Bookworm's Paradise
Alice Garner
I loved the Baillieu Library so much I wrote a really bad poem about it in second year. I found it in my diary. I can only bring myself to quote the last few lines, which imagined the consequences of the sun going out (?!), one being that reading in libraries would no longer be possible:
no more backs of hands
on pink cheeks, keeping
the face from dropping onto the text.
A lot of sleeping went on in the library (and not just by me), especially in its warmer zones. In first year I discovered that the library had its own ecosystem, of hot and cold, quiet and noisy, light and dark regions and sub-regions — not to mention unusual varieties of the human species. I learnt to choose different spots to read in, depending on the season and the subject.
The Baillieu building was not nearly as old or impressive as the State Library, but it had its own secrets and charms. In the dim basement aisles, where you turned on the light by pulling on a string, I found the hardbound academic journals, with their volume upon volume of deliciously obscure and heavily footnoted articles, on any subject you could dream of. I figured out how to use the indexes, which were only in hard copy then, and happily lost whole days sitting cross-legged before piles of heavy tomes, crossreferencing between subject keywords, author names and article abstracts, and scribbling numbers on torn slips of paper. When I wanted a break, I went up to the first floor toilets and read the juicy graffiti on the walls, where students, safe in anonymity, laid bare their deepest fears and secrets and asked the questions they would never dare ask of their friends or parents or teachers. And then back down to a safer world of historiography, bibliography, philology.
At this time the library was in the painful process of adapting to new technologies, which superseded each other more quickly than cataloguing staff could handle. When looking for a book, you started with the card catalogue, flicking through alphabetically ordered cardboard rectangles threaded onto horizontal metal rods in long wooden boxes. If the title wasn’t there, you moved onto microfiche, which seems incredibly old-fashioned now — perhaps even more so than the card catalogue, which could be updated much more easily. I hated the ugly green typeface on squares of black plastic, which you clamped between plates of glass, and moved around clumsily with a knob. It was counter-intuitive, like trying to reverse a trailer for the first time. A few years later, the first computer catalogues rendered everything else obsolete — though the cards are still there, for old times’ sake, or perhaps in case of an electricity failure (and if that happens, we’ll only be able to find books from before 1980). Now that you can find journal articles online, and print them off in seconds without having to move from the computer, you can generate stacks of reading material without any real selection procedure operating. Back then, you made a careful choice of the most essential articles based on how many back-breaking volumes you could heave in one go to the photocopy room — usually only two or three.
Libraries are like onions, or sliced tree trunks showing years of growth. The outer ring holds up-to-date reference books and CDROMs, electronic journals, and required course reading in the Reserve section. But there is a whole world of thinking and writing and researching and drawing and painting and composing that sits, waiting to be rediscovered, in the Research and Periodical and Music and Microfilm sections. In the twenty-first century city, where every empty block of land is being developed into apartments, and where shops with ancient stock, like Steinbergs’ drapery or dust-choked Job Warehouse, close down when their ageing owners lose heart or die, the library is one of the only places left that offers the possibility of stumbling across something old and forgotten. Only op shops compete. And hard rubbish day.
Libraries can induce a kind of paralysis: a sense of horror at everything one doesn’t know, at the amount of stuff people have written about — and slaved over — that gets forgotten. On the other hand, if you acknowledge that one human can never embrace the whole lot, but think of it as a secret forest through which you can weave your own little path, it becomes less frightening — and it can even be seductive.
Edited extract from The Student Chronicles, by Alice Garner, Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Publishing, 2006, pp. 44–50.