The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  MELVYL will retrieve all the subject headings in this helpful list that have the word “censorship” in them, because that is what it mechanically does, but it will not give you any of the others, since their access relies on the perceived relationship between two categorical concepts rather than on rote text strings. As a result, once this subject catalog is thrown out, Milton’s Areopagitica, a work of brilliance and occasional syntactic impenetrability protesting the 1643 act of Parliament that required the seizure of “scandalous, unlicensed, and unwarrantable” books and pamphlets—a work, surely, of some small importance to the history of political censorship-will, because MELVYL lists it under “Liberty of the Press” and “Freedom of the Press” instead of under “Censorship,” not come to the attention of a library-school student, or any student, interested in writing a paper on the topic.

  Similarly, the “See also” card that Virginia Pratt wrote for “Children’s Literature” lists sixteen sensible cross-references, including pointers to “Fairy Tales,” “Storytelling,” “Biblio-therapy,” and “Juvenile Literature”; MELVYL, on the other hand, offers an unmanageable and indiscriminate list of 745 subject headings, none of which is “Fairy Tales” or “Storytelling”—though MELVYL will obligingly refresh your screen with another disorderly list of 306 subject headings for “Fairy Tales” if you think to ask it to. Ms. Pratt’s card catalog is good, it is smart, it knows what we need to know—it wants to help us be better librarians. Before we junk it, forcing students to depend instead on subject headings bought in bulk from pooled databases that have been edited not by minds but by iterative software routines, perhaps we should read a little of Areopagitica, since the cards were kind enough to refer us there:

  We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of publick men, how we spill that season’d life of man preserv’d and stor’d up in Books; since we see a kinde of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdome, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kinde of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elementall life, but strikes at that ethereall and fift essence, the breath of reason it selfe, slaies an immortality rather than a life.

  It is not just crankish and extreme to say that a “kinde of massacre” is going on in libraries right now. There is the exuberant recycling of the card catalogs themselves; and then there is the additional random loss of thousands of books as a result of clerical errors committed in disassembling each card catalog, sorting and boxing and labeling its cards, and converting them en masse to machine-readable form—a kind of incidental book burning that is without flames or crowds and, strangest of all, without motive. If a great research library, in the process of converting two million cards, loses track of one tenth of 1 percent of them, say, severing our access to two thousand books that offend nobody, we can only shake our heads in astonished perplexity. “A few things”—i.e., cards—“that weren’t converted got dumped, but, you know, that’s the nature of life,” Judith Brugger, of Cornell, said to me; and every cataloger and technical-services person I asked admitted that there are now books in their library that, owing to inevitable slipups of one sort or another, aren’t in the online catalog that is supposed to help you find them. Or there is an online record, but the book isn’t on the shelf where the computer says it is. Barbara Strauss, formerly of OCLC, told me that the flaws in online catalogs have created a whole new class of in-house dislocation specialists: people who, like the editors of corrupt codices or of early editions of Shakespeare, are able to divine from the existing computer record what sort of text-entry mistake might have been made, and hence where they should begin to look in the stacks for those ghost books that they know they own but just can’t find.

  The current situation is not without a few hopeful signs. Cornell’s Judith Brugger was nearly ready, I felt when I talked to her, to recognize why her own university’s card catalog—whose brutal pollarding proceeds apace—deserves to be spared. Ms. Brugger has degrees in Russian and English as well as in library science, is capable of a passing reference to Derrida, and is full of ideas about how to modify the Anglo-American cataloging rules so that librarians can venture forth and catalog the Internet, which needs it. Twice, she startled me by using the words “art form” in reference to card catalogs, something that nobody else had done. And she mentioned, as an example, the Library of Congress catalog, so “brown and beautiful and round” that it could “bring tears to your eyes.” She spoke reverently of the tiny catalog at the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome, which is “quaint and perfectly specific and completely comprehensive.” She has even kept some handwritten cards as souvenirs of an earlier job. And yet, amazingly, of her own library’s cards she said simply, “They have to be burned.” Cornell possesses what is, in her estimation, “the Velveteen Rabbit of card catalogs.” It has mismatched cabinets. It has broken drawers. It is incorrect.

