Losing the Fiance but Winning the Honeymoon

Nell Stevens, “Losing the Fiance but Winning the Honeymoon,” New York Times August 5, 2018, p. ST5.

In the preceding months, I had been in the fateful state of being both bored and in love, completing my Ph.D. in London while the man I was going to marry worked in Boston. In the rare-books reading room at the British Library (where I had gone to write), I spent a lot of time entering online contests filling out form after form in the hope of winning vacations, designer clothes and theater tickets.

COMMENT 

    The library is a refuge for writers, but technology is a source of distraction and a ready excuse for procrastination.  Print books and frustratingly slow (or non-existent) Internet offer a handy solution to distractibility. Some people even advocate solving the problem by reverting to using a typewriter.  The romance, needless to say, was just an excuse to avoid writing.  It didn't work out. 

Six Kinds of Rain

Kathleen Dean Moore and Erin E. Moore, “Six Kinds of Rain: Searching for a Place in the Academy,” in Placing the Academy: Essays on Landscape, Work and Identity, ed. By Jenifer Sinor and Rona Kaufamn, Utah State University Press, 2007, pp. 27-38.

“In this folded space, it’s hard to know where a university is. Maybe the university has become a paradox, a place with no particular place —  in a familiar geography of classrooms, restrooms, computer networks, and labs where uncomfortable table-chairs and library shelves are an iconography recognizable around the world. This global University has a common language, shared ethical codes, standardized measures of status, and ingrained methodologies, economic systems and taboos. What the University doesn’t have is a meaningful relationship to a particular place— its absence the final achievement of the goal implicit in the word university. [pp.31-32]

COMMENT

Let's sing along with Malvina Reynolds’ classic song!

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they got put in boxes
And they came out all the same
There are doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

     In Becoming Native to this Place (1993) Wes Jackson asks, what if universities had a homecoming major? I would add, if they did have one, what would need to change in Academic libraries? 

     In the name of efficiency, academic collecting has been largely outsourced to approval plans and digital aggregators. That means libraries are spending a lot of money to buy very similar digital collections no matter where the institution is located. This in turn has led to proposals to replace academic libraries with huge regional book warehouses in order to “share” shelf space. [1] The book-warehouse idea presupposes that all campuses are interchangeable. All of this only makes sense if  you don’t truly think of your  university campus as a “community”

     Interestingly, even the people who most strongly advocate replacing libraries with book warehouses have realized that diversity (a.k.a. "unique print book manifestations") in academic library collections derives from collecting that reflects geography. Place is still important, no mater how much universities have been trying to ignore it.  If academic libraries start to pay attention to place it suggests a better way forward than replacing libraries with remote warehouses. 

     What if academic libraries decided to adopt a core mission of  fostering  resilient community? That would trigger a shift in library collection priorities away from globalized, generic knowledge towards specific local and hyperlocal knowledge.It would make regional Special Collections more prominent. But more importantly, it could help with the sustainability agenda to make the world a better place.

[1] OCLC Shared Print Management https://www.oclc.org/en/services/shared-print-management.html

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451. 60th Anniversary Edition. Simon & Schuster, 2013. 

“In order to finish the novel— I had no office, I looked around for a good place to write this fantastic story that was coming to birth, and I thought, “Well, what’s a better place to write a novel about book burning in the future than a library?”   And I discovered , in that time, that wonderful downstairs basement room in the UCLA library with a typewriter that you fed a dime into every half hour. So I sat there and fed dimes into this typewriter for eight or nine days, twenty cents an hour, and finished the  short novel “The Fireman” on that typewriter in a room with ten or fifteen or twenty other students who didn’t know what I was up to.” [p.194]

COMMENT

     Bradbury seems to feel like he was getting away with something.  The CPI Inflation calculator says that in 1951 when he wrote The Fireman, $0.20 was worth $1.98 in 2018 dollars. That's dirt cheap rent for office space in an age.
      Are there modern-day Ray Bradburies writing the next great novel in library computer labs? Maybe. Good word-processing software is available open-source, but not everyone has a big screen and an ergonomic keyboard. The ubiquitous computer these days is a cell-phone which is not well adapted for typing. AS people are increasingly stuffed into crowded megacities the future demand for libraries as writing retreats might grow, too. In 1950, the average size of an American houses was 983 square feet.  The median size of a single family house built in 2017 was 2,426 square feet which should provide plenty of office space. Except that in many American cities average people can't afford to buy houses any more.
    Typewriters, by the way, seem to have experienced a bit of a comeback.[1] Some writers like the way they eliminate online distraction, slow down the thought process, and record a first draft without corrections.  A few libraries admit to still having typewriter rooms including Oberlin College Library A San Franciso Public Library  Facebook post implies that their typewriter is so popular people are queuing up to use it.

