A Day at the Library

Sitting at his favorite place in the Widener reading room, near the windows and directly off the center aisle, Gridley often wondered why Nathan Pusey had chosen Massachusett Hall for his office and left the real seat of power to any chance comer. He turned to the left and surveyed the Yard; all of Harvard lay below his throne. A bearded old man hurrying to finish his last book sat across from a closely twined couple not even pretending an interest in the copy of Burckhardt open before them. Through the main arch he could just make out the automatic lady in the Widener Room reciting her litany of shipwreck and bookish treasure to yet another tourist. She stood secure as any beadsman, knowing that no Philistine administrator would ever violate her walls or blot out her sun. The Widener deed of gift would forbid such ignoble intrusions upon the Room, and even the new addition could fill the court only as high as her window sills.

But the real springs of power lay to the left, through the humming catalogue, past the circulation desk processing 300,000 volumes a year, and into the stacks. Gridley entered at Level Four, quickly bypassed American Literature and the Men's Room, with its outhouse graffiti, to plunge into the fields of light, the PZ section, home of pulp fiction and an unrivalled assortment of detective novels which came from the library of an egyptologist named George A. Reisner '89. Reisner died during the war and left the University crates of material, crates that held no hieroglyphs. Instead, his bounty was the arcana of Rex Stout, Dashiell Hammett and the rest, all conveniently graded by the good professor. The Clue of the Bricklayer's Aunt got a B, but David Hume's Goodbye to Life received a straight A on the inside cover.

Picking out an old Michael Innes, Gridley took the elevator down to Level D, struggled with the vault-like door and issued into the moderate gloom that enshrouds Sections HunL, Oc and Ind (Hungarian Literature, Oceania and Indic Studies). Gridley chuckled sardonically as he walked through the country's largest Hindi collection, musing that Harvard didn't teach the language. Finally he reached his destination, Ang and F. Ang means Angling and F stands for Daniel B. Fearing, a former mayor of Newport who donated, in 1915, several thousand titles having to do with fish and fishing. "What a gold mine," thought Gridley, "everything is here. The sixteenth-century Ius Fluviaticum bound luxuriously in vellum with metal clasps and that Mexican masterwork, Piscicultura in Agua Dulce. To say nothing of Tricks That Take Fish and all fifteen editions of British Rural Sports." On a lower shelf he noticed two copies of Fish I Have Known by Arthur H. Beavan, author of Birds I Have Known and Animals I Have Known. Pulling out the first edition, Gridley looked with warmth at the Fearing bookplate, which showed a green trout leaping from a green stream. The motto read: "Wish Us the Wind South," and underneath were the words: "This book is not to be sold or exchanged."

"Good old Fearing," laughed Gridley. "His best trick was the lead bookends. They looked exactly like real books, complete with library numbers and titles like Mainly Bracing and Etwas Wundervoll. I'll never forget when I was a stackboy and they sent me to get End of the Line, F.102.9. I couldn't believe it was that heavy.

"The reference librarian still laughs at me even now that I quit the job, but I'll bet he wouldn't be smiling if he knew I'd duplicated his keys." Gridley strode confidently up to Level B and out the back entrance to the stacks. A sinister smile played over his features as he hurried down the tiled hallway toward the main elevator. Checking to see that no one watched him, he slipped into a dark alcove and fitted a key into what looked like a closet door. "Section X," be exclaimed as he plunged into the fabled Inferno that holds pornography and anything else the library suspects will be stolen or mutilated. Frenetically, Gridley re-examined some of his old favorites: Robinson's Sexual Truths, Curiosa of the Flagellants, and The Hindu Art of Love. Finally, he came to rest on the thirty volume set, Eastern Love, a Collection of Amorous Tales from the Orient.

