Shelf Life

Meryl Gordon, "Shelf Life: The Story of One of the Rarest Books in the World." New York Times Book Review, May 5, 2019, p.18.

     The Gutenberg Bible, purchased n 1950, was the jewel of her collection which she left to St. John's Seminary upon her death in 1958.
     In her bequest, she insisted the nothing be sold for 25 years, in the belief that future librarians should have flexibility but would keep the collection intact.  It was a tragic mistake.  The Los Angeles Archdiocese, unable to resist monetizing the valuable assets, put the entire Doheny book collection on sale in 1987.  The Maruzen Co. Ltd of Tokyo snapped up the Gutenberg for $4.4 million.  It is now the property of Keio University, where it has been digitized and locked away from public view. 

 COMMENT

    The quote comes from a book review about a biography of a rare Gutenberg Bible[1]. The collector, as in other library stories, [2] imagines that her rare book collection has enough value to be guarded intact by librarians.  In fact, the librarians sell the collection for money.

     What's most interesting to me is the comment that the digitized book is "locked away."  Librarians like to imagine that digitization makes rare and valuable things more available, not less available.  But an online picture of a Gutenberg Bible is not really the same thing as a Gutenberg Bible even though the text is the same. The spooky sense of history is lost in the format transition.

[1] Margaret Leslie Davis, The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey, Tarcher Perigee, 2019. 
[2] Can't. Just. Stop. 

Why Your Neighborhood Can Determine Whether Your Child Thrives as an Adult

Matthew Brown, "Why Your Neighborhood can Determine Whether Your Child Thrives as an Adult," Deseret News, May 1, 2019, Online.

     Libraries, community centers, parks, houses of worship and other neighborhood gathering places can unlock opportunities for children to achieve the American Dream. That's what experts told a joint congressional committee Tuesday in Washington, asserting that rebuilding declining communities to foster social connections is key to closing the widening gap of economic inequality in America today. [1]
...
     Dr. Patrick Sharkey, a sociology professor at New York University, said government policies offering incentives to reversing a 50-year trend of families, businesses and social institutions fleeing economically hard-hit communities could address the disparities that Hendren's research revealed.
     "The most effective way to build stronger communities is to invest in core public institutions like schools and libraries, and public amenities like parks and playgrounds, that bring people together in shared spaces," he said.

COMMENT

      In his testimony, Dr. Sharkey cites a poll from the American Enterprise Institute that identifies schools and libraries as the top to elements that make communities successful. [2]   He goes on to say that there are three ways to build successful neighborhoods, 1) scale back policies that create geographic inequality 2) help families move to better neighborhoods and 3) community investment.  

     It's hard to say where the cause and effect lies. Future success  seems to depend largely on how much help kids get from their parents. And of course, rich people generally live in nicer neighborhoods. However, the U.S. Census Bureau says that children who grow up just a few miles apart in families with comparable incomes can have very different life outcomes. [3]  In fact, I do earn far less than my parents and I do live in a neighborhood with less social capital. It's not my preference. I would have loved to buy a house in the neighborhood where I grew up, but it's out of my price range.  I suppose my kids are doomed. At least we have a nice public library, although the neighborhood branch is currently closed for repairs due to flooding that was probably a result of climate change.
  


[1] U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Expanding Opportunity by Strengthening Families, Communities, and Civil Society [hearing] (April 29, 2019). 

[2] AEI Survey on Community and Society (February 2019).  

[3] The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Social Roots of Social Mobility (U.S. Census Bureau, October 2018).

Imagine Resetting Your Digital Life

Cal Newport, "Imagine Resetting Your Digital Life," New York Times, April 29, 2019, p. B8.

    Inspired by Mr. Bennett, I encouraged them to aggressively reintroduce high-value leisure activities that had nothing to do with glowing screens-- even if those activities required more energy and commitment than clicking "next episode" or scrolling a Twitter feed. Many embraced my advice. 
     A graduate student named Unaiza replaced her habit of browsing Reddit at night with reading library books, finishing eight during her digital declutter.  
     "I could never have thought about doing that before,"she told me proudly.

 
COMMENT

     One of the trends identified by the Center for the Future of Libraries is "unplugged." CFL even suggests: "This may be a rebranding from "quiet reading spaces" to "unplug zones" or "digital escape spaces" that capitalize on the trend's language.

      The fact that reading library books counts as a "high value leisure activity" shows why librarians have been mistaken to overvalue immediate digital access.  Actually reading a book takes hours to weeks. Getting the book right now is often not the most important consideration compared to selecting books that are worth the time commitment. Sometimes waiting is even preferable.  When you get in the queue for a current best-seller it  might not come for a month, but when it does arrive it's nice to be reminded of something that looked interesting. The public library has a wonderful "Lucky Day" shelf near the exit with popular books on it, and once in a while you get to jump to the head of the line by going to the actual library.

