This Book Is Overdue!

by Marilyn Johnson

  “I gave a talk about my new book across the street at the Mid-Manhattan branch. That place is utter chaos. And it will all come here—the noise, the teenage programs, the circulating DVDs.”

  Lundquist’s book, The Temple of Jerusalem: Past, Present, and Future, is a scholarly work about a temple from the age of King Solomon, which doesn’t survive; not even a fragment of a ruin survives. Lundquist reconstructs it based on eyewitness accounts, scripture, and historic records, using an impressive breadth of references, from the Hebrew Bible to the Coptic Gnostic texts of Nag Hammadi, to the writings of medieval Jewish, Christian, and Islamic pilgrims.

  The people who took his scholarly division away lavishly celebrated the publication of his scholarly book. “Paul LeClerc and David Ferriero gave me an extraordinary book party in September. Many, many library staff members came, my friends and family—I have six children—were there. Really, it was very generous of them, and I don’t know that such a gesture has ever been made to a librarian here before.” So September was a good month and a bad month.

  The director with no one to direct had turned into a curator with too many things to curate. The odd part of this downsizing was that, although his reading room had been taken and his staff dispersed, his acquisitions budget had increased. New books, magazines, photographs, and art from Asia and the Middle East continued to pour through the door, but his former staff librarians “all have different supervisors now. We do continue to collaborate on acquisitions, but we have to find the time to do that work.” It led to messes like this room. He said he was frequently interrupted by the stream of librarians from Mid-Manhattan, the circulating branch across Fifth Avenue, who would soon be moving from a space that resembled a department store (and was, in fact, a former department store), into marble and gleaming wood, and who could barely conceal their excitement from Lundquist. The little jewel box, the Shoichi Noma Reading Room, was renovated in 1997 by the head of Kodansha, a Japanese publisher, who donated more than a million dollars in his father’s memory to buff it up with cork floors edged in marble, an elaborate desk for the librarian, brass and wood steps to a balcony lined with books. The bequest was honored by the library at the gala, and Shoichi Noma’s widow accepted the award. Someone in the administration was trying to compose a letter to let them know that their gift would no longer be used to host parts of the Asia and Middle East collection, and called Lundquist for help, but he didn’t know what to say, either.

  Why didn’t he just leave? “If I left now, it would be a disaster. I have all this institutional knowledge, and this is a crucial transitional period. Things would disappear, be misplaced, get lost or dumped.”

  He showed me some of his treasures in the locked cages of the stacks, late-nineteenth-century photographs of Mecca, recently salvaged by the conservation lab in the basement and “of great historic value and endless potential for scholars,” he said. “We have one of the greatest collections in the world of what I call Orientalism, Western scholars and explorers discovering Asia.” Images of some of the books and scrolls can be seen online in the collection’s digital holdings. Lundquist appreciates the work the digitization staff has done—“one of the greatest achievements of this administration,” he said.

  The most exciting acquisition was a complete set of prints from the hand-engraved woodblocks of the Tibetan monastery of Dege: about eight hundred volumes, arriving by ship over the course of three years. Among all the muted reds and blacks and browns of the stacks were carts piled high with these printings, bundled in bright-yellow flags with embroidered end flaps, gift-wrapped offerings from another culture. The first shipment was in the process of being cataloged by one part-time librarian and two volunteers from a Buddhist library.

  Lundquist opened one of the intricately folded yellow bundles, brushed off the paper dust on the cover, sounded out the letters, and explained that this volume was about a branch of Buddhist philosophy. It was exotic, red ink in a code I couldn’t read, on textured paper, about three times as wide as it was tall. Why was it wrapped so carefully, even ceremonially in that flag? Why were the edges of the book painted red? These were signs of respect; the monks do not want the book to be naked, so they clothe it with paint and fabric. “If we were Buddhists, we would touch the manuscript to our foreheads,” he said, “like so, as a blessing,” and the librarian lifted the manuscript and touched it to his head to demonstrate.

