October 12, 2007
“Laws Die; Books Never” (Bulwer-Lytton)—Or Almost Never Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 10:20 AM EST I made a special trip to the university library near my house, just to look up something in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, the index of magazine articles printed during the twentieth century. I’ve been doing the same thing roughly my whole life—same Reader’s Guides, same place on the shelves. Except that yesterday, they were gone. The librarian said the decision had been made to throw out nearly all of the Reader’s Guides in order to save space, since the content is now on a database. I might have pointed out that a database is not a book. It can’t impart the power of periphery or of perspective. Apparently, however, that ship has sailed, or that garbage truck has left the loading dock of America’s libraries, choose your metaphor. I am certainly inured to computer research, however, and so the librarian and I looked up the database. First we couldn’t find it, and then it wouldn’t work—or was it the other way around. Ever optimistic, I asked where it was that they kept the Reader’s Guides that they hadn’t thrown out. Maybe they had made a mistake and kept July 1934 to August 1935. She looked that up and told me that whatever was left was on the second floor. The second floor was actually quite hollow, except for row upon row of metal bookshelves, all empty and making a tinny sound in answer to my heels, a sound with a sting, when one wonders which books were thrown out to make it possible. The Reader’s Guides were nowhere in sight. But I congratulate the librarians on achieving their goal: They’d certainly freed up lots and lots of space. A sentimental confession: when I was writing my new book on Lincoln (The Case of Abraham Lincoln: Murder, Adultery and the Making of a Great President), I used to dream not about topping the bestseller list or of being short-listed for the Booker Prize (which is for fiction anyway), but of seeing the book added to the Lincoln section at some of my favorite libraries. For a moment, walking out of the university library in question, I doubted that libraries are going to last long enough for my Lincoln book (it comes out in November). In the one I was in, the one that was making all the space by throwing out books, one half of the ground floor was boarded up and draped with a huge sign: “Café Coming in November!” Praise be: They have the space for a coffee shop. After all, you can get a copy of the Reader’s Guide for July 1934 to August 1935 on almost any corner, but where can you find a cup of hot coffee? Don’t call me old-fashioned because I repeat the one thing I know: An Internet café is not a library. And a database is not a book.
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