“How are all the books today?” the grey-suited divisional manager asked as he strolled up to the pod of desks occupied by the library team. Working on the 7th floor of an open plan office building, we were used to unannounced visitors dropping by – and besides, he was our boss’s boss’s boss. So we tried to look enthused by his banal question.
Except Richard.
“Actually I don’t spend much time with books,” he replied, with a hint of ‘Are you f-ing kidding me’ in his voice. “We do most of our research online these days.”
It was only half true. The information we dug out in response to members’ requests came from a range of sources, including books. But some librarians – like Richard – have a touchy relationship with books. Keen to distance themselves from the cardigan-wearing, book carrying, “ssh”-ing librarians of old, they like to give the impression that books are – well, a bit passé. The occasional librarian has even gone so far as to get rid of all the books and replace them with online databases, just to prove a point.
The problem is, a lot of library users still like books – the ones with covers and paper pages and stuff. “Weed in the dead of night” was the title of a column an ex-colleague of mine wrote for The Spinoff news site a few years ago. She related how weeding, or the systematic removal of books from a library collection, frequently raised the ire of library users, leading to petitions, protests or even dumpster diving in an attempt to rescue the books. The advice around weeding provided by the academic literature she had consulted could be boiled down to: Weed in the dead of night, bury the bodies, and hide the books under a pile of leaves.
But Richard was no scaredy-cat. An ex-truck driver in the mines of Western Australia, his straight-talking approach was a refreshing change in a sector that sometimes felt like it was bursting at the seams with political correctness. His attitude to weeding? “Let ‘em burn.” The extra recycling bins would be ordered and filled with old books before you could say, “Excuse me, is that a 1920s encyclopedia in your hands?” And it never took long before some well-meaning pest from another department started sniffing around.
“Are you really throwing out all of those books?” they would ask accusingly.
“Why don’t you hold a book sale?” someone suggested.
“Yes, why don’t we,” I wanted to say. “”Let’s invite all of our library users from New Zealand and overseas to fly to Wellington just for a second-hand book sale. We’ll hire some trestle tables and cover them with decrepit, out-of-date books that no-one ever borrows. I’m sure they’ll be snapped up!”
Others, though, viewed the library’s book collection as a relic from another time. One day, a visiting executive from Sydney (by then, the organisation had merged with its Aussie equivalent to become a trans-Tasman conglomerate) gazed wide-eyed at the book shelves, in much the same way as I imagined she would contemplate the surface of Mars.
“So you mean people actually order these books, and wait for them to arrive?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Weird." And she stalked off.
All of this is very interesting (well, I hope it is), but also a roundabout way of getting to where this blog post began. And it’s this: Over the Christmas break, I counted up the number of books I own and realized it came to 150, almost a third of which I have never read. So I have made a commitment to myself (and to Barnard) that I’m not allowed to buy any more books until I have read them all. And once I have done that, it might be time for some weeding of my own.
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