This Book Is Overdue!

by Marilyn Johnson

  Like most wired librarians, Jenna Freedman can be found all over the Web, posting whimsy on social networks and thoughtful commentary in library publications. She has a blog, Lower East Side Librarian, in which she writes about everything from vampire fiction to roller derby to politics. She’s also active offline, publishing her zine, Lower East Side Librarian Winter Solstice Shout-Out, as well as organizing a feminist zine collection for the Barnard College Library. Zines, homemade, self-published periodicals, are rich artifacts of offbeat and street culture; they aren’t collected by most libraries or archives, though there are exceptions, like the Salt Lake City Public Library. Jenna Freedman’s vision as a librarian encompassed electronic networks of activist information professionals, as well as old-fashioned displays of low-tech, handwritten booklets.

  I wanted to research her work before we met, easily done on her website and Barnard’s; but trying to get my hands on her zine was more challenging, because I had to buy it directly from her. I sent her an e-mail and mentioned why I was interested. Instead of a warm greeting and instructions on how to deposit a few bucks to her PayPal account, I got a response from Freedman that showed a bit of teeth. “I’d like to hear more about your book. Any particular librarians (or kind of librarians) you’re writing about? Sorry to get all reference on you, but I hesitate to send out intimate details about the last seven years of my life without much knowledge of who wants it and why.” She’d found my website, and wanted verification that she had the right person.

  “‘Sorry to get all reference on you’?” What a great phrase. But wait a minute—she published these intimate details of her life, but only certain people could read them? Zines may be self-published, but they’re published. Freedman had written about the difference between blogs and zines, and her response was the perfect illustration of the difference. You hit the post button on a blog, and your sentences flow into cyberspace where anyone from your kindergarten babysitter to your boss can read them. You run your zine through the copier, and fold it up, and you can pretty much track it through the world. The humble zine is revealing in a way that drunken photos on MySpace never could be. “I’m pretty intimate in my zine,” she acknowledged after sending me the complete set.

  There was some of Freedman’s DNA on every page of Lower East Side Librarian Winter Solstice Shout-Out: the accomplished but self-doubting young librarian; the city dweller who hated cars and seriously feared plants (she’d been told at an impressionable age about a cancer that grew inside someone, and pictured green tendrils); the bride who’d celebrated with a vegan cake made of Rice Krispies, lactose-free Rice Dream, and Marshmallow Fluff; the urban woman who kept a separate apartment from her beloved spouse and cats (though if they could afford a place big enough to share…). She read constantly in women’s literature, but had skipped Jane Austen till she was almost forty. She was the daughter of a former social worker, now a Hindu nun, and the prominent librarian Maurice (Mitch) Freedman, who had been the director of the Westchester Library System and the president of the American Library Association. “If my father weren’t a librarian,” she told me, “I might have been one a lot sooner, which isn’t a slam on my father. It’s just like you want to be your own person and do your own thing…. I finally stopped resisting it.” For all her political activism and digital-age networking, she espoused the plain and simple model of the librarian. “I like the word ‘reader’ for library patron,” she declared in her zine, “especially compared to ‘customer,’ which is favored by so many public libraries doing their best to adopt a business model, thus destroying librarianship’s best strength: our emphasis on service….”

  Like the zines she collected, hers was the chronicle of a complicated, unique, and direct voice. It was both more open and more substantial than her blog; it had been written, not dashed off, the whole package crafted. “[Z]ines, although they’re called ephemera in library lingo, are actually a lot more permanent than blogs,” she wrote.

  Zines were ephemera? I remember the first time I heard the word ephemera used in connection with libraries. I was in Edinburgh, hanging out at the Fringe Festival, a cacophonous arts event with hundreds of shows and performances conducted on the street and in makeshift venues, alive with the raw, fun power of undiscovered actors mugging and posing. I had just started tracking librarians, so between a comedy act put on by a guy who had sailed the English Channel in a bathtub and a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream featuring a Puck with an artificial member bobbing from his belt, I ducked into the National Library of Scotland and browsed their special collections. There I met a friendly librarian with the haunting name of Eoin Shalloo.

  Shalloo tried to explain his library’s more mysterious holdings, the Fleming of Wigtown Papers and something called The Roit or Quheill of Tyme. The Flemings were earls of Wigtown, landowners and fancy types, fond of keeping old receipts, all the way back to the fifteenth century. The Roit or Quheill of Tyme was an anonymous chronicle of kings from the beginning of time to 1537. Among other old papers, Shalloo was also guarding the minutes of meetings about the running of a soup kitchen from the mid-nineteenth century—great background for scholars of soup kitchens, no? What about the Fringe Festival? I asked. Wasn’t that an important Scottish event happening right under your window? He allowed that the festival was of historic interest, and that certain records pertaining to it would merit collecting, if someone were to bother to collect them. I had in my bag a cluster of flyers the buskers and shills had pressed on me, homemade advertisements, handbills for plays, coupons for comedy shows. “Oh, we wouldn’t collect those,” Shalloo told me. Those were ephemera. So I met that lowly library word.

