of water damage I could see, and neither did any of the other books, which meant they had to have been subject to some kind of advanced salvage technique.
I revised my theory of eccentric millionaire up to billionaire. Technologies to salvage waterlogged books cost big money. I’d researched the big 1966 flood of the Arno that had destroyed Florence’s National Library in connection with a pro-digitizing post I’d written. Their vacuum freeze-drying and other book-salvaging equipment had been wildly expensive.
Or maybe these were just the few that hadn’t gotten soaked.
“Flash floods,” Cassie said. “Sheffield; Big Thompson; Rapid City, South Dakota; Fort Collins, Colorado.” She paused a moment to indicate a shelf of books. “That one was particularly bad because the university library was being remodeled and all the Colorado history books and doctoral dissertations had been moved to the basement.”
Which explained why the books all had titles like Irrigation Techniques in Use in Dryland Farming and The Narrow Gauge Railroad in the Rocky Mountains from 1871-1888.
“Landslides,” Cassie said, still walking, not even glancing at the bookmarks as she passed, “mudslides, sinkholes.”
Shelving the books this way, by the agent of their almost-demise, was crazy, but it certainly highlighted the dangers facing books. Just like a nature preserve putting up signs telling what had decimated the particular species: poaching, acid rain, loss of habitat, pesticides.
There seemed to be just as many ways to wipe out books. As we walked, Cassie pointed out sections for censorship, changes in taste, academic trends.
“Academic trends?” I said.
“Yes. Some authors, like Dreiser and Alexander Pope, go out of favor with academics and are no longer taught. Or a book’s wildly popular and then just as quickly goes out of print and is forgotten.”
“Like The Bridges of Madison County, you mean?” I said, hoping they weren’t trying to rescue it. It was the perfect example of all those things society was better off without.
“Not yet,” she said. “I mean books like The Sheik and Elinor Glyn’s novels. And Charlotte Yonge’s.”
“Charlotte Yonge? I’ve never heard of her.”
“Exactly. At one time she was the most popular author in England, even outselling Dickens. And now no one even recognizes her name. And then there are books that disappear because they’ve become outmoded or discredited, like Dirigibles: Our Future, and Using Your K+E Slide Rule.”
Or that surviving the Y2K apocalypse book, I thought.
“Or because they’re badly dated,” Cassie was saying, “like Flossie and Her School Friends and Ambush in Apache Canyon—
Ambush in Apache Canyon?
Finally, a book worth saving. “I remember reading that when I was a kid,” I told Cassie. “It was my favorite book. My uncle gave it to me. “I’d kill to read it again.””
I had no idea what had happened to it. Could my mom have given it to the library and it had ended up in this place?
“You have a copy of Ambush in Apache Canyon here?” I asked Cassie.
There was a pause, as if she thought I might try to steal it if she said yes, which convinced me it was my copy, and then she nodded. “Would you like to see it?”
“Yeah,” I said, looking over at the books, searching for the blue and brown and red cover.
“It’s not here,” she said. “It’s in the Children’s section.”
Oh, of course. That made sense. Kids’ books would end up in library discard piles and estate sales and attics, too.
“That’s over here,” Cassie said and led the way quickly down four rows, over an aisle, down another two rows to another aisle in a zig-zagging trail just like the one the kid had followed through the red rock canyons in Ambush in Apache Canyon, searching for the missing cattle. Except he’d ended up trapped in a box canyon with a band of Apaches leaping suddenly out at him from the rocks.
God, I’d loved that book. It had had everything a boy of nine could want—horses, six-shooters, war paint, cattle rustlers, the cavalry riding to the rescue. But I wasn’t surprised it had ended up in a library sale. Westerns had already been old hat in my uncle’s day, and as I recalled, the book had been full of politically incorrect language like “marauding wild Indians” and “red savages.”
