Reveries of libraries, the twenty-fourth : THE SPACE BETWEEN

A shelfie of St Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons
taken by Amanda Witt

Book trolleys are necessarily sturdy, given the solid give and take they handle every day. Wheel it over here. Charles Dickens somewhere, perhaps ‘Bleak House’, describes shelves of leatherbound books, the titles of which are receding into the binding. Whether this is from overuse or no use, or perhaps the weather, is something we sometimes ask as we reshelve them after circulation. Though not for long, unless the spine is falling off, the call number’s lost its grip, all in need of repair. Pamphlets are the imps of the shelver, hiding between ranks of the normal, disappearing completely into their allotted spot, forgotten were it not for a shelf read. They slip out of sight between tall buildings. Unlike the classics and required reading. Great armfuls of monographs in number order from fingers to elbow go back into place at the edge of ledges. Call numbers tease with their decimal points, sometimes going round the bend. Old authors push out new ones in a reversal of the concept of succession. Progress is levelled and elevated by terraces, when shelving.  The new looks remarkably like the old when published at the same time; the old is fresh as the morning and the new awaits its time in the yellowing sun. Shelving strategies vary. One strategy is to arrange them all on the trolley, for a leisurely stroll in shelf order once all the books are sorted. Thus church fathers and their heretics are managed together in one clean sweep. Another strategy is whatever a handspan can stand. Gaps that were created by a borrower may still be there, with luck, a ready answer to the conundrums of the call number.  “There are those who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge; that is Curiosity,” writes Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. “There are those who seek knowledge to be known by others; that is Vanity. There are those who seek knowledge in order to serve; that is Love.” Reading is not on the to-do list of shelvers. Our reading, mischievously at times, but also on a needs-to-know basis, is an education in what borrowers are reading. The person who cannot get enough Thomas Merton, the person captive to the Inquisition, the mystery reader working her way through Buddhist scriptures, the devotee of existentialism, all these and dozens more inform the shelver’s sense of the life of the collection, and influence buying. Syncopated strolling is the shelver’s habit, two steps forward, three steps back. Continued down aisle two, round the corner and up the top, slowed by mis-shelved sequences needing resequencing, the appearance of cram or total bookwall. There is no use trying to push books into place, it will only make it worse. Continued from aisle 11, where the collapse of the Roman Empire is almost a weekly occurrence, propped back up by a legion of returns. Encyclopedias stick together like a committee that knows its own mind, any volume soon back in line where it belongs. Some shelvers cannot reach the top (height) or the lower (injury or age) shelf, haphazardly returning monographs that are their reach, even theirs alone. One falls from the armful and a bookmark slips out. The art requires less haste. A rhythm, personal and calm, turns the process into a meditation and in particular a meditation on the collection and why we read at all, on what is of interest, why this and not that, of what drives our needs. Picking up the fallen book the shelver notices all the people who must have made this book: author and publisher, editor and proofreader, compositor and typesetter, designer and binder, packer and seller, back in the middle of a war in 1941. There cannot be very many copies left in the world. It even looks like 1941, smells like it, thin wartime paper stock. It slides quietly into its accustomed peace. No time for reading. Buoyed by the letting go of books, shelvers are as well buoyed by the successive decades that keep their employment going. Well may we say, so much to read, so little time, as though we had all the time in the world to read through our libraries. The library assumes we know what we’re looking at. Emphasis on assumes. “No one who can read,” says Charles Dickens in ‘Our Mutual Friend’, “ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.” Then too, the shelver glances occasionally at a book that has probably not gone far for some time, a gem if only there were the right reader, an unmoved mover. But we must continue. It is a dream of stops and starts, passing thoughts and surprise encounters with olden words. The space between circulation and breathing, between rare books and rare moments, between the phone and the loan. Squared corners of the imagined world are taken and tipped back into their fine resting place. Never final resting place, for who knows where a book may end that is constantly on the move. Even the unmoved mover could become seriously overdue, given half a chance. All of this dizzying regimentation, this decimalised regulation, this dance of reading rotation, devised to hold in the impossible surge of the world as we know it, our thousand theses that would contribute explanations of what is yet beyond the aims we ever set ourselves anyway. The fortunate shelver glances at the arrival point, the shelf with the sermons of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, only to notice the space left behind when the returned volume was selected, some weeks previously. So it goes, the necessary job of keeping the like-minded together, putting the treasure where it may be found, while also enabling the gracious moment of serendipity.