'A Library Fit For a Man'

About five miles from the Rice University campus is the Library Service Center (LSC), the Fondren Library’s off-site storage facility. It houses some 1,140,000 items, mostly books – about one-third of the library’s total collection. From the outside, the building has the conspicuous anonymity of a military installation. Inside, it suggests Borges’ “Library of Babel.”

 

Every week I order books from the LSC and they arrive hours later. I have been doing that since I first went to work for Rice in 2006. It’s a remarkable, reliable service I never take for granted. This week I was invited to tour the facility and meet the people who run it. Shelver/Driver Rosalba Benavides shook my hand and said, “It’s good to meet our favorite customer.” The LSC manager, James Springer, suggested they order a rubber stamp with my name on it.

 

Basically, the LSC is a highly organized warehouse. The stacks are mostly thirty shelves high. All books are boxed and the boxes and shelves are labeled. The upper shelves are reached with the use of a forklift. Seen from the bottom of these canyons of books, you might mistake the stock for shoes. The temperature is kept at 50°F, humidity at 30 percent.

  

Borges often pictured paradise as a vast library, as in his prologue to “Catalog of the Exhibition Books from Spain” (trans. Suzanne Jill Levine, Selected Non-Fictions, 1999):

 

“Each in his own way imagines Paradise; since childhood I have envisioned it as a library. Not as an infinite library, because anything infinite is somewhat uncomfortable and puzzling, but as a library fit for a man. A library in which there will always be books (and perhaps shelves) to discover, but not too many. In brief, a library that would allow for the pleasure of rereading, the serene and faithful pleasure of the classics, or the gratifying shock of revelation and of the foreseen.”