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∞ Break
It’s been wonderfully quiet around campus this week because of spring break. Today was quieter than it’s been all week, save for the sound of the Campanile bells and the occasional roar of ROTC cadets in training exercises. Days like this you can actually walk down the campus, along the long path that leads from the Campanile west to the Grinnell wooded area, without getting run over by bicyclists or having to steer clear of students walking three or four abreast.
Tomorrow I’ll have a day off because of Caesar Chavez Day, and I’m also taking Monday off. The student maelstrom will be back in full force on Tuesday when I return to work. ★
∞ Overheard
On the bus last night:
An out-of-state tourist who was returning to the eastern end of Contra Costa County — staying with relatives, presumably — expressing a slightly distasteful surprise in remembering the turkey and pear sandwich that he’d been prevailed upon to consume while visiting the Financial District in San Francisco. ★
∞ Friends of the Berkeley Public Library Bookstore
It’s tucked away in a little pedestrian alleyway west of Telegraph between Channing and Durant. It’s basically a hole in the wall, staffed by elderly volunteers, most of whom are way more devoted to shelving and tending the collection than they are to the people who happen to wander in to browse and buy their stock. If you’re in the way when they’re shelving, you’ll get a brisk “Excuse me!”
But they have some surprisingly good stuff, for a hole in the wall. I’ve picked up quite a few good buys there recently. And most have been not more than $2 apiece.
One good find was Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914. Another was The People’s Almanac, a book which my aunt in Houston sent me for my tenth birthday and which turned me into a lifelong fan of subversive writing — it was probably the most influential book I read as a kid. (I have a feeling that my aunt just picked it up and thought it was a plain old thicker-than-usual World Almanac-type book. Little did she know.) ★
∞ Barnes and Noble (or, in Berkeley, Ignoble)
I ran across an article a few weeks back in the Berkeley Daily Planet that delivered the news that the Barnes & Noble on Shattuck and Durant will close its doors for good on May 31. There followed the usual sighs of relief from independent booksellers like Pegasus (across the street from B&N, on the east side of Shattuck) and Moe’s.
I could insert here the Alison Bechdel 1990s used bookstore versus evil chain “Bunns & Noodle” trope, but I see that even Bechdel has some good things to say about B&N nowadays.
The owner of Moe’s was quoted in the Daily Planet as saying, “Moe’s is like a theatre to the mind. It’s clean, bright and lovely, an absolute pleasure to be in.”
Well, sorry to say, but Moe’s isn’t an absoute pleasure to be in. It’s stuffy, cramped, has narrow aisles, and its system of organization is at best idiosyncratic, at worst chaotic. The counter staff seem to be surly when they’re in good moods, hostile when they’re not. If the store’s crowded, which it can frequently be because there are no other large bookstores in the area, it’s no fun at all.
Moe’s has a wealth of fascinating used books, and it’s a fun place to browse, because it’s got four floors of them. But if you’re looking for new books, which would presumably be the main point of competition with a store like B&N, it’s another story.
I really, really don’t like the policy B&N’s counter staff have of having to constantly ask you whether you have a B&N Member card yet. I would agree with Moe’s owner that the fountain in the middle of the Berkeley B&N store was unnecessary.
I’m not a B&N booster, particularly. But I could find good, informative, fascinating tech books there — books on Web design, for instance — and buy them without having to wait for Amazon shipping.
I’m sure that there are good bookstores on Fourth Street that I haven’t explored (though how many of them are independent bookstores?). But if you don’t have a car or bike at the ready, west Berkeley is not a short trip from downtown.
So at the risk of sounding counterrevolutionary, I will miss B&N not being in downtown Berkeley. And I still miss Cody’s, which closed last July (Cody’s still has a store on Fourth and Virginia, but the store on Telegraph and Haste was its flagship). It did have an excitingly heterodox collection of new books, and its absence left a huge hole in downtown Berkeley that has yet to be filled. ★
∞ Anthro Library (and a digression)
Toured the Anthropology Library here at UC Berkeley this morning. I’d been before (mostly to poke around the stacks and to pick up the only available campus copy of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory), but not as part of a formal tour group.
I like this library a lot. I like its cramped stacks and its narrow stairwells and passageways. I like the fact that it has a dumbwaiter. But that’s me speaking as a library user (and an increasingly rare one at that) who has a stubborn love for antiquated libraries and their often byzantine physical setups.
The one time that I had the privilege of visiting (and using for research) the Bodleian Library 20 years ago, I was in absolute awe of its grace, its antiquity, and its fussy fustiness, but in the transformational era of the internet, there are increasingly fewer and fewer library users who are enamored of that set of qualities.
Even the glorious grand Bodleian now has a website, and it also has a mission statement, part of which says that the library will “always aim to develop and maintain an understanding of the needs of its users and potential users and respond to them.” How long that mission statement has been in existence I don’t know (seems like 1995, judging from the webpage), but it’s hard to believe that it was in place when I was using the library and had to read and sign the following declaration, handed to me by a stern porter, just to gain admittance:
I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.
And that was before I’d even filled out all of the other paperwork and made all the proper curtsies that I needed to make in order to handle within authorized eyesight the volumes that I wanted to peruse. An experience not to be missed (in my opinion), but partly because of the exquisite frisson of terror in it, the feeling that I was a common interloper treading on hallowed ground who needed to have my place in the scheme of things severely underlined and bolded.
It was really in some ways akin to that wonderfully terrifying scene from “Citizen Kane” in which Jerry Thompson visits the Thatcher Library and the forbidding crone at the entrance does everything short of asking him for a pound of flesh before she lets him through the crypt door.
Anyway — back to the Anthro Library. The library has 91,000 items in its collection, some of which it’s having to move off-campus to storage because of the campus’s chronic space shortage problem.
The librarian pointed out that this is only one of three formally instantiated anthro libraries in the US — the others being at Harvard and Penn — a fact that surprised me. It’s neat to work on a campus with one of the few operating anthro libraries still around.
Oh, and updating the last post — Pasadena did eventually pass the library tax renewal. Good for them. My hometown did the right thing. ★
∞ Libraries and (cultural) capital
Interesting juxtaposition. Tomorrow, voters in my hometown, Pasadena, California, will be deciding whether to pass a tax to help support the public library system there. (Actually, what they’re voting on is whether to extend a “special tax” that was already approved in 1993 and then extended in 1997.) If the tax extension doesn’t pass, the funding stream provided by the tax will dry up at the end of June 2008.
Meanwhile, in Jackson County, Oregon, it looks like the entire county-wide library system will close next month because federal funding has dried up. (The direct cause is Congress failing to re-authorize an annual subsidy for timber-dependent counties in 41 states under the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000, signed by Bill Clinton in his last months in office.)
Libraries as cultural capital: or, considered more directly, libraries as capital. Will we get to the point, when people no longer consider libraries to be worth their weight in cultural capital, that the only way a public library will be able to stay open anymore will be through the auspices of a federal subsidy? ★