  Outside his office, a lone man sat reading at one of the carved tables, opposite the two closed reading rooms. “This used to be a quite active corridor,” Lundquist said. “It’s a dead zone now. It is a main corridor that cuts through the center of the building and will be an obvious route for the public to get to the stacks, which are behind that door and which are going to be taken out and turned into a circulating library. I think we are just an accident of our geography. It’s not so much that they don’t want us…. [The Asia collection] is simply in a space that they require for other purposes.”

  The whole time Lundquist spoke, he looked at me steadily; his tone was flat and deadpan, punctuated occasionally by a wan smile. This is the way of the world now; if bombs were dropping, he’d estimate their distance and force. And within a year, he would no longer work here.

  “I’m terribly sad about it,” he said. “In due time no one will remember we existed. These rooms will be reoccupied, and all will be forgotten. I’m quite certain we will be forgotten.”

  The NYPL press officer received my request to sit in on a trustees’ meeting with surprise and asked a number of questions. I mentioned that I had been the beneficiary of a key to one of the writers’ rooms; that I had done programs for the library; that I had already talked to a dozen or more librarians—“You interviewed librarians?” he said, alarmed. Didn’t he get requests like that all the time? What about the New York Times? No, the press doesn’t come. So how do they know when something is happening? He sends them press releases.

  This is surprising for an institution that relies on public funds as much as this one, but the press is shrinking, and so is press coverage. Within twenty-four hours of asking, however, I had permission to attend the February 11, 2009, trustees’ meeting, to be held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. By then, almost a year had passed since the announcement of the ambitious remaking of the research library, and the economy had tanked. Now what? Where would the librarians and the trustees with the high-beam flashlights strapped to their foreheads take us next?

  The Schomburg Center in Harlem is a lovely brick building three stories high, a fraction of the size of its sister library at Forty-second and Fifth. I headed downstairs to the research and reading rooms, clean and modern, with views of a little brick courtyard with ivy-covered walls. The elevator opened onto a sweeping reference desk, where a sharp-eyed librarian named Sharon Jarvis snagged me.

  It’s hard to say who interviewed whom. “I’ve been spending time at the main library,” I began and she smiled. “We don’t call it the main library here. Have you been to the Bronx Hub?” She was referring to a modern and successful community library, open till nine at night, hopping with patrons, and circulating material like mad; this was the model the trustees wanted to replicate in two other locations. I confessed I hadn’t been yet. Jarvis worked there on Sundays sometimes, and she recommended it. Jarvis tilted her head—she was in her fifties, I’d guess, with pulled-back braids and a broad pretty face; she had two master’s degrees, including her library degree, and this was her third career—and extracted my résumé before giving me a tour of the holdings from her computer, skipping around the archives and showing me what was possible to look at, the papers of the singer Mabel Mercer, for instance, or some, but only some, of the papers of Malcolm X (his heirs had left restrictions).

  I settled in at one of the slate tables rimmed with pale wood and started writing, but before I got very far, Jarvis came over and dropped a volume on my desk: The Handbook of Black Librarianship. “I don’t know whether this would inter
est you,” she began. It certainly did. Its coeditor E. J. Josey, I learned, had spoken out in 1964 against ALA officers and staff for attending, on the ALA’s dime, the meetings of the four state library associations that still practiced segregation. Twenty years later, Josey became the second African-American president of the ALA. He was a visionary, too, as his writing showed. “Information justice is a human rights issue; the public library must remain ‘the people’s university’…and librarians can get involved and shape the future or they can sit back and watch the changes.” Like a great reference librarian, Jarvis had given me what I didn’t know I needed, perspective on a profession that, even now, was only 5 percent black and 3 percent Latino. (Why? There is so much education required, and so little pay and prestige for the work.) A few months later, I read Josey’s obituaries when he died at the age of eighty-five.