And the book had been cheaply printed, on that paper that turns brown and brittle in a matter of months. It had already been in bad shape when my uncle gave it to me—the dust jacket torn, the binding half-detached, the pages coming loose—and in even worse shape by the time I’d finished reading it. Definitely a candidate for the landfill.
And no doubt the radio interview guy would cite this as an example of good things being lost, but it wasn’t. It was here, which was proof that if society needed something, it found a way to make sure it survived.
Cassie had gotten a long ways ahead of me. I hurried to catch up before she disappeared down one of the rows and I lost her. “Is this Children’s?” I asked as I approached her and she turned into an aisle.
But it clearly wasn’t. No picture books, or fairy tales, just more of the same kind of thing in all the other sections: Macleod’s Trout Fishing in the Hebrides, Milton’s Adam Unparadis’d, Henry Calvin Russell’s Marooned on Saturn, P.T. Hicks’ Chickens is Chickens, even what had to be another doctoral dissertation, Microbial Biosynthesis in Karstic Sediments, by Darryl A. Krauss, Ph.D. Not exactly Dr. Seuss.
“So how much farther to Children’s?” I asked.
“This is it,” Cassie said, and began pointing out divider cards. “Peanut butter. Spilled Kool-Aid. Melted chocolate.”
Oh, books destroyed by children. Of course. I’d forgotten their weird method of categorizing.
And now that I looked closer, I saw that there were some children’s books sandwiched in among the others. I spotted The Tale of Little Flinders and Tommy Toad’s Birthday Surprise and L. Frank Baum’s Molly Oodle and The Vagabond Boys Go To the Blue Ridge Mountains. Jesus, how many of those damned Vagabond Boys books were there?
“Left on the beach,” Cassie went on, ticking off the sections as she moved down the row. “Left on the bleachers, played catch with—”
“Dropped in the bathtub,” I put in, remembering the incident that had made me decide to get a Kindle.
“Yes,” Cassie said, continuing along the row. “Spitup. Teething. Torn up by a toddler. Colored in. Scribbled in with Magic Marker—”
Which would be even harder to remove than the stains of water damage, I thought, pausing to see how they’d gotten that out, but before I could look at it, Cassie called from the end of the row, “Here it is!” She held up a book.
Even from that far away I instantly recognized it. The blue and brown cover with the boy on horseback picking his way between the narrow, red-rock walls of the canyon was exactly the same as the one on my copy, but it definitely wasn’t my book. This copy looked like new, the dust cover untorn, the colors unfaded.
“That’s it, all right,” I said happily. “Just like I remembered it. Have you read it?”
“No,” she said, “it just came in,” and put Ambush back on the shelf. “I was going to show you the Fires section,” she said, heading across the aisle and then over to another cross-aisle and down it, pointing out the various sections: “Earthquakes, Volcanic eruptions, Shipwrecks.”
And how exactly had they managed to recover those? A submarine thing like the one they’d used on the Titanic? And was the Titanic one of the ships she was talking about? It had had everything—a gym, a bowling alley, a post office—which probably meant it had had a lending library, too.
I asked Cassie if it had.
“Yes,” she said promptly. “Four hundred volumes, plus the books the passengers and crew brought along with them—including Selden�
�s Modern Ocean Travel and The Plight of the Vicar’s Daughter, which we have here, and a priceless jeweled copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.”
Wow. “Is it here, too?”
Cassie looked taken aback. “No, of course not. There are still thousands of copies of the Rubaiyat in existence.” She bit her lip. “I don’t think you understand what this facility—” she began and then stopped, looking over my shoulder.
I turned. One of the guys who’d been unloading books from the baggage carousel was standing three aisles back with a clipboard and a worried expression.
“What is it, Greg?” Cassie called to him.
“Problem,” he said, waving the clipboard at her.
“Sorry,” Cassie said to me. “I’ll be right back,” and started toward him reluctantly, as if she wished she could finish saying what she’d been telling me first.