  Mightn’t it, I asked, develop a hint of saving quaintness over the next fifty years? Mightn’t there be ways that future historians could extract unexpected insights about life and thought and prevailing mental taxonomies by analyzing how Cornell once classified books, and how it revised its classifications over time? “We don’t see any research value in archaic card practice,” Ms. Brugger told me. “User studies are the thing now, not particularly strategies for recording data.” (A few days later, she called to be sure I understood that she was speaking on her own behalf, and not on behalf of Cornell, which, it seems, has no official policy vis-à-vis its card catalog—although it’s hard to see how a dumpster can be construed as a value-neutral storage site.)

  But when Ms. Brugger said that user studies were the thing now, I thought I heard her waver: Woopsie, she seemed to be thinking, maybe user studies won’t always be the thing? Maybe paper database strategies will be very hot in twenty-five years? What I took to be a truly hopeful sign, though, was Ms. Brugger’s unexpected metaphor: Cornell’s card catalog equals Velveteen Rabbit. That beat-up, brown-and-white spotted, sawdust-stuffed hero of Margery Williams’s book for children is a sympathetic figure, who becomes more precious and indispensable to the Boy who owns him the more his fur wears away and his tail comes unsewn and his boot-button eyes lose their luster. The only way for a possession, a toy, to become “Real,” the Skin Horse explains to the Velveteen Rabbit, is for it to be loved:

  “Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

  When the Boy falls ill with scarlet fever, and the doctor orders the gardener to burn the threadbare, germy Velveteen Rabbit, the Velveteen Rabbit grows sad and sheds a tear on the ground. Out of the tear, a flower grows, and out of the blossom of the flower there appears a magic fairy, who saves the Velveteen Rabbit from being burned by changing him into a real rabbit. This may or may not be a sappy story, but as an allegory of card catalogs it works fairly well. It goes something like this. The User loves his Velveteen Catalog so much that it begins to show signs of wear and tear: broken drawers, mismatched cabinets, out-of-date subject headings, worn cards. The User sickens financially, and he is unable to keep a watchful eye on the Velveteen Catalog. A Doctor of Technical Services orders the Velveteen Catalog burned for the User’s own good, and replaced with a new, more antiseptic reference toy. Awaiting its fate, the Velveteen Catalog lets fall a single drawer, out of which blossoms a savioress, who helps the Velveteen Catalog escape into the stacks by transforming it from a Real catalog into an even Realer art form. A moment’s reflection suggests that Judith Brugger secretly sees herself—unbeknownst even to her—not as the cold-hearted torcher of Cornell’s cards, but as their salvation.

  And it’s a good thing, too, since even non-Cornellians may remember one especially eminent, especially studied user of the Cornell catalog during its glory days: V. Nabokov. He and hi
s fictive friend Timofey Pnin would regularly withdraw the heavy Slavic Literature card trays from the “comprehensive bosom of a card cabinet” back in the forties and fifties, and, on the wings of a hundred typewritten, time-and-space-spanning cross-references, would overleap the irrelevant ocean and return for an hour or two to green, mythic, pre-Revolutionary Russia, inhabited by lost leading lights like “Kostromskoy” and “Zhukovski,” and Aleksandr Pushkin. The very cards that Nabokov turned and pondered while he worked on his translation of Eugene Onegin are, as far as I have been able to determine, still in place in Cornell’s shabby-genteel catalog. The library would be well advised to keep them there.

  But the real reason to protect card catalogs is simply that they hold the irreplaceable intelligence of the librarians who worked on them. Kathryn Luther Henderson, a professor at the library school of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me, “I’ve made catalogs I’ve been very proud of, or had a hand in making them.” Her work, and Virginia Pratt’s work, and the work of all those other people who spent every weekday thinking about the interconnectedness of the books around them, deserves praise and admiration, not clear-cutting. “It’s going to be another generation before we realize that we’ve done this, and what we’ve done,” Professor Henderson said. When I talked to her, she told me that she had some cards that were produced, she thought, in the 1850s for the Harvard catalog. “If somebody came into my office and I weren’t here, they’d probably throw them out,” she said.

