The Library Quarterly

If you are planning to purge your bookshelves, you shouldn’t place the stack at the door to take to the garage and then your car, and then the Friends of the Library Sale later. No, if you are really determined, place them in a dark garbage sack, hustle them to your husband’s car, and don’t look back, because they will call to you like a puppy who’s been left in the culvert by a farm, in hopes someone else will want him.

I looked at this old friend (in the 1960s I was a Slavic cataloger at the University of Illinois and at Ohio State University) lying on the floor this morning and made the mistake of leafing through it. What could be less useful than what librarians were saying about their collections in 1965--collections that specifically dealt with Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Islamic countries, and Russia (the former Soviet Union)? Today’s whiz kids librarians with their Twitter, air guitar and hip-hop programs and digital doo-dahs wouldn’t pause for a moment over a controversy on whether the Library of Congress should be spending time producing cards(!) in the original language or should speed things up with transliteration and English and catch up 20 years later to the incredible disgorging of the Soviet presses when improved technology permitted. Little did we understand in 1965 what “improved technology,” and a very young Russian immigrant who would invent Google, would do to our profession.

No, I just couldn’t do it. I carefully wiped off the mildew (it’s in pristine condition otherwise--none of the pages have loosened the way today’s paperbacks do after one reading), and it will go back on the shelf with all the other unread titles like The Federalist and SoDoku for Dummies. However, I did discard some of my old library school text books like AACR cataloging rules. Not too useful these days, in fact, a bit like reading recipes that call for dollops, swigs and “moderate oven.”