Here is what two librarians who had been part of a weeding team told me one Sunday at a coffee shop:
LIBRARIAN A: They said, “Get rid of as much as possible.” And they said, “Anything that doesn’t look like we should have it in the New Main Library, if it doesn’t look good, if it needs to be repaired. .” And then there was the question whether when you sent things to be repaired, was it actually being repaired, or were they tossing it?
LIBRARIAN B: There seemed to be a reluctance to send things to Repair because they [in Repair] were “overwhelmed.”
LIBRARIAN A: People were beginning to think, “Wait a second, these are just being tossed.”
LIBRARIAN B: Actually, we don’t know what happened, because the librarians weeded their areas but a senior librarian had the final word. We don’t know what she did.
LIBRARIAN A: She started putting everything on the same truck, and I said, “This is not to be thrown away, it’s not to be discarded.” She said, “No, just put it on.”
There are now no copies of Garden Friends and Foes on the shelves of the San Francisco Public Library. There are no duplicates of it at the University of California at Berkeley, or at Davis, Stanford, or UCLA. There are copies of a number of Headstrom’s other books in SFPL’s collection — he has written about spiders, lizards, birds, insects, and even a Complete Field Guide to Nests in the United States—but this sole copy of his work on weeds was weeded. Why? Its binding was slightly torn, and the weeders, as they are called, have at times been urged to weed quickly and in quantity, basing their decisions in large part on looks.
I hasten to say that many of the books in the Discard Room which I have personally checked do have duplicates on the shelves, or at least are represented by later editions of the same work. The 1983 Arco Civil Service Exam Book for Sanitation Workers, of which the library has twenty copies — I found it in the Discard Room two months ago under ten books about ethics and a mint Clarendon Press edition of Leibniz’s Logical Papers—makes sense to discard. (Question 67 on page 90 of Sanitation Workers asks you to choose the last phrase of the following jumbled sentence: “the book / the top shelf / of the bookcase / wanted was on / which she.” The answer is “of the bookcase”: “The book which she wanted was on the top shelf of the bookcase.” Not in the back of a DPW truck.) But here are some of the other books I left with, after one unannounced visit, which either have no record online at all, or say “Ask librarian for holdings information,” a phrase that is often, especially in the case of older circulating books, code for “I am a last copy, and I have been purged.” There is Crumbling Idols, by Hamlin Garland; a lovely little Knickerbocker Press book with color plates called The Way to Study Birds, from 1917; a 1907 edition of Rivers of North America, by Israel Russell, with a complete chemical analysis of a water sample taken from a hydrant in Los Angeles on September 8, 1878, along with similar results for other samples from the Hudson, the Cumberland Reservoir, the Mohawk River, and the Rio Grande; and Handbook for the Woman Driver, by Charlotte Montgomery, which devotes a whole chapter to “Clothes and Beauty En Route.” (“Dark glasses are a must.”) Studies of Abnormal Behavior in the Rat, by Norman Maier, was another last copy. (On page 19: “An electrified grill was interposed between the jumping platform and the canvas net. Now the rat was punished not only for staying on the platform, but also for jumping from the platform. As a control the same grill was used in the case of the female rat. This technique failed to produce neurotic attacks in either animal.” Give it time.)
Although the weeding continues, the good news is that since this past January no more books have been dumped. On January 29, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Andrew Ross and Phillip Matier published a front-page story headlined SF LIBRARY TOSSING THOUSANDS OF BOOKS and a picture of the Discard Room. “The ongoing crime was so apparent by then,” one staff member told me. “The blood was seeping under the door.” Since then, no book, to my knowledge, has been thrown away. (True, many thousands of recent unbound periodicals to which the library subscribes — serials with titles like Welding Design & Fabrication, Nutrition Reviews, Journal of Tribology, The Canadian Journal of Soil Science, Car and Driver, and Bee Culture—were secretly tossed into recycling bins this past February, March, and April; but no books were.) Instead, nonprofit and community groups are invited to tour a large room in the basement of the Old Main; the last public giveaway got rid of five thousand books. They have gone to other libraries, here and abroad, and to schools, prisons, and villages in Madagascar and Armenia. Every Friday this month the general public will have a chance to take whatever the charities don’t want. Deetje Boler, of the Gray Panthers, left this summer with about twenty boxes of books: works on labor history and birds; books by McPhee, Malamud, Herb Caen, and a first-edition Elizabeth Bishop. (They are holding them in trust, waiting for the library to come to its senses.) At least we can be thankful that the newer rejects will continue their lives somewhere, and not make up a semi-sentient layer in the ultimate closed stack — the sanitary landfill.
Dowlin, who is a respected figure among library managers, has announced that he is running for the presidency of the American Library Association next year. He narrowly lost his first race for the ALA presidency, in 1987: “TRUCKIN’ FOR THE FUTURE: Ken Dowlin for ALA President,” his campaign stickers said. In his role as ALA luminary, Dowlin (who spent six years in the Marine Corps before a part-time job driving a bookmobile diverted his interest toward library administration) sometimes quotes business theorists like Everett M. Rogers, whom he has called “my guru for change.” One of Rogers’s books lists four ways to transform an organization — by destroying it, by restructuring it, by changing the individuals within it, and by introducing new technology. In a 1992 ALA talk (part of a forum entitled “Electronic Reference in the 21st Century: Innovation Through People, Money, and Imagination”), after citing Rogers’s four ways, Dowlin went on to offer a fifth: “I can tell you what happens when you get an earthquake that puts five hundred thousand books on the floor. It’s a perfect opportunity to rearrange them.”