[1] California Typewriter [documentary], 2016. http://californiatypewritermovie.com/

Be Afraid, Jeff Bezos, Be Very Afraid

David Streitfeld. “Be Afraid, Jeff Bezos, be Very Afraid: Citing Amazon’s Dominance, a ‘Legal Prodigy’ Argues for a new Approach to Antitrust Regulation,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 2018, BU 1, 6-7. 

The dead books are on the top floor of Southern Methodist University’s law library.      

     “Antitrust Dilemma.” “The Antitrust Impulse.” “Antitrust in an Expanding Economy.”  Shelf after shelf of volumes ignored for decades.  There are a dozen tomes with transcripts of the congressional hearings on monopoly power in 1949, when the world was in ruins and the Soviets on the march. Lawmakers believed economic concentration would make America more vulnerable. 

     At the end of the antitrust stacks is a table near the window. “This is my command post,” Lina Khan said. 

COMMENT

     The photo accompanying this article shows law student Lina Kahn in law library stacks barely holding onto a toppling armload of hardbound library books.  She’s the author of a highly-cited paper [1] about the possibility of reviving and expanding anti-trust laws in order to rein in the outsized monopoly power of Big Tech. Khan is jump-starting her legal career by delving into historical legal scholarship on a topic that has been long ignored. The “dead” books she is using for her research sat on the shelf for more than 60 years but now it seems they were really just dormant, waiting for the passing of a fad for unregulated free markets. It’s a recurring library narrative -- finding intellectual treasure concealed in unused, supposedly obsolete books.  From an original research perspective, there is deep conflict with the  the commonly-held librarian notion that the most heavily used books are the most valuable.

    Big Tech, of course, is not responding passively to being labeled dangerously monopolistic.  As the article points out, Amazon has already hired its own lawyers to write rebuttals to Kahn. Shortly before this article appeared an op-ed [2] was published on the Forbes,com website (and then quickly redacted due to public ridicule) proposing that since public libraries are “obsolete” they would be better replaced with Amazon.com outlets. The idea was a logical if misguided extension of the tired old idea that public services would be more efficient if they were run like businesses. It’s hard to imagine an Amazon branded “library” outlet that would support antitrust legal research against its own parent company.  Yes, I know there’s a difference between public libraries and academic law libraries, but increasingly corporations are “sponsoring” university professorships in order to guarantee scholarship that is friendly to their own interests and political ideology. 

     Amazon really is overly powerful. Book sales statistics are not very precise, but in 2018,  Amazon sold about 1/2 of all print books, and about 80% of all ebooks (many of them self-published) in the U.S. Market. The company has been known to  promote or suppress publications, sometimes vindictively (such as the 2014 incident when Amazon attacked the publisher Hachette over ebook pricing).  It’s probably no coincidence that American democracy is in a state of crisis. A little trust-busting could be just what's needed right now. 

[1]Khan, Lina M. "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox." Yale Law Journal,  126 (2016): 710.  
[2] Mourdoukoutas, Panos. “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money,” Forbes.com, July 21, 2018 [deleted]

Seeing My Son Read is a Bittersweet Joy

Viet Than Nguyen. Seeing My Son Read is a Bittersweet Joy. New York Times, August 5, 2018. p.4SR.

Books were not a priority for my parents, so we never had them in the house. I would go to the public library every week and stuff my backpack full of books, which were barely enough for a week. I never owned my own until high school. My son has a bigger library than I ever had.  While my parents showed me they loved me by making sure that I always had enough to eat, I show my love for my son by making sure that he always has enough to read (as well as to eat). For me, the library was a second home, and I want my son to have his own home

By 11 or 12, I knew how to get to my second home by myself, on foot or on the bus.  But in remembering that childhood library, what I also know is that libraries are potentially dangerous places because there are no borders. There are countries called children’s literature and young adult literature and adult fiction, but no border guards, or in my case, parents to police the borders and protect me. A reader could go wherever he or she wanted. So, at 12 or 13 I read Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” and Larry Heinemann’s “Close Quarters."

COMMENT

     We may not normally think of letting kids get inappropriate books as a desirable function of the library, but considering how often reading the “wrong” book influences the course of someone's life it strikes me as a particularly valuable service. There is a kind of coming-of-age that happens when a child starts reading books that reveal  truly shocking adult knowledge. Reading these books becomes a formative experience precisely because the reader was so ill prepared. Some kids can find such transformational books on their parents’ shelves, but Nguyen’s refugee parents didn’t have any books at all. The library had to facilitate his coming-of-age.  Luckily, the librarians provided guidance for curious kids by dividing books into shelves for children, young adults and adults. Any child who wanted to sneak a peek at adult secrets would know exactly where to look. Nguyen, now a protective parent himself, is absolutely right that by learning to read his son is “one step further on his own road to independence, to being a border-crosser, someone who makes his own decisions, including about what he reads and what he believes.” I like to think that Banned Books Week helps this coming-of-age process along.