  There are other, higher-volume card hoarders, too. One of Maureen Finn’s operators at OCLC worked on the retrospective conversion of chunks of a catalog from the University of Washington. The university didn’t want the cards returned—they wanted OCLC to toss them out on the spot. But this operator (too reticent to consent to an interview with me) didn’t go for that. He had looked carefully at the words on those cards; he had reached an understanding with them. He is, according to Maureen Finn, currently storing portions of the University of Washington’s card catalog in his apartment.

  But the biggest and most heroic hoarder of them all is Tom Johnston. Mr. Johnston is the painter and conceptual artist who, simply because he asked for them, is receiving hundreds of thousands of cards from Harvard’s Widener Library. The real treasures, in a sense, of the now incoherent Widener catalog are or will be his, for he is currently being sent the cards representing, in part, seldom borrowed books that the library is moving to off-site storage. I reached Mr. Johnston in October of 1993, at a number in France, and asked what he plans to do with them all. He was spending several months at a huge, empty château in the Sauternes region; the pieces of the Widener catalog, however, were arriving steadily (much to the dismay of his secretary) at the Department of Art at Western Washington University, where Mr. Johnston teaches. Of course he could, he said, have them forwarded to France, and paper the rooms of the Château Suduiraut with them, or dig a trench a mile long and bury them there, but so much of contemporary art destroys things, and he has decided that he isn’t interested, this time, in destruction for artistic ends. Still, he does want to “get them in front of the public,” somehow. There is a beautiful museum in Bordeaux; he was considering writing a proposal to create a “really nice” conceptual installation with the cards there.

  Exactly what sort of installation he hasn’t figured out yet. (He has the cards, but Harvard, with its finely tuned sense of relative worth, kept the cabinets.) Mr. Johnston’s previous work has often played with bibliographic themes: he made, for example, a series of large, geometric paintings that were hung in pairs. “If you look at them a certain way, you might see a book,” he told me. More recently, he solicited pieces of hair—strands, braids, and dreadlocks—from strangers and acquaintances and taped them onto selected pages of a Gallimard edition of Camus’s L’Etranger. (The book still closes, but not completely.) When one of the “C” boxes arrived from Harvard, just before Johnston left for France, he looked up the cards for Camus. “There’s no rod holding them in. You just pull it out, read it, turn it over, sometimes there’s notes on the back.…” He doesn’t think, however, that he will be taping hair to the Camus cards, because of his personal vow to do no harm. He is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara. (UCSB, incidentally, finished throwing out its main catalog in the summer of (1993.) The Harvard cards come packed in old memos from OCLC’s RETROCON folks announcing softball games, potluck dinners, and paper-airplane contests, and Johnston is saving these crumpled communiqués, too, true antiquarian that he is.

  He is weighing the possibility of inviting international artists and “thinkers” to send him their ideas about what should happen to his sizable collection. Though he is pleased to have it—“Think of all the people who have touched those cards!”—he is concerned about how much of his studio it will eventually occupy, about the hundreds of boxes getting out of order, about whether he’ll go crazy having taken on this responsibility, and about the substantial cost of postage, which he, rather than Harvard, is voluntarily bearing. “I think I owe them money,” he said. He wonders what the reaction will be when the world learns what he now legally owns. Maybe Harvard will suddenly decide that it misses this large, conveniently packaged core sample of its history and will ask for it back. “That would be fine, too,” Mr. Johnston said.

  Maybe, in fact, the riskiest, most thought-provoking piece of conceptual art that anyone could create out of these found materials is the original card catalog, enclosed in its own cabinets, sitting undisturbed somewhere within the library it once described.

