> read more of the 19th century regional NY literature in Washington than I
> ever got to see in NY State. (Despite my also having access as a county
> resident to the Cornell libraries.)
Ken, I had exactly the opposite experience, and it changed my life. As a
high school kid in Ithaca, my very first "job" in life was working on
Saturdays as a "Book Mover" at the Cornell Library. The crew of "Book
Movers" was a team of three kids employed to make the collection flow like
an amoeba. Then the 9th largest library in the world, the collection had
more books than could fit on the shelves. The Collections Management Plan
was that a certain number of books would always be out on loan, so the
number of shelves was adequate to stack all the books currently inside the
library. However, the loan patterns were always shifting. If the stacked
collection could be made to ooze this way and that, all was well, meaning
storable and findable.
The Main Library was built in cruciform shape, all eight stories connected
by cast iron spiral stairways. Arriving for work Saturday morning, we
would find a note left by the Collections Manager saying, "Move the middle
three rows of West 7 to the first three rows of South 2, then move the last
two rows of North 3 to space on the middle rows of West 7." We would
gather as many books as would fit between our outstretched hands and our
chins and waddle up and down from floor to floor in that elevatorless
historic building. Along the way, if one was blessed with curiosity, and
because we were on our own all day since the Collections Manager worked
Monday to Friday, books would be opened and delighted in. Because no one
would tell us what was in there, we always struggled to find ways to get
into the internally famous and very secret "Locked Press", a small open room
created on a corner with its stacks of shelves surrounded by a antique
chain-link style fence, complete with giant padlock. However, the rest of
the world was there at our fingertips every Saturday we climbed and
descended those endless stairs. I recall opening books that had not been
checked out in over 100 years, reading my first treatises on modern physics,
discovering the great library worker's secret of where the pornography was
stacked, seeing original publications with illustrations by Louis Agassiz
Fuertes, etc, etc, etc. That was really when I discovered the world was
bigger than Ithaca, but also that much of the world was contained within
Ithaca. Occasionally, we would be sent to other buildings on campus to
move books in the Law Library, Ag Library, Physics Library, etc., expanding
ever further the contact with live books by dead writers. My nose will
never cease to recognize that special smell of book dust.
cp in bc
(once a book mover, always a book mover)
--
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