  True, you can’t collect everything, but I couldn’t help pitying future students and scholars trying to re-create the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh without the litter of flyers, the trail of paper that led the audience to the performers. That would be a parade without the confetti. I still wonder why the receipts of an old soup kitchen are worth preserving in a national library, and the flyer announcing a comic Shakespeare performance with particularly creative props was considered trash.

  Ephemera, that beautiful word, like fairy dust or wood smoke, is, in library science, what you toss in a box without cataloging, or throw away altogether—unless, of course, you find your niche as a collector of ephemera, like the British printer who lived on the premises of the Oxford University Press with the job of keeping it running during World War II; his only amusement during the period in which he threw his body between the bombs and the press was to collect advertising circulars, handbills promoting entertainment, and notices of executions—historic ephemera. Now the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera is part of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, a rare source, so claims the Bodleian, of primary historic documents. No fewer than 65,000 of these once-disposable scraps of paper have been deemed important enough to be digitally preserved, and can be found on ProQuest, a database you can probably access online with your library card.

  All of which is to say: one person’s trash is another’s history. Eion Shalloo’s ephemera was John Johnson’s history and Jenna Freedman’s archive of zines.

  I must be an ephemerist; as soon as someone tells me something is not worth saving, I want to argue. The regular weeding that librarians do, removing dated or moldy old books, throwing out or giving away old copies, even of Reader’s Digest condensed books, makes me nervous. The blog Awful Library Books is an effort by two public librarians to highlight discarded books so ridiculous and out-of-date, even a hoarder like me will agree they need to be ditched. The blog features, mockingly, More Great Pantyhose Crafts (1985), Creative Recreation for the Mentally Retarded (1975), and fifty-year-old books on gas prices, computers, space exploration, the Soviet Union, and careers for girls. It’s entertaining, I admit, and I see their point; but I wish they’d link the pictures of decrepit book covers to digital copies of the books. Frankly, I want to see what’s inside Those Amazing Leeches (1988). In fact, I’d love a
ramshackle little hut of a library that carried nothing but copies of discards and awful books from the narrow tunnel of our past—books that captured us as we were. Reminders of how foolish writers sometimes look can be instructive. And these books tell our history, too.

  The Barnard Zine Collection resided in the middle of the floor, between a rack of magazines and the reference desk, in an oblong wooden caddy designed to hold periodicals on all four sides. The zines had a distinctly homemade look, their poetic titles often written by hand and poking above their shelf-mates: I Dreamed I Was Assertive; Ben Is Dead; No, I Don’t Think So; Placenta; Darling Disasters. A few of them looked like works of art, the creative vessels of zinesters like Celia Perez, also a librarian, whose mock encyclopedia The Miscellaneous History of Common Experiments was a collage of words, paint strips, glassine envelopes with foreign stamps, and a glossy map of Chicago. Mostly, though, the zines looked as if they had been made at someone’s kitchen table.

  Like any collection, this one benefited from the collector’s, or librarian’s, focus. This wasn’t just stuff that happened to be in zine format; it had to fit with the rest of the library’s holdings, in a library that served an undergraduate population of women and contained archives and manuscripts of women authors. “I feel like it’s important for each library to have its niche,” Freedman said, so Barnard’s zine collection was restricted to zines of urban females. “I’m definitely missing out on some good wacky zine fun,” she allowed. She shipped those that didn’t fit in her collection to other zine libraries. Queer zines (male) went to the Queer Zine Archive Project in Milwaukee, where they were not only collected and cataloged but (with the permission of the zinesters) scanned into a searchable Web archive; transgender zines went to Kelly Shortandqueer at the Denver Zine Library.

  Zines represent a challenge to a cataloger with their nonpaper extras (buttons, tea bags, locks of hair), their nonstandard sizes, covers that left no room for cataloging information, and often mysterious origins. “There is no preexisting librarians’ code pertaining to how one should handle a document that includes a free prophylactic,” a reporter for the Boston Globe wrote. Zines are hard to categorize. The librarian who tried to organize them geographically would be frustrated; zinesters tend to be peripatetic, or disappear altogether. Freedman and her colleagues tried to fit the individual zines into the Library of Congress Classification System, but the zines were too miscellaneous. They ended up classified simply as zines and alphabetized by author. Freedman’s goal was to make the zines an integral part of the Barnard and Columbia catalog, and findable both inside and outside the community; listings on WorldCat had led to interlibrary loans and a higher profile. She wanted them to be accessible and circulate to the student population, but she also wanted them preserved in the archives, for current and future scholars. One of her mentors gave her the idea of collecting two copies. “First copy goes in the acid free climate controlled archive, and the second copy, if there is one, goes into the stacks which can now be circulated. It allows me to be much less precious about the stack zines because I know that the zines in the archive are okay.”

  She handed me a mini-zine, an 11-by 17-inch folded paper called Cite This Zine! How to Cite a Zine in Your Research Project, conceived and created by an intern. The zine lays a path for this material to be included in scholarly papers; now maybe zines will get footnoted in the ongoing history of our culture. Freedman herself has written technical articles about cataloging and collecting zines for librarians—she sees them as important primary sources of underdocumented subcultures. “We preserve today what may be important later,” she said.

