The Old Lady and Her Bookshelf
I have always liked old libraries and ancient books. Books and libraries were such advanced technologies and wonderous sources of images and ideas. Note I put this as past tense.
Years ago I began a project called the Library Book. The intent was to express my joy of discovery when I was in a library. My travels have taken me from my hometown Carnegie Library to the old Springfield Massachusetts Library, various university and college libraries, the New York Public Library, The Library of Congress, the private library of the French Senat, and the reading room of the National Library of France. But where I spent the most time exploring was in stacks of Tutt Library at Colorado College.
My Library Book was put on hold when the college renovated the building. During the process of remodeling the structure, the concept of what a library is was also readdressed. At that point in time many books were culled from the collection and carted off to a landfill, much like outdated telephone directories. What had been open stacks are now shelves on rollers controlled by sometimes functioning motors that roll the racks one way or another to create an aisle that one must dash down to snag the particular book you wish to retrieve. There is no time to browse, to regard the spines of other related books on the same topic as the one of which you were fortunate to know the call numbers, as other patrons may be waiting patiently for your aisle to close and another open for them.
I took many photographs of how old books were arranged on shelves, how fancy were their jackets. I had even begun a sketch of how my Library Book would look. But, as I said, this project is on hold.
During the book purge I rescued a number of dog-eared books of Nineteenth Century American Poetry. Generally I am no fan of rhymey stuff. Yet I am not utterly disrespectful. These particular books by individual poets had been damaged beyond repair. However, as much of the damage these books had suffered was due to too-much-love and the abuse of having been handled by too many readers. The pages were falling out. In some cases the dog ate not the book report, but the book. I decided to alter the nature of these poetry books and remake them in a new form: A folio of recycled paper that is an unreadable catalog of Nineteenth Century American Poems. I shredded the pages, turned the text back into paper pulp. Each poet’s words became broken down and intermingled with the words of another poet. Then large sheets were formed in which, if you look closely one can pick out fragments of sentences, words, syllables, or letters.
This repulping, remaking of new sheets of paper from old, is a symbolic rebirth of the physical paper of a book. It is more poetic than simply dumping books into landfill alongside busted pottery and empty tv dinner trays. I know what often becomes of the libraries of regular people.
Not long ago, in New York City, I was walking along Madison Avenue when I noticed that instead of cars and delivery trucks, a large number of open top, four-wheeled dumpsters were parked on the west side of the street. These were filled to overflowing with books. Every book was in French. They were there for the taking as a garbage truck would haul off the remaining contents away to the standard depository. Most books were hardcover including a first edition by Sartre. I was certain the Voltaire was early 20th Century. I took more books than I should have, making my sport coat into an improvised bookbag. The old lady whose library these books had been would surely have preferred seeing me and the others pick-over her collection to the true destination of those books we did not rescue.
I know of another library that went from the shelves of an emptying apartment in the Bronx to a landfill without anyone discovering its treasure. It was a small library with only a few hundred books that had ran from the doorway of the apartment to the television set. Beneath the tv was a crockery jar.
Each day the elderly woman took a crisp hundred dollar, from a stack of hundreds in her lingerie drawer, to the grocery store and dry cleaner. Returning home she set down her groceries and dry cleaning, then put her spare change away. Any coins were dumped into the crockery. The paper money was placed into a random book on the shelf, each bill individually between pages.
The coin-filled crockery was obvious. Thieves would have seen the hoard of coins. She told no one about where she put the paper money.
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