      In the digital age, libraries should spend less time trying to become part of the Internet and pay more attention the advantages of analog media and physical space.  Those are things that the Internet will never have, and they are things that are becoming more and more valuable as the drawbacks of virtual space become more and more apparent.

    

Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder, "By the Book," New York Times Book Review, April 28, 2019, p. 8.

   

Did you read poetry as a child? What books made you fall in love with poetry?
As a western Washington State '30s family we had few books.  My mother was a reader, though, and every Saturday we drove into north Seattle to check out the university district library and the thrift stores.  It seems I heard Whitman, Robert Frost, Poe and Robert Burns before I could read. 

COMMENT

     I'm happy to know that Gary Snyder's mom read him poetry.   

     If anyone asked me this question the answer would be Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats  / T.S. Eliot,  The Bat Poet / Randell Jarrell,  The Bad Child's Book of Beasts and Moral Alphabet / Hillaire Belloc, Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle and Other Modern Verse / ed. By Stephen Dunning and Edward Leuders, and Edward Lear's nonsense poems. Also those unlikely poetic parodies that used to appear in Mad Magazine at a time when there was an assumption that everyone was familiar with certain poems. (Once upon a final inning/ with the other ball team winning/ and my Mudville teammates trailing/ by a score of 2 to 4... If Edgar Allen Poe wrote Casey at the Bat).

   It's not quite  fair to say that youngsters these days don't read poetry, though. The strikingly passive-aggressive lines of William Carlos Williams' poem This is Just to Say have become an Internet meme (as I recall, the poem was included in the Reflections anthology).  My daughter appreciates This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin.


     



   

  

It's Not You, It's Men

Justin Chen, "It's Not You, It's Men" (Modern Love), New York Times, April 28, 2019, p. ST6.

     Several months ago, a co-worker asked me for the name of my celebrity crush.
     "Carrie Brownstein," I said.
     I didn't really have a celebrity crush, but Carrie's name jumped out. On "Portlandia," she was smart, whimsical and tough. I had checked out her memoir from the library the previous week and had just begun reading it.

COMMENT 

     Librarians like serious talk about education and life-long learning, but the library is also the perfect place to get light reading, like a celebrity memoir that you wouldn't want to actually spend money on or need to keep on your home bookshelves forever.   It's the Readers' Bill of Rights again with the right to escapism.[1]  

     There is great value to being able to borrow any library book that seems appealing.  Yet in this Modern Love essays, even this fluffiest of books got the reader thinking about the nature of his own romantic relationships (and also a publication credit in the New York Times, which is nothing to sneeze at.)

[1]See, How to Tap Your Inner Reader

400-Year-Old Stolen Bible is Recovered

"400-Year-Old Stolen Bible is Recovered," (Odd News), Salt Lake Tribune, April 26, 2019, p. A2.

A 17th Century Geneva Bible, one of the hundreds of rare books authorities said were stolen from a Pittsburgh library as part of a 20-year-long theft scheme, is back home... It was among more than 300 rare books, maps, plate books, atlases and more that were discovered missing from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh last year. 

  COMMENT

     This is from the "Odd News" section culled from some unidentified sources outside of the Salt Lake Tribune newsroom.  There is no information about the 20-year-long theft scheme or why it took so long for librarians to discover that the items were missing or whether any of the other stolen books were ever found. 

     Is it odd that someone stole rare books from the library?[1]  That it took 20 years to catch the perpetrator? Or odd that one of the books was eventually found?  In fact, library rare book rooms seem to hold a special allure for thieves.  Perhaps the fact that people are allowed to handle rare and valuable objects in the "book museum" makes it seem like nobody is minding the store. 

[1] Other blog posts about theft.

     

What Life After Coal Looks Like in Romania

Kevin Faingnaert (photographs) and Keven Granville (text), “What Life After Coal Looks Like in Romania,”New York Times, April 18, 2019, B6-7.

     The mines, and the cities and the jobs, have faded.         Thriving communities were build around the mines during coal’s heyday.  Residents recall that the theater in Lupeni was packed during Romania’s Communist era. Many mine companies had their own libraries and clubs. 

COMMENT

     The lack of a library indicates how far the boom-and-bust fortunes of the Jiu Valley have fallen. In the age of climate change, using coal for fuel has become an existential threat. Coal made some communities prosperous for a while. The theater was supported by the former Communist government, but the article specifically says that the library was part of a company town. It is  inevitable that a single-industry extractive economy will eventually bust. With neither coal nor government to fund it, it seems there is no longer a library in the Jiu Valley at all. 

     The photos of the abandoned town are reminiscent of  the ravaged coal towns in Appalachia. In  Carbon Ideologies  William Vollman describes using small-town libraries in dying coal towns to  seek local history, do online research and find office space for writing while he was on the road.    Appalachian coal towns may not  be faring much better than the ones in Romania, but at least they still have libraries.