Two hours later, Gridley slipped away, exhausted. He sat on a window sill debating with himself the best way to enter the Houghton stacks. There was the easy way, the tunnel from Widener, or he might go in by the front door and use the staff entrance in the Houghton first basement, that unobtrusive little door that leads to so much. "The tunnel's safer," he decided and searched for another key. Soon he had traversed an empty tunnel and let himself into Houghton's impregnable, immaculate catacombs. All was silence except for the air-conditioning system maintaining a constant temperature of 70 and a relative humidity of 50. Light glistened from the linoleum, polished that morning as it was every morning. Gridley noticed an empty group of shelves where the so-called "Chinese laundry" collection had been kept before its transfer to the Yenching--bale after bale of Tibetan prayer sheets gathered in silk wrappers with colored silk tabs. But Gridley was hunting for the Anastasia papers, the documents pertaining to a glamorous heir to the throne of the Czars. Passing through the Theater section with its two million playbills, he unlocked another door and found himself in the Lincoln room. Death masks glared from the shelves and an ax well-worn from rail-splitting lay on a table in the center along with a blackthorn walking stick. "This is even better than the Thomas Wolfe manuscripts," he thought, recalling with some amusement the tons of paper which had arrived from Wolfe's executors. "Tons and tons of scrawly paper and three beer glasses," he muttered, walking next door to the science fiction room. He peered in at a lurid wall of magazines and paper novels. Some new stuff had come in, garishly decorated with girls in scanty space suits under attack by lusting Venusian monsters. He glanced once more to make sure the complete set of Weird Tales Magazine hadn't disappeared and then stepped nonchalantly into the elevator and rode it to the second floor above ground.

Paying his respects to the Amy Lowell Keats Room and the Richardson collection, he drew away the crimson sash and opened the glass door of the Emily Dickinson Room furnished with Miss Dickinson's own furniture and piano, her library, her family portraits, and a sampler she sewed herself. In an august bureau against the far wall, Gridley located the autograph manuscripts of her poems, left just where they had been found at her death. Now, of course, the pages were enclosed in leather folders, but each folder also contained the original strings that Emily Dickinson used to tie up the poems.

Gridley looked at his watch. 4:30. There was just time to look at the new exhibit downstairs. He descended a magisterial, winding staircase and turned right into a large display salon whose bookshelves held nothing but incunabula, volumes from the cradle of printing between Gutenberg and 1500. The Houghton staff had just prepared an "Exhibit of Catalogues of Imaginary Books." In one case Gridley observed the "greatest of literary hoaxes," a brochure for the sale of the library of the Comte de Fortsas, 1840. Across the room was a "bibliography of the works of Sylvester Marmaduke (celebrated Aleutian Islands poet) (Vancouver, 1943?)." Next to this, Gridley noticed, was a mimeographed supplement to the British Museum's Bulletin of Printed Books. It mentioned the acquisition of the unique volume published in 1455, Asellus Hinnibundus (Whinnying Ass). Asellus begins with the words: "In hoc libro non continentur quae expectares, candide lector" (You won't find what you expect in this book, shining reader) and ends: "Nuces tibi" (Nuts to you). The fake bulletin also states that "until further notice all Scottish books printed before 1750 will be issued only to Scottish readers."

Gridley looked up and realized that his time was almost up. He walked across the hall and asked the attendant to buzz him into the reading room. The old man pushed a button, electric locks disengaged, and Gridley walked on through, past the austere scholars and the academic secretaries clicking away at their silent typewriters. He waited for another buzz and then took the bridge to Widener, re-entering the stacks at Level 1, where he took the elevator up beyond Level 6, beyond the Church History section and Migne's Patrologia Latina with its 200-odd volumes, finally exiting by special key on the third floor of Widener. Turning toward the map room, that library without a department, he moved on by the Archives to the main stairway.

At last he regained the Main Reading Room and his favorite seat. But, to Gridley's utter amazement, his books were gone. In their place was a crisp envelope from the Head Librarian. He opened it quickly and read: "Because of your flagrant disregard for circulation time limits and overdue book fines, the Library Committee has been compelled to suspend your reader's privileges in the coming term." For the second time that day Gridley smiled sardonically. He was thinking about the new tunnel he had found, the one that led to squash court 9 in Lowell House. He was still smiling when he loaded the 1516 New Testament of Erasmus with Holbein capitals into a Coop laundry bag and trudged back to his room.