  I followed a couple of well-heeled gentlemen into the elevator to the trustees’ meeting, in a big, modern, asymmetrical room. Long tables arranged in a rectangle took up almost the whole space, with places for nearly forty board members, all dressed up, suits everywhere, and the occasional strand of pearls. “You’ll sit over here,” I was told, on one of two wings where folding chairs had been set. “With the press?” I said. “There’s no press,” my guide said. I knew that; I was just needling her. In fact, I was sitting with staffers, aides, the new professional lobbyist who was being introduced that evening. It was like a Senate hearing. I recognized almost every nameplate within eyesight, from Catherine Marron (the chairman) and Princess Firyal (of the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division at the not-main library), to the writer and philanthropist Barbara Goldsmith, to Calvin Trillin, to businessmen like James Tisch and Edgar Wachenheim and Joshua Steiner.

  The meeting ran like an Acela, on high-speed tracks with minimal interruption (only one latecomer; only one board member slipped out early; only one brief trill of a cell) and little spontaneous discussion. The economy was bad, endowment was down, drops in city and state funds and donations were coming—but the NYPL would move forward, with the help of the captains of industry on its board. There were already savings initiatives in place, including a plan not to fill sixty-five vacant librarian positions (farewell, Persian-language librarian; goodbye, Baltic specialists).

  Everyone spoke rapidly, so as not to waste time; the whole meeting took seventy-five minutes. Statistics informed it all, a result of a strategic plan that had galvanized the chairman and the CEO and president, and made them determined to find out what the people of the city wanted in their libraries. The statistics, the metrics, the proof in the pudding: that fall, physical visits to the library had increased by 13 percent. Visits to the research centers had increased by a whopping 27 percent. Circulation at the branch libraries was up 18 percent. Curiously, materials usage in the research libraries was down by more than a quarter, maybe because wifi was now available in the entire reading room at Fifth Avenue and people were coming in just to check their e-mail.

  The board was invited to help draft an up-to-date mission statement. They would meet in small groups over the next few weeks and help set their priorities. So far, these were their goals: to inspire life-long learning; to empower our communities; to bring together New York’s diverse population to spark creativity and strengthen our cities.

  These were wonderful goals—but if you were sitting in a world-class research library with a Wordsworth collection so good that British scholars had to come use it, and you knew Caribbean writers who cited its holdings of letters from Columbus to Luis de Santangel, Keeper of Accounts of Aragon, those goals seemed local, parochial, not big enough.

  John Lundquist had put a beautiful volume from the Asian and Middle Eastern collection in my hand: Quentin Roosevelt II’s dissertation on the Nashi (now called Naxi, or Nakhi) people, an ethnic group from the Himalayas with its own religion and language related to Tibetan. Who will use this book? A scholar of Chinese from Germany? A biographer of Quentin Roosevelt not yet born? Neither of these hypothetical people can be surveyed. The people who use research collections are unknown until they show up. If metrics measure worth, a research library might seem pointless; its collections are rarefied by definition.

  Nicholas Basbanes tells a story about his search for a particular edition of A Descriptive Catalogue of the Pepys Library, not the 1829 or the 1978 editions—only the 1914 edition had the information he needed. He finally found its three volumes, untouched, in the basement of the Boston Athenaeum research library. “You wonder who they bought these books for, anyway,” he said to the librarian. “We got them for you, Mr. Basbanes,” he was told.

  The hard choices are being made. The material, or much of it, is still there. But the librarians who understand it and can help people find and use some of those treasures are a disappearing breed.

  The news about the architect who would spearhead the renovation of the Fifth Avenue library and pull it all together appeared seven months after the grand plan had been announced: Sir Norman Foster had the job. “NYPL’s new architect announced…we’re getting a big glass dome!! Seriously, though, very exciting,” read the Twitter later that day from Josh Greenberg. Foster, who specializes in dramatic modern additions to historic buildings, had designed the British Museum’s spectacular modern glass casing around the historic relic of a reading room from the British Library. He had done something similar for the Smithsonian in Washington, covering its stately nineteenth-century courtyard with an undulating glass roof.

