`It's More Like Bedlam'

“The existence of public libraries was kept from me as long as possible (the knowledge would, it was thought, interfere with my studies), but when the secret broke at last, I rapidly became what in those days was an especially irritating kind of borrower, who brought back in the evening the books he had borrowed in the morning and read in the afternoon.” 

This is Philip Larkin, for more than forty years a librarian, in both public and university institutions, writing in “Shelving the Issue,” first published in The New Statesman in 1977 and collected in Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews, 1952-85 (2001). Born in 1922, he is describing the public library in his home town, Coventry, “nestling at the foot of the unbombed cathedral, filled with tall antiquated bookcases.” To this day I experience mild embarrassment when visiting the library for the second time in a day. One fears being catalogued among the derelicts sleeping in the periodicals room. Larkin adds: “Such was my first experience of the addictive excitement a large open-access public library generates: the sense of imminent discovery, the impulse to start on twenty books at once.” That excitement has never ceased despite the best efforts of librarians to subvert their collections and turn libraries into theme parks for the lumpenproletariat. Catharine Savage Brosman confirms my observations in “In the Public Library” (On the Old Plaza, 2014): 

“No quiet here!—no studious frowns; it’s more

like bedlam. Children dart among the stacks

and squeal; bored people lounge about, or pore

through tapes and DVDs on crowded racks, 

“or scan new fiction—Cromwell, Brown, and Clark

(a dozen copies each). What can they lose?

In short, it is an air-conditioned park,

a beach. Teens chatter, showing off tattoos; 

“a drifter, drunk or drugged, accosts a pair

of women, muttering a fishwife’s word;

he’s taken out by guards (by guards!). And where

in all this is the catalogue? Absurd 

“to ask: on-line, of course.—A harmless drudge

(as per Sam Johnson), I should like to find

four literary books. But this is sludge,

the dregs of culture. Scholars of my kind 

“will be extinct ere long, good books removed;

we’ll read on screens, or else won’t read at all.

As everyday experience has proved,

Eden’s long gone; this is the newest fall. 

“Avoiding drunks and dragons, I succeed—

knight-errant—in procuring an array

of unread tomes. The addicts have their need:

withdrawal is, I’m glad, still years away.” 

By “Cromwell” does Brosman mean Patricia Cornwell, the thriller writer? It hardly matters. She's referring to generic book-like commodities as expectation-fulfilling as Big Macs. Brosman lives in Houston and may be describing a library I know. She gets the details right for a cultural institution administered and patronized by vandals (sorry, Dave), and she nicely echoes Larkin’s "addictive" theme.