Dismantling the library - if only for the delight it would have given me to get rid of them

Wuthering Expectations is not moving, despite its recent transformation from a blog to a newsletter, but the Amateur Reader, the actual human, meaning me, is.  From the prairie to the sea, perhaps.  What will happen to my books?  I am moving every one of them, but maybe not more than once.

In other words, I am deaccessioning.  Lightening the load.  Getting rid of a lot of books.  My current mindset is ruthless and brutal.

Lately I have been reading exclusively from my shelves, evaluating, often saying farewell.  Enjoy your new home, book.

Joseph Epstein wrote, in 2000 or so, about his own purge of his library, from around 2,000 books to 400, in “Books Won’t Furnish a Room” (collected in In a Cardboard Belt!, 2007).  The essay is really a way to play with his collection one last time, to wander around the shelves.  A last chance for nostalgia, or jokes.  “I wish I had owned some of the French literary theorists, if only for the delight it would have given me to get rid of them,” (102).  He keeps all of his Henry James, Proust, Santayana, and Beerbohm.  “I would love to tell you what the deeper meaning of my love for them is, but I cannot because I gave away my six volumes of the Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud” (105).

Epstein was influenced by his experience as an estate executor for sociologist Edward Shils, whose Hyde Park apartment, including the spare bathroom, was packed with 15,000 books.  “I hated to see [the collection] broken up, for it was in itself a work of art,” and Shils had “put them to the highest use” (98).  But they seemed “inert, cumbersome, almost grotesque” without Shils.  I was reminded of Epstein’s essay when James Wood published “Shelf Life” in the New Yorker in 2011, the account of his difficult struggle with his father-in-law’s mass of books.  He vowed not to leave the problem of his own library to anyone else.  I wonder how that has gone.  Patrick Kurp has a nice post about some similar essays as well as Epstein’s, on the job of what Kurp calls “you, the free-lance librarian.”  That is how it feels now, certainly.

My principles of deaccession, all of which are subsets of “know thyself”:

1.  Travellin’ light.  My “giant personal library” fantasy has been gradually replaced by a “divides his time” fantasy.  You know, in author bios, the writer who “divides his time between Paris, Florence, and Schenectady,” like a Henry James character?  Aren’t those writers the worst?  I want to be one of them, except in cheaper cities.  Store the remaining books in Schenectady, I guess.

2.  My library is more of a working library than most people’s, although less than yours, of course, but after fifteen years of internet literary criticism I have a good idea of which books do the work and which are never opened.  The slackers can go.

3.  Time has passed.  I pulled Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1987) off the shelves recently.  I had last read it 28 years ago, when the 1993 movie came out.  It’s almost a unique book in its energetic, meaningful use of pop music, and I was thrilled to read it again.  Love it. Out the door!  Farewell, book!  If I want to read it again 28 years from now – when I will be 79 years old – I bet I can find a copy, perhaps in a

4.  Library.  Epstein is not sure he wants to live in a library.  I agree – I want to live next to a library.  The Lyon Public Library was my home away from home away from home when I was in France.  I have become comfortable with the idea that professional librarians can manage and store my books for me.  Austen, Dickens, Faulkner, Nabokov, Morrison – you know, I tell myself, good libraries have those.  And a good public university library has more than that.

If I were moving away from libraries, I would be tempted to bring every single dang book with me.  But I would not because of

5. The internet.  It has changed everything.  I would never have guessed, in the 1990s, how easy it would become to search for images.  So most of my art books, gone.  Ordinary paperbacks of public domain books, gone.  In 28 years, the American public domain will have reached 1953.  Before I went to France, I trained myself to read books online, and it did take some training.  But now I have books on my computer, books on my phone, books everywhere.

In an ironic, aggravating footnote, I was not able to find my copy of Joseph Epstein’s In a Cardboard Belt!, which must be in the house somewhere, but is not with all of Epstein’s other books, presumably because I had it out for something else I wrote who knows when.  But the book is, yes, available on the internet, and I used the scanned copy to find the quotations I wanted.

I’m keeping my Epstein books.  Anything I bought in France.  Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s Fantastic Four, yes, but Kirby and Lee’s Thor has already been sent to my nephews.  Library of America Henry James stays, but those beat up old Penguins, I don’t know.  The battered paperback Bleak House I bought for 18 cents (!) in 1990, which I have read twice and my wife has read once, that goes.  Got my money’s worth there.  I just pulled my old Penguin Balzacs, since I’m not allowed to read those in English anymore.  Maybe all of the translated French should go.  No, the Richard Howard Racines and Molières, those I’ll keep.

Maybe I’ll write updates like this all summer long.  I doubt this is so interesting, but it is sure taking up a lot of my mental energy.  “Sometimes reading supplies the most cunning of all means of avoiding thought,” Epstein worries (107).  Too true.  And now much of my thought boils down to “Yes or no?”  Mostly, no, no, no.