  To Jessica Pigza, reference librarian, the decisions of the trustees and the administration were a no-brainer: “It’s great.” She pointed out that there had been a circulating library in the Fifth Avenue building until 1970, when the Mid-Manhattan branch was created, so in her view things were coming full circle. People came to the library all the time wondering where the children’s room was, or why they couldn’t check out books, she said. It got tiresome explaining that it was a research library and everything had to stay on-site. She’d be happy when she could tell them otherwise. As for the library’s choice of an architect, Sir Norman Foster was her favorite.

  Pigza was in her thirties, one of the original members of the librarian social group, Desk Set. It was probably her fetching cat’s-eye glasses that defined the new-wave librarians—she was pictured wearing them in the much-discussed article in the New York Times. The day we talked she was also in a beautiful turquoise dress that she’d made herself, with big antique buttons; she was “crafty,” and described herself as an “enthusiast of books and other objects made by hand.” Like the other reference librarians at the NYPL, she worked the desk for three or four hours a day and spent the rest of her time on projects, some of her own devising. “You can carve out your own niche here,” she said with pride. Because she was interested in rare books, special collections, and the handmade arts, she taught occasional free classes for craft artists who want to use the library’s resources for inspiration. She also wrote a blog for NYPL “about all this crazy stuff I find, like vintage knitting patterns.” One day she came across the subject heading soap sculpture in the catalog and had to investigate. She posted a story about the craze for soap sculpture in the 1920s, when Procter & Gamble promoted it with contests and cash prizes. “Instead of just enjoying it and telling my husband about it when I get home, it lives on the Web now, where other people can find it.” Every time I see Pigza or read her blog, I learn something new: Voltaire loved handcrafts, say, or the prisoners at San Quentin used to knit for the troops during World War I.

  Like Pigza, Amy Azzarito had an interest in design; in addition to her library degree, she had a master’s in the history of decorative arts and design. Josh Greenberg hired Azzarito as a digital producer in the spring of 2008, with the mission to get “the voices of the library and the librarians out onto the Web.” Azzarito had worked at the library in various jobs, including designing classes for the public. “Instead of ‘How to Use the Online Databases,’ we offered classes like ‘Cookery 101.�
�…We would talk about how to use the catalog or online database, but in the context of a subject.”

  For centuries, writers and scholars had been mashing up the contents of libraries and archives to create something new, taking correspondence and journals and turning them into biographies, pulling strands and pieces of others’ arguments into a treatise of their own. But wouldn’t it be interesting, the librarians thought—and, frankly, more fun—if artists mined the library the way writers did? Azzarito and Pigza plundered the NYPL collections for items they thought would inspire visual artists. Then they created a video series, tracking five young artists from their visits to the NYPL to their studios to their final art projects. They posted the results on the NYPL website and YouTube.

  In the first episode, we met the artists, all of whom were young and lived in Brooklyn (no doubt next door to young librarians). There was a glassblower and four other artists working in a variety of media, porcelain jewelry, prints, wallpaper, and a self-described “maker” (“I just make things”). One of the artists admitted: “The library is a little intimidating. You don’t want to bust through the doors and hunt down a librarian and say, ‘I’m looking for a picture of a hydrangea!’”

  In the second episode, the artists braved the library and met the charming Pigza—“I’m your librarian today!”—who spread a table for each with volumes of folding paper masks and fabric samples; old maps of Brooklyn and antique postcards; books on ghosts, terrariums, and WWII vintage navy uniforms. Anticipation continued to build in the third episode, in which the artists were seen working on their inspired art. After the third video was posted on the Web, the production team decided to give the fourth and final episode a ceremonial debut.