  The Barnard College Library website had pages dedicated to the zine collection that made the case for this collection of more than seventeen hundred voices, beginning with an excerpt from Jenny San Diego’s zine Not Sorry: “I’m not even trying to be dramatic, but to the world at large, I am a freak…a fat, queer, mentally ill, politically radical woman with very little money and little to no regard for beauty standards and so on and so forth. But you know what? I am so NOT fucking SORRY…my experiences, ideas and opinions need to be heard…. Besides, how else are these stories going to be documented?…Now I know that this zine will not go much beyond the zine reading community, but this is where I have chosen to start and it’s something which is always better than nothing.”

  I curled up with a couple of librarian zines, including Riot Librarrrian (after the “riot grrrl” feminist punk movement). The whole concept of a librarian zinester intrigued me, implying as it did a person who could zip around databases, link to the world of information, and still want to sit down in her free time to cut-and-paste a homemade expressive booklet. (I wasn’t the only one intrigued; a library student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, had started the Library Workers Zine Collection, to preserve alternative voices in the field.) “One of the reasons I decided to enter this profession,” one of the Riot Librarrrians wrote, “was because I’m in love with information, and the library remains one of the few spaces in our lives where information is not a commodity…. There’s a subversive element to librarianship that I adore.”

  That’s the ticket: “one of the few spaces in our lives where information is not a commodity.” It’s no wonder I kept running into librarians who struck simple notes in a complicated world. Riot Librarrrian’s e-mail address was printed on the inside cover along with the request, “Please do not stalk.” Would I be stalking if I sent the writers an e-mail? I decided to risk it. Zines were the call in a call-and-response; “I never got so many letters until I made a zine,” Freedman said. Not surprisingly, though, my e-mail came bouncing back. I pictured the two itinerant librarians, their backpacks filled with laptops or smart phones, definitely paper, library paste, scissors—and a bunch of extra r’s.

  I went on a zine kick after meeting Freedman, another diversion into the low-tech stacks behind the library computers. (But even straight-up digital librarians will tell you that that’s half the fun of this business, getting diverted.) I attended a panel on the subject, got myself on some mailing lists, and came across a zine that recounted the story of an unusual life.

  Zines are most valuable, it seems to me, as documentary artifacts and narratives when written by people who are hard to categorize: strays, self-identified women, men, transgenders, agitators, street people, punks, anyone who didn’t fit neatly in a society that organizes itself in simple binary categories—male or female, Democrat or Republican, black or white, married or single, adult or child. The author of the unusual zine I read had been an unhappy girl, until she started calling herself he and began a course of male hormones. After growing a beard and deepening his voice, but stopping short of surgery, he embarked on a relationship with a transvestite male. The self-defined male with female parts lived with a male who preferred to dress as a female. What were they? A couple. What was he? Even he wasn’t sure, though he felt right. The zine was a record of his unique life, which he felt a responsibility to document.

  Who knows how many people are invisible because their stories don’t fit our categories?

  Librarians have long tried to catalog the world in all its complexity. They want to describe things accurately, find the right name for this rare bird or that; but they are also looking for a description that fits into the architecture of information, that shows where the bird fits in its family, genus, species, and so on. They argue passionately about the specifics. Freedman and her father both referred me to the work of Sanford (Sandy) Berman, a radical librarian from Minnesota who wrote, among others, a book called The Joy of Cataloging. Berman has spent decades combing the Library of Congress’s subject headings, petitioning its catalogers for refinements, deletions, and additions to try to rid it of any cultural insensitivity—arguing that they needed to distinguish between the god of Christianity and other gods, for instance, that they should label some action Genocide instead of Civil war, that they should list Sex worker as an alternative subject heading for Prostitu
te.

  Library catalogers try to describe things neutrally and avoid cultural bias. They also try to sidestep the holes that open up and swallow our questions when we can’t find what we’re looking for—what Berman calls “bibliocide by cataloging.” Subject headings, search terms, keywords—if the searcher can’t figure out the right term, the one that triggers the jackpot of information, she’s lost. In her memoir One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets, Bliss Broyard described going to the Boston Public Library to look for stories about people like her father, the critic Anatole Broyard, who had been born Creole but passed for white. Passing—that’s the term she looked for in the card catalog, but she found only Passing (Football), Miscegnation, and Mulatto, none of which led to stories of people who had been born one race and lived another. As far as she could tell, the world of the early 1990s was devoid of books about racial passing. Broyard thought she was an outsider, unconnected to anything in the vast world of written literature. Now there’s a subject heading in the Library of Congress called Passing (Identity) that marks a path to Bliss Broyard’s book, among all the others.

  But the catalog is incomplete on the subject of librarians. There are Library of Congress subject headings for Bisexual librarians, Gay librarians, Transgender librarians, Transsexual librarians, and Packhorse librarians, the last of these, librarians “who delivered books on horseback to patrons in the remote rural areas in the United States in the 1930s.” But Anarchist librarians? You can’t find them in the catalog. Not yet, anyway.