Celebrating circulation records

A single grim subject occupies my mind; but my unimportant opinions about events in Iraq would amount to no more than another teardrop in the bucket, or rather sea of troubles on which our lumbering ship of state is now tossed. I'm facing writing deadlines, and I have been sticking to Firestone Library, where I continue to be amazed at what one can find in books. I have in mind in particular vignettes in the history of reading.

Among the provisions of one of the various "Patriot Acts" designed by Mr. Ashcroft and his friends to allow us all to sleep sounder in our beds each night is one allowing the Feds to snoop on our library records. The theory behind the legislation is pretty simple. Say there's this brownish guy with facial hair and a weird name with Zs or U-less Qs or something, and he comes into the local branch library and wants to check out "Ten Tips from Top Terrorists" or renew "Home-Made Bombs for Fun and Profit." Well, he'll have lots of time to read at Camp X-Ray.

Any college professor knows the legislation is based on two highly questionable assumptions: viz (1) people actually read the books they check out and (2) they actually understand what they read. Still, it's another professorial consideration that keeps me from howling with the ACLU on this one. Think how much poorer English literary history would be if a succession of Gradgrinds had not had access to the library cards signed by the twenty-three-year-old James Joyce while he was teaching at the Berlitz School in Trieste in 1905. Knowing what great writers were reading in their youth, though apparently less important than knowing what they were drinking and with whom they were sleeping, is still of significance for literary biographers.

The realization that lots of people do not want it known what books they have been reading suggests to me that I have been missing out on some pretty remarkable books. Actually I am very grateful for the cards still to be found in older volumes in Firestone, because the only way I can any longer be sure I've read a book is if I see my name on the circulation card.

You now check out and return books without leaving any telltale sign of your literacy; but until about 1960 Firestone patrons actually had to sign little cards in the back of the book. Hence the Orange Key Guide rumors, not once verified by my own experience, that many library books still bear the autograph of Albert Einstein. On the other hand I have been able to collect a number of other eminences. These include Christian Gauss, Adlai Stevenson, '22, and the famous art historian from the Institute, Irwin Panofsky. Signatures of my own great teacher, the genius medievalist D.W. Robertson, are a dime a dozen.

By the 1960s, when I started using the library, the system had changed to one that involved a heavy plastic ID card on which the patron's name was embossed in raised letter which, when squashed in a machine that looked something like an old lemon juicer, left a mechanical imprint of your name on the library card. Even these printed cards can have a certain pleasure to them. I recently consulted a book that, as it turned out, had been circulated but once in its long Princeton career, in 1973, to "J C FAWTIER STONE." There are still many people here who knew that formidable and winning woman, Jeanne Stone, daughter of the eminent French medievalist Robert Fawtier, wife of superstar Princeton historian Lawrence Stone, powerful intellect and accomplished author in her own right. Here was an unexpected and happy reminder of vanished friends, one of the great couples of Princeton, and both dead within the last five years.

....Finding famous signatures is tricky, though, like a game of "Pick Up Sticks" that gets harder and harder as it goes along; once an "old" book gets checked out, it enters the Computer World and loses its cards. This means than most of the books that anybody would actually ever read have lost theirs.

But there are new frontiers of the marginal. I went to look up something in the Variorum Spenser yesterday. The stack copy was once owned by a former member of my department, Hamilton Cottier, also '22. On the back of the flyleaf of the first volume, inked notations in small elegant columns record the publication dates and purchase prices of the ten volumes. The total cost of the great monument of erudition was $61.40! It's a good thing books were cheap. Pasted down on the same flyleaf is a letter, dated June 17, 1930, from the Dean of the College at Northwestern appointing Cottier to his first job, at an annual salary of $2800? Ashcroft can have my reading-list, but I don't want him ferreting out the scandal of my salary!