> 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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