But I’d already figured it out. This wasn’t a no-kill shelter for books that had been thrown out. It was an endangered-book archive, like those gorilla and elephant sanctuaries or those repositories for rare types of seeds, to keep them from going extinct. And it was the scarcity of a book that determined its place here, not its collectible value or literary quality.
The books here were the last of their kind, or close to it. Which meant that my falling-apart copy of Ambush in Apache Canyon—and all the other copies—must have been thrown out. Or washed away or burned up or de-acquisished by some librarian to make room for more copies of Harry Potter.
But at least there was still a copy here. And it proved that what I’d told the radio interview guy was true—that if something had value, society would find a way to keep it around.
Ambush in Apache Canyon definitely deserved to survive, though I wasn’t sure Leonardo DiCaprio did, or Flossie and Her School Friends. Or all those doctoral dissertations.
But it explained why they were here. Only a handful of copies of those had ever existed. A flood could have cut the numbers in half.
What it didn’t explain was why they hadn’t recovered the jeweled Rubaiyat and sold it to finance this place. Which had to cost a fortune. We’d walked what?—half a mile?—already and were no closer to the end that I could see.
“Sorry,” Cassie said, coming back. “We just got hit with another deluge. Bookstore closing.” She shook her head. “We were already overwhelmed, and now this.”
I was afraid this was leading up to her saying she’d have to cut the tour short, but she didn’t. She started off again in the direction we’d been headed before, still talking over her shoulder to me. “And as if that’s not bad enough, Jude called and said she’s going to be at least another half hour. It’s apparently still raining hard outside, and the subway’s flooded. I told Greg to tell her to take a taxi, and we’d reimburse her, but I’m afraid she won’t be able to find one,” she said, sounding worried.
She should be worrying about this place instead, I thought, tagging along after her. We were at least as far below ground as the subway system. A warehouse like this was likely to flood, too, and she had to know the danger, what with the survivors of all those past floods on the shelves we’d just passed.
But Cassie’s main concern seemed to be how long it would take for Jude to get there if she had to walk. “The taxis all vanish whenever it rains!” She said.
I looked down toward the end of the cross-aisle, but we were too far away from any walls for me to see if they were wet. I looked down at the floor. It was bone-dry, and I couldn’t see any puddles, or worse, trickles of water in the aisles. But I couldn’t see any pumps, either.
They must have some sort of built-in waterproofing—floodgates or something. But I remembered, post-Sandy, seeing photos of a flood-proofed, temperature-controlled, top-security wine cellar for rare vintages. The priceless bottles had been bobbing in six feet of water, their labels floating beside them.
And since they’d already had to dry these books out once, you’d think they’d at least be checking for leaks—or be setting in motion a plan for moving the books upstairs if necessary.
I hated to admit the radio guy who’d interviewed me was right about anything, but this place was another Wheeler’s Field waiting to happen.
But Cassie was only worried about Jude getting here now to deal with the books coming in from this latest bookstore’s closing. “It’s Elliott’s,” Cassie said, which was the one the radio interview guy had mentioned. “It had been there since 1899.”
Translation: it had a bunch of old books that might be endangered. I wondered exactly how they figured out which ones they needed to bring here. Was that the job of the old guy at the desk upstairs in the store?
But one person wouldn’t be enough for a job like that. Finding out how many copies of Fairy Tales for Wee Tots or The Vagabond Boys Go to Mount Shasta were left in the world would take tons of research. And how exactly would you go about it?
I wanted to ask Cassie, but she was still going on about Elliott’s closing. “There used to be other bookstores who could buy up their stock when one closed,” she said, “but now, with so many having already gone under, there’s no one who can take them and see to it they survive.”
“Except you,” I noted, but she’d already taken off again, saying, “I want to show you the Fires section.”
“Fires?” I said, getting a sudden upsetting image of Cassie charging into a burning building to rescue books.
