“Libraries
and colleges are clearing out books as if they were asbestos. Computer
terminals are what are wanted now, in the same way that Mr Gradgrind wanted
facts. I am not entirely technophobic: the internet is a superb instrument and
I am very grateful for it, but it is by no means a perfect substitute for
books.”
At present only
four of Stead’s novels (not including her masterpiece, The Man Who Loved Children, of which I own a copy) are in HPL’s
holdings, and all are in the “closed stacks,” meaning they are shelved at
another location not accessible to the public, and must be requested for delivery. The happy serendipity of discovery,
always among the charms of a library visit, is eliminated. I remember finding
John Updike’s Pigeon Feathers and
Kafka’s The Castle that way in our
neighborhood library when I was a kid. Some library visits are purposeful. One
looks for a specific title or subject area. Others, the best ones, are small,
hopeful adventures. All the lip service paid to encouraging children to read is
hogwash. The public libraries I know are dedicated to books as data, or books
as slightly old-fashioned novelties. Dalrymple writes:
“I have been
obsessed by books all my life, and now I feel the melancholy that I suppose old
artisans must once have felt when their trade became industrialised. All these
years I have been on the wrong, or at least losing, side of history, a dinosaur
that did not foresee its extinction.”
3 comments:
I remember walking over to the central library when I worked in downtown Houston. It was a refreshing escape from the workday.
Several books marked "Discarded" from that library have ended on my shelves, including one of my favorites: Czeslaw Milosz's The History of Polish Literature.
Yes, this trend is dismal. What I would give for full access to rummage through the "Closed Stacks!" I noticed early on that the new San Francisco library downtown was largely denuded of books and kept asking the librarians where they all were. And at the library book sales, the tables are also full of contemporary rubbish - not just the so-called "Literature" section, either. One goes to the "History" table and encounters only compilations of Thomas Friedman's pompous columns for the New York Times.
This even applies to my local used bookstore, a good one. A lot of the treasures are hidden upstairs where we cannot go, and the downstairs rooms tend toward the popular and commercial. We're lucky that they're still open to foot traffic at all, now that their main business is online.
I often have that wrong-side-of-history feeling. Novels? Formal poetry? Writers are like the lacemakers of another age, seeing their own demise. The current system of publishing (lead books, lead books) and distribution is unhelpful to almost all of them.
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