Ending Books

Read Sheila Liming's piece in the Yale Review, "The End of Books," while waiting for my next call to start. The opening of the essay is a construction loader at her university pouring thousands of books into a dumpster in June 2018. The culling had begun with a spreadsheet that has titles flagged for removal because of low checkout rates.

The spreadsheet detail is the thing that stays with me because it is the arbiter of a book's fate based on the metric of how many times it left the building and came back. I have books I have loved deeply but not opened in years. By the logic of the spreadsheet, it is deadweight and should be consigned to a dumpster. It would break my heart to do that because the value of those books is beyond what meets the eye.

Liming and her colleagues wrote defenses to the librarians doing the culling, shared the spreadsheet with students, who checked out condemned titles to boost their numbers in a last effort to save them. They agreed to take books themselves, to house them in offices and classrooms, except that state university property cannot be transferred to private individuals even when the institution is about to throw it in a dumpster. A rule invented to prevent theft, applied to the act of saving what is being discarded.

Liming is writing about university libraries, but the same logic at work elsewhere in our world. The podcast over the long-form essay. The AI summary over the source. Engagement is the only way to prove value and this one I particularly dislike because so many wonderful things in life resist engagement or even be harmed from it. She ends by saying that preserving the library won't rescue reading on its own, but it's where she'd begin. I think she is right, though I am not sure the library she means is only the building.