The St. Louis Mercantile Library, which tourists should visit

The problem with praising a library is that there is little point for anyone not able to actually check out a book.  If I induced a single St. Louis resident to visit the library, I’m happy.  But for anyone else, even someone visiting St. Louis – so what?  The Boston Public Library has the Sargent murals.  What does the St. Louis Public Library have to attract the peripatetic Cardinals fan, in town for a game?  Not much, plus the main building is now closed for two years while they polish it and clean out the giant coal bin.*

So visit the Arch and the Anheuser-Busch brewery and the amusing and original Citygarden sculpture park. And the misnamed City Museum, which has to be seen to be believed.  And, if it’s not too far out of your way, one library, a different one.

The St. Louis Mercantile Library, founded in 1846, is, I am told, the oldest library west of the Mississippi.  It was founded by merchants, not for them, as a cultural space for working men.  Over time, it accumulated a collection of stuff, odd stuff, as well as books.  A sign for the Mercantile Library can still be seen downtown, the original building victim of an abandoned renovation.  The library itself and every object in it has moved to the edge of the city, to the campus of the University of Missouri – St. Louis, where it now has a space within the university library.

The website for the Mercantile Library emphasizes its importance as an archive, which is true, but no reason for most of us to visit.  I can find no mention of the peculiar old artifacts.  Napoleon’s death mask, for example.  Or the marble statue of Beatrice Cenci.  Or the bust of Robert Burns, perched atop a custom-made wooden pillar carved with scenes from Burns’ life and poems.  Over here is a giant steamship wheel, over there is an original Audubon Birds of America, and farther on is someone’s model train collection, filling eight cases.  A chest full of movable type, the Library’s original doors and chairs, a cabinet full of editions of Tom Sawyer.  About the only thing you won’t find is a college student!  Ha ha ha!

The art collection is significant and attractive as well.  I borrowed a favorite of mine, a Joseph Vorst, and put it off to the side.  Missouri scenes, city scenes, labor scenes, railroad scenes. Maps, too, heaps of maps.  I now wish I had taken some photos.

The Mercantile Library is worth visiting.  The traveler crossing St. Louis on I-44 or I-270 will have to go out of her way by twenty minutes or so.  The driver on I-70 goes right by it.  Why doesn’t he stop?  What’s his hurry?

* The coal bin is so large that it is being converted into a theater.

The magnificent St. Louis Public Library

How to praise a library?  It has a lot of books!  The buildings are nice!  The above painting of the central branch of the St. Louis Public Library can be found here.  Everything in it is an imitation - a ceiling copied from Michelangelo, a floor from Florence, a dome from Venice.  Also, a bronze bust of Mark Twain, funded, partly, by Mussolini. 

The books were the point, of course, and the books are what sustained me.  And the CDs, another story.  And the toys, and the Xbox games – well, I never checked any of those out, but still, the things libraries do today.  Kids don't know how lucky they are.  Where was I?

Books, books.  Because I was teaching during this last year, I had access to almost every university library in Missouri, including Washington University, which was a twenty minute walk from home.  I could, within a few days, get anything I wanted.  The startling fact, though, was that, aside from university press monographs, the St. Louis Public Library was as likely to have what I wanted.  The three Oxford World’s Classics translations of Sergei Aksakov, a hundred year old illustrated translation of the poems of Théophile Gautier, forty-seven titles by Margaret Oliphant, twenty-four by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.  Not that I ever read any of those, and I’ll bet half are in Norwegian, but now I feel like I should have read some.  The Chicago Public Library has, as far as I can tell, not a single book of Bjørnson’s.  What?  Nobel Prize for Literature, 1903!

A few minutes at the keyboard, and a few days’ wait, and any of these books – say a 19th century Blackwood edition of Oliphant’s The Perpetual Curate - would be placed in my hands.  Why do they keep all of this stuff?  How wonderful that they do.  I once asked a librarian – it was because of the Gautier book – if I should really be allowed to leave with it.  She said that she had wondered the same thing with books that she had used.  I guess they’re not really that valuable.  They seem valuable.

The central branch of the library, a 1912 beauty that has fallen on hard times, is now closed for a massive renovation.  My photograph of the closed stacks is on the left.  The one problem with the library was that much of the collection was inaccessible, so mastery of the irritating online catalog was essential.  The renovation will make all of this accessible.  Note the glass floors!  Note the pneumatic tube system (left and down)!  I never requested a book merely to see the pneumatic tubes operate, I swear.  All of this will be torn out, a shame but a necessity. 

St. Louis is a city in which many public institutions – how to say this politely – do not function as they should.  The library is an exception, an enormous exception.  It’s one of the treasures of the city. 

Now, back to weeding.