Calamity 2009

Accident Forces Major Shift for Library

One afternoon this summer as I sat at my computer, I heard off behind me and to my left what sounded like a ruffle as though some animal was rustling through wads of crumpled newsprint. I turned in time to see the wave of the library’s metal shelves in the major stack area topple one another from the outside wall to the inside door of the furnace room. For those moments, the tipping shelves seemed to domino in slow motion. But suddenly it was all over: about 8,000 volumes lay among the layered and twisted cascade.

Pat Sween and I built our house in the summer of 1992. We were still working and our two children had finished college in 1985 and 1988 and were at work away from home. Our daughter had married the year before. Though I had years left to work, I was looking for a building that would furnish library and office space after I quit employment and focused on reading and writing. Instead, we decided on a new home with space for all those things we wanted.

After some looking, we found a house plan that lent itself to our wishes. If we moved some of the components around and built a lower floor, it would suit just fine. We wanted a lot that sloped allowing a walkout from the lower level, and we found one on a steep, oak-filled corner, purchased when it was full of snow. When construction began, we quickly learned it did not slope exactly as envisioned, but some more dollars for excavation took care of the defects in our landscape choice.

Pat Sween spent her summer supervising the contractor and his crew, and by August 1, amazingly, we moved in even as the carpeting was been fixed in place.
I had done enough study, teaching, and some library administration to know what was ideal in library design and what was workable.

Besides two bedrooms with a bathroom between them on the south end of the lower level, two large areas comprise the library. The larger area at the foot of the stairs is 32 feet deep by 21 feet across. This is the office area housing clippings files and periodicals on the east behind storage cupboards that back up drawers and filing cabinets around the computer station that is opposite the work desk. A work table at the foot of the stairs doubles as a conference table and a couch and chairs welcome more casual conversation. Book stacks and display areas run along the longer parallel walls. The stack area is smaller at 23 feet deep by 11 feet wide. The opening between them, 3½ feet by 9 ½ feet, is the space between the under stairs closet and the furnace room wall. Additional shelves spill over into this space.

My previous library setup had used a number of metal shelves that migrated into the new place to accommodate storage in the furnace room. I found new inexpensive metal shelves at Pamida and after the initial purchase bought 25 more sets. When set up in six-shelf sections of four-section ranges, shelved on both sides, the library realized 672 linear feet of shelving. Though books are various widths, because many are paperback, mine average ten volumes per foot. The metal shelves would accommodate about 6,700 titles.

By July 2000, when I quit employment, these shelves were crammed and I needed more shelving. Thanks to a post-employment freelance contract, I used most of the income to purchase a second batch, this time more deluxe. From scouting around, I hit upon a sale at Unpainted Furniture and with my contract earnings bought 20 sturdy oak units of six shelves each, about half again as tall as the metal ones. These went against the outside walls of my space freeing the metal shelves to be realigned and moved closer together.

That center section of metal shelves carried all the language and literature – criticism, anthologies, and individual works – as well as most of U.S. history, the states, and the Americas, physical and cultural geography, social science, political science, and law. Law, mostly U.S. constitution and Bill of Rights matters is one of the smallest areas in the library.

By 2007, the shelves were full again despite stopgaps with shelves I built or bought for such items as general encyclopedias, language dictionaries, and the scores of picture books that helped amuse the younger grandchildren when they visited. I tried to slow my book buying by concentrating on the lists of the most essential books that I lacked and buying fewer on the discovery basis. Often I would see a book that illuminated one of my interests or contributed to a future project, and if the price was right, I would buy it. I had only minor success in resisting my own imagined future.

However, by resolving upon a steady state library, I began to routinely identify books to discard. Easy stuff went first – books I had read and would neither read nor consult again, dated books of unlikely reference value, areas no longer of former interest such as management and entrepreneurship. All told about 500 volumes fell to this axe.

With the collapse of most of the metal shelves, another reality hit. The tumbled stacks struck me as an archeological site collapsed by an earthquake so that I must excavate it to restore its former semblance of sense and order. I found only a handful of books actually damaged – four torn covers and one broken spine. However, most of sections had been skewed in some way so that fifteen shelves were warped beyond straightening and about twenty supporting rods could not be bent back into shape. Worse, the major damage was to the coupling pieces that held upper and lower rods together as one straight post.

My excavation took most of four weeks. Only seven sections could be used at full height. Though restoration required all sections to be taken apart and tightened in reassembly, the full height shelves stood up best against walls, placed necessarily against them in the direction they leaned. The rest went into half-height sections in ranges only nineteen inches apart to carry the remaining literary works of individual authors and anonymous titles.

With seven less stable sections against walls, confined to one-sided shelving, and the forgone top shelf to maintain alignment besides the loss of fifteen unusable shelves, no room remained for an estimated 1500 books. Such a number put new pressure on further rigorous withdrawals.

The calamity disheartened me, but realism beckoned and required me to slog at it in as unflinching a manner as could be mustered. Of necessity, my priorities came up for review. Then a bright spot emerged. Our oldest grandson about to enter his junior year in high school and a great reader said he wanted to build up his library and would be glad for anything I could give him from the discards. What he said made me think of the two other older grandchildren, and I began to cull for books matching the reading interests of the three at nine, thirteen, and sixteen years.

This time, I gave up on what I determined as more marginal works particularly in science fiction, foreign authors I would never get to, and less literary works. While I retained almost all of the U.S. titles, as well as those for Greece and Rome, I cut off many biographies and areas of specificity while retaining the more general histories. I became merciless in areas of interior design, home furnishing, and less attentive to specific technologies. I cut a whole section of biographies of actors and actresses, though film remains one of my favored entertainments, and decided I could live without a whole section of past yearbooks and almanacs, retaining only the most recent editions of current titles.

The process of de-accessioning titles is a cumbersome one, and most of the dumped books sleep in boxes to get them out of the way for later handling. Hundreds of titles still important to me remain, but I currently lack the shelves to accommodate them. These books went into sacks and boxes, stored in a closet and furnace room, much as I once had to keep part of my library off the shelf before we moved to this house. A byproduct of the space crunch is that I needed to shuffle backfiles of periodicals to handle shifted book locations. I am using a less than adequate shelf, a survivor from my attempts at carpentry in junior high. I had to recycle about five linear feet of past New Yorker magazines, clipping out and filing some of the more impressive stories and articles. Something had to go, and since I no longer subscribe, the axe fell there.

In all likelihood, we will be moving in a year or two for reasons of advancing age and the need to focus and manage our lives. In that regard, much more priority sifting has yet to follow as I narrow what is most important, useful, and targeted to my actual accomplishments.

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I welcome all comments to blog articles. For personal comments to me, send to rogdesk@charter.net.

© Copyright 2009 by Roger Sween.