  (1994)

  Books as Furniture

  On the cover of a recent mail-order catalog from a place called The Company Store, a man and a woman in white pajamas are posed in the middle of a pillow fight. But there isn’t one feather in the air, because The Company Store, of La Crosse, Wisconsin, sells new pillows—not stale, corrupt, depopulated pillows from some earlier era of human insomnia, but fresh, unashamedly swollen dream-bags corpulent with clean, large-cluster white goose down of a quality that only European white polar geese can grow. The Company Store also sells things like new flannel blankets, new bed wedges, and new baffled-box comforters. They are not in the business of selling beat-up editions of forgotten nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century books.

  But in another way The Company Store is in fact a used-bookseller—or at least the people there are committed book propagandists—since more than twenty old volumes appear in the pages of the catalog. On top of a pile of five folio-folded Wamsutta sheets in Bluette, Black Cherry, Ivory, Sunset, and Onyx, there sits a worn oblong shape that looks to date from about 1880, with a pair of wire-rimmed glasses resting on it—glasses that might be used to read the pages they surmount. Sadly, it isn’t quite possible to make out the title on the book’s spine. But the title in another picture in this catalog—a very small photograph on page 66—does, just barely, cross the threshold of decipherability. The catalog designer has reversed the negative, so that the letters are backward, and the words they spell are partly covered by a finger, but if you look closely you can still identify which book, out of all the books that have ever been published, is lying open facedown on a white-pajamaed thigh—the thigh, it seems, of the woman who was first seen pillow-fighting on the cover. Now she is alone, lost in a fiction-inspired reverie, leaning against a vertical pillow prop with low, stumpy arms that is helping her sit up in bed: one of those readers’ pillows that my wife and her college friends used to call “husbands.” The woman is in the middle of reading The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus, published in 1904 and written by someone named Mary E. Waller.

  I went to a big library and took the elevator to the lowest level of the underground stacks, and found there a copy of The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus identical with the one in the picture. The novel is about an unsophisticated high-altitude apple farmer named Hughie, who lives in the Green Mountains of Vermont, on Mt. Olympus—or Mt. ’Lympus, as the locals call it. A falling log has left Hughie crippl
ed in some serious and vaguely Hemingwayesque way, so Hughie, with marriage now out of the question, teaches himself wood carving, aided from afar by cultured friends. They forward him trunkfuls of books and reproductions of European art: he reads Carlyle and George Sand and Browning and Bret Harte, and he stares attentively at a photograph of Michelangelo’s David; and, little by little, under this mail-order tutelage and influence, Hughie succeeds in elevating himself from limping amateur whittler to Olympian panel artist and wainscoteur. One of his correspondents, Madeline, on her way through northern Italy, sends him a set of carved black-oak bookshelves. She writes him, “I like to imagine all those books you have been gathering and making yours on these special shelves.”

  I’ve been thinking about bookshelves myself lately, and imagining the shelves one might fill by searching through mail-order catalogs for the books they use as props (often searching at extremely close range: part of the delight comes in figuring out, with the aid of tiny clues and keyword computer searches, the identity of a book whose title at first seems totally illegible), and I’ve been thinking, too, about what our mail-order catalogs and our bookshelves, those two affiliated regions of cultural self-display, reveal about the sort of readers we are, or wish we were. We are not, clearly, whatever The Company Store would have us believe, casual bedtime consumers of the novels and travel books of Mary E. Waller. The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus went through at least twenty-three printings after 1904, according to the copyright page—which would have made it a big book for Little, Brown—but my copy was last checked out on January 19, 1948, and was returned on January 20: too promptly, one suspects, to have been read. The model in the white pajamas and I could be the only two people who have read, or pretended to read, this work in several decades. And yet a very small image of it has been delivered by bulk-rate mail to thousands of households. In another picture in the catalog, the pajama woman is asleep, embracing a seventy-two-inch-long body pillow: she is dreaming, needless to say, of disabled mountain men and the bookshelves full of Carlyle that taught them everything they know; The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus waits on her bedside table.