One day last May, after a few hours of note-taking in Brooks Hall (nobody challenged me when I came and went, but I took nothing, for the books I was looking at weren’t discards), I went back to the New Main building, negotiated its catwalks and stairways, and entered a staff-only door on the lower level. (The door was slightly ajar, foiling its magnetically actuated lock.) Under several Plexiglas ceiling bubbles that held surveillance cameras, I hurried through the hallways until I came to what I was looking for — the all-important sorting room of the library of the future. In the old library, returned books slid down a chute into the sorting room in plastic bins: a simple, durable system. In the new library, a motorized conveyor belt pulls the books down the chute one at a time, and when they jam, they get hurt. It’s as if you sent your clothes down to the luggage handlers in the airport without putting them in a suitcase. Hundreds of books have been torn and injured this way. Someone has taped up a postcard of a pained-looking Ezra Pound right over the opening out of which the books slide; the staff must poke the chute with a broom handle to keep the flow going.
The old sorting room could hold tens of thousands of books on its shelves; the new sorting room has no installed shelving. It was supposed to work on the “Federal Express model”: everything would absolutely, positively get reshelved overnight. But because the plan depended on the creation of a new, lower-paid class of employee called a “shelver,” which the union has opposed, and because there is no money at the moment anyway, books can take more than a month to get put back where they belong. (In staff areas, book trucks line the halls; at least forty thousand books currently await reshelving.) Hard-pressed book handlers until recently took the books that poured off the conveyor belt and flung them, as if they were dealing cards, into one of several mounds on the floor. I looked in and saw a sign taped to the wall that said “800s,” which in the Dewey system means books of literature: under it was an enormous spreading berm of books. Then I was gently and politely reprimanded by a security guard for being in a restricted area.
The sorting room is like the entire new building, in that it has built into it a contempt for, or at least an indifference to, literary culture and its requirements. As one staff member told me: “De facto, this is not a good book building. There’s not enough room for books, there’s not enough staff to get the books back on the shelves, there’s not enough staff to check the books out — however it happened, it’s an absolute disaster.”
I first told this story in the auditorium of the New Main Library last May. (I spoke at the invitation of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Librarians’ Guild.) Since then the library has responded to my at-times intemperate criticisms, and to the resultant coverage in the press, in a variety of ways. In the August issue of Library Journal, Dowlin is quoted as saying, “The building is doing exactly what I wanted it to do.” At a Library Commission meeting in July, Kathy Page, chief of the Main, said that the library had withdrawn more than a hundred thousand books from the entire system — the branches as well as the Main — in the period from January 1995 to June 1996, but she contended that the weeding was standard procedure. (Indeed, she said much weeding has yet to be done.) Librarians had been asked to do a thorough weed before the move, she said, but only so that the movers wouldn’t have to carry things no one wanted. She said that all last-copy discards were now reviewed by a Main Library subject specialist, and complied with what she called “the bible”—the library’s Collection Development Plan, which assigns a rank from 0 (not collected) through 6 (comprehensive) to every area of the library’s holdings. (For example, subjects like life sciences, general philosophy, and Italian literature are assigned a Level 2, “introductory material” rating, which may explain why I found so many old books about birds and ethics in the Discard Room, and why old Italian novels were in discard piles last month.)
A few days after I gave the speech, a member of the board of the Library Foundation told me I was a pawn of the employees’ union; later, when the San Francisco press picked up on the story, I became a sort of weirdo cultist, a “ringleader” who, in the company of a band of converts, was launching an attack on the library for personal glory. (“With some Rogaine and a few weeks’ more growth of his salt-and-pepper beard, the 39-year-old Baker might pass for Rasputin in tweed,” wrote a journalist for SF Weekly. “Soft-spoken, tall, and intense, Baker seems to hold an almost mystical sway over a ragtag collection of feisty librarians and disgruntled activists.”) In July, a letter signed by representatives of a number of the fund-raising affinity groups went out to every member of the library staff. The letter accused one librarian, Toba Singer — who had written an op-ed piece for the Examiner critical of the library’s corporate sponsorship — of homophobia and racism, and it accused me of anti-Semitism, because I had used what were, the letter charged, Holocaust references by mentioning the so-called Deselection Chamber and by calling the book purge a “hate crime directed at the past.” I and the audience that “cheered [me] on” were, according to the letter, “intellectually dishonest, disrespectful to the library staff, and insulting to all Jewish, gay and lesbian, and other individuals who suffered the actual Holocaust.” Over the next several weeks, this letter began to appear on the desks of newspaper and radio editors.
Late in August, two librarians decided to measure the shelves of the old library in order to get a more accurate number for the oft-disparaged old building’s capacity. Walter Biller (a historian) and I came along, tape measures a-dangle: it was impossible to resist this last chance to tour the old floors. We measured the card catalog, and we read the legend high on the wall to the right of the entrance to the catalog room: HANDLE A BOOK / AS A BEE DOES A / FLOWER / EXTRACT / ITS SWEETS BUT / DO NOT / INJURE IT.
The four of us spent several hours at our work, nervously listening for footsteps, and then we locked up and left. Unfortunately, the librarian in charge of coming up with the spreadsheet didn’t, in her haste, note down one of the crucial numbers for the seven floors of the north stacks and relied instead on a faulty diagram that was taped on the wall; her newsworthily high preliminary numbers were then immediately leaked to a reporter. OLD LIBRARY HELD MORE BOOKS, SAY CRITICS, read the headline of the front-page article in the Examiner; and then, a few days later, FOUR CRITICS OF LIBRARY MUST EAT THEIR WORDS. Mortifying though it was, the episode had the unforeseen effect of prompting Kathy Page to write a constructive memo to all employees, which said, among other things, “The unhappy fact remains that we have less storage capacity in the new building than we had planned for and less than we need.”
I have been able to speak only a few words to Dowlin, Page’s boss, directly. At the end of May, he consented to an interview with me, provided I sent him, three days in advance, a list of questions. I mailed off the list; then, a few days before we were to meet, he (understandably) canceled the appointment, because, in the words of his likable secretary, “we are being sued.” In the Library Journal piece, Dowlin is quoted as saying, “I’m not convinced Mr. Baker understands the people of San Francisco and what they want. There are some people who disagree with what I wanted to do, but they’re about six years too late.” Dowlin told the reporter for SF Weekly that my account of the library’s extreme weeding was “bullshit,” and that my writing was “crap.”