SHELVE!

From the archives

Okay, last archive piece in this time slot, this one from 2003. I’ve been wrapping up some large projects, and need the extra week to get my schedule in order. New stuff resumes next week.

I was first fired by the Albany, NY Public Library, Delaware Avenue Annex. Here’s what I remember; on November 8, 1985, I reported to work as usual, shelved some books and greeted some patrons. At closing time, my friends Eddie and Bob showed up. High school juniors, we were all too young to drive, and my boss, a Ms. S., had agreed to chauffer us to the Corrosion of Conformity gig across town. While closing up shop, Mrs. Smi beckoned me into a thinly partitioned back office. There she read me a poem called TERMINATION OF EMPLOYMENT, a solemn elegy that concluded,

While you are trying your best
you are unable to perform
your paging duties to my satisfaction
and I feel
at this time
it is necessary for me
to terminate your employment.

I accepted the letter in shock. I was barely a man and already unable to perform my duties. I knew my friends had heard everything through the meager wall. “Can we,” I asked quietly, “still get a ride to the show?” Ms. S. nodded and the three of us were driven to the Washington street VFW hall in a difficult silence. Bob and Eddie are big shots now—an NY1 journalist and a doctor—and I thank them for not laughing hysterically until Ms. S. left us on the sidewalk and drove off into history.

Typical teenage hijinks. If a movie is someday made of my life, this scene will be embellished, the symbolism teased out and some witty comebacks invented. But the insult remains. I was a good shelver. I’ve always felt unjustly dismissed, collateral damage in Albany budget battles, a pawn in a much larger game. I can accept that. Or maybe some mentally insane hobos came in and rearranged my careful shelving. I can accept that as well. Stranger things have happened. But I don’t know if I can accept that I was a bad librarian.

Subsequent years haven’t resolved this. I’ve frequented a lot of libraries since, but almost never fetched a book on my own. At the famous NYC 5^th Ave branch—in the vast, ornate reading room that stank of old gym clothes, its windows still blacked out from WW2—my book requests were written on slips of paper, handed over to employees and lowered by hydraulics or rope pulley into the catacombs below. Downtown, at the giant cube library NYU graciously let my college use, I only studied, or wrote terrible fanzines. In Richmond, VA, I spent many hours in the main branch on Franklin Street, a fake airport terminal that seemed to mirror the Cancelled Flight inertia my life had taken on. But I almost never checked out books. The charming Providence, RI library had a good VHS selection. I use the local Claremont, CA library now only when I need graphics of cowboys or body parts, and I know what aisles to browse. Would I be able to shelve and retrieve?

life is a rich tapestry of emotions

By 1986, the Delaware Avenue Annex was history, bundled into a strip mall branch a mile west. Later that year, arson destroyed 400,000 books at the central Los Angeles library. Having done a lot of research on lost libraries in the last year, I can vouch that this kind of thing still happens a lot. The 1992 destruction of the entire National & University Library of Bosnia & Herzegovina, a million and a half book loss, was a blow to the Balkans equal to the Library of Alexandria fire. Civilizations leak data. We produce far more than we can hold on to.

Lost libraries are poorly mourned. In 1764, when fire swept through the Library of Harvard, how many people grieved its 400 volumes of Bible commentary, its collection of puritan sermons, or its “goodly array of several Jesuit authors?” Americans were outraged when the British shelled the Library of Congress in 1814, but probably not by the slaughter of books. One has to read pretty deep into the1945 Russian siege of Berlin before finding any references to the destruction of something called the “Preussische Staatsbibliothek reading room.” These days, small bands of library enthusiasts hold periodic freakouts over the assault on card catalogs that is, for most of us, too esoteric to comprehend. Nicholson’s Baker’s Double Fold, a 2001 book-length rant against the loss of our nation’s first-hand research sources, holds an unwitting defense for the opposition; his book is simply too boring to read. I know the Delaware Avenue Annex will never be more than an honorary member of the lost library hall of fame. I just wish it still existed. I’d like to have the option of marching in disguised as an adult and complaining about the misshelved books.

Also, I’m curious if any data was lost in their transition. There is always this risk when libraries are uprooted. Samuel Dashiell Hammett, the author I’m circuitously named after, wrote an entire short story—titled, ironically enough, “Immortality”—that has no surviving copies. I once wrote an online column that later vanished forever, despite my methodical searching through Google archives. Already that meager output has faded to a dull imprint, a memory of a memory, like the details of that first employment, or the scant workplace clues I should have read in the weeks leading up to my sacking.

Speaking of Google, the search engine tells me now that Ms. S. is still an upstate New York librarian and is currently seeking fresh workers. A new poem called LIBRARY PAGE reads:

Applicants for this positon [sic]
must be at least 16 years old
and able to work various shifts
including some night
and weekend hours.

Job responsibilities include
shelving library materials
and assisting
library
staff.

I feel a new urge. It goes like this; fly to Albany. Regain residency. Re-apply for the positon [sic]. Get hired by Ms. S. Shelve the shit out of some books.