But she had her hands full here. There must be a whole other team—or teams—who did that, and that went and picked up the books from all those houses and storage units and bankrupt bookstores. Plus researchers to determine whether a book qualified as endangered. I upped my estimate of the cost of this enterprise another digit.
“Fire’s one of our biggest sections,” Cassie stopped to say. “As you can imagine. Lightning-caused fires, faulty wiring, arson, playing with matches, accident, civil disobedience. Or both.”
“Both?”
She nodded. “The Michigan State Library fire was caused by a student who was trying to burn the state draft board files so he wouldn’t be drafted and ended up destroying twenty thousand volumes.”
She started to walk again and then stopped, and I saw she was standing in front of a divider labeled “Dresden.”
“So this is the Fires section?” I asked, gesturing at it.
“No,” she said. “War. But there’s considerable overlap. That’s why they’re shelved next to each other. These rows are High-Explosive Bombs,” she said, walking me quickly past several rows, rattling off the names of the bombed buildings as she went: “Westminster Abbey Chapter Library, Allen and Unwin, Holland House, Lambeth Palace, the British Museum Reading Room—”
“My God, how big is this section?” I asked.
“Big,” she said. “Twenty million volumes were destroyed by bombs in the London Blitz alone.”
“So is war the biggest?”
She turned to look back at me. “The biggest?”
“Cause of book destruction. You said water damage was the second biggest. Is war the first?”
“No.”
“Then what is?”
For a second I thought she wasn’t going to answer me, and then she said, “Time.”
“Time?”
She nodded. “Decay. Paper deterioration, ink degradation, glue oxidation, overuse.”
“Overuse?”
“Being read so many times the book falls to pieces.”
Like I’d done with Ambush in Apache Canyon. I could see its browning, brittle pages and its broken spine in my mind’s eye.
“Bookworms,” she said. “Dry rot, moths, mildew, mold. And attrition.”
“Attrition?”
“The gradual destruction of one copy after another over the years through a whole variety of circumstances. The ravages of time.”
I could see that. One copy lost at sea, another chewed up by the family dog, others sent to the landfill and put on no-longer-readable microfilm, and pretty soon there would be hardly an
y left.
“It doesn’t affect us here as much as at the other branches because English hasn’t been around as long as some languages,” Cassie said, “but it’s still our number one cause. Though war certainly contributes. These books are from the Library of Louvain.”
“It was bombed?”
“Yes, but not by the enemy. The Library’s Tower provided a landmark for the gunners to adjust their sights by, so the defenders destroyed it.”
She walked on. “This next section is Paper Drives. During World War II, they collected scrap paper to make into ammunition, including, unfortunately, old books. And this next section is—”
“Wait—other branches?”
“Yes. I told you, we’re English language only.”
“So how many other branches are there? And where—?”
“Cassie?” a male voice called from the cross-aisle. “Where are you?”
“Here, Greg,” she called back, and the guy from before appeared at the end of the row, looking apologetic.
“Don’t tell me,” she said. “Jude can’t find a taxi.”
“Yeah, she said she’s been trying for fifteen minutes and there’s not a one to be found, so she’s going to have to walk it, and, in the meantime, we’ve got another problem.” Aha! I thought. This place is leaking.
But Greg said, “Today’s the twenty-first.”
“You’re kidding!” Cassie said. “I completely forgot.”
“We’ve got to get more people in here to help with it,” Greg said, “and I’ve called everybody I can think of.”
“What about Rita?”
“She said she’s already worked overtime every day this week, and—”
“I’ll talk to her,” Cassie interrupted. She turned to me. “Sorry, I need to go take care of this. I’ll be back in a minute,” she said and hurried off with Greg, while I wandered along the War aisles, wondering what was special about the twenty-first and looking at the books and the divider cards—Sarajevo National Library, Bosnian War; Library of Strasbourg, Franco-Prussian War; Library of Congress, War of 1812—Jesus, how long had they been doing this?—and then, since she still wasn’t back, went on to see if I could find the Fires section on my own.