Lost In The Stacks

1969  BSU Library 

When I was at university I was fortunate enough to land a job with the University of the dubious title of Work Study. I was in school in the 70s and I don't know how work-study is officiated today but in the old days it was a giant CCC program. I don't know if you heard those stories about how during the depression the CCC program was set up to provide a way for men “to earn/work”their daily bread. The famous example comes to mind where one day a group of workers dug a ditch all day long and the next day they filled the ditch up. Work-study was a program which you are found eligible and given a sum of money but had to “work” for the funds. I had to work-study positions at Boise State University the best and most interesting was working as assistant Dean of disability affairs. My direct supervisor was the Dean of men at the University Dean Wilkinson my other work-study position that I had during the summer when school is not in session was working at the Boise State University library. What a great place! Myself along with item now 30 or 40, maybe even more students were all on different levels of work-study. My most pitiful position at the library work-study was sitting just outside the doors to the main library just down from the checkout station. My job is to make sure no library books “walked” out. They actually wanted me to challenge people coming out of the library and go through their backpacks to make sure the volumes were properly checked out what a joke. I was only on this position two hours a day the rest of the day I spent either working behind the counter actually checking books out are fetching books from the reference room and answering the phone. There was always about five of us work-study folk wandering around the checkout area. But things got to slow we were sent up the floors to read stacks. Essentially this was a busy work assignment. Essentially you are being told to “get lost” for a couple of hours. The concept was you were to check out, “read” the spines of each book in the stacks to make sure the books are in proper order as to the Dewey decimal markings on the back of the books. It's hard to say how many man hours were spent/are spent reading the stacks checking things out.

I kind of liked being banished to the stacks. This is where I found the oversized books! Usually when one thinks of oversized books they are thinking of coffee table books, beautiful compilations of images sandwiched between book covers with a little bit of text/sometimes a lot of text but usually beautiful images from everything of Zulu tribes Of Africa, everything , biology to geology as giant oversized beautifully imaged volumes. These lives are usually too big for the library shelves and often laid their side. In the arts section there are huge oversized books, prints of woodcuts and other agent images from the Middle Ages to the present day of age. Books like Dante's Inferno , The Illustrations of Machiavelli, Even Grays Anatomy(Though technically not an oversize book or an ancient volume, you gotta love grays anatomy for all of its artwork).I was always fascinated to see the copyright dates of like 1850 and such I guess they were not old enough or explicit enough to warrant their being head and quarantined in Special Collections. What a great way to spend a hot summer afternoon than being lost in the air-conditioned stacks of university library and being paid for it.

I haven't spent too much time trying to figure out the symbolically laden images of oversize books in my dream but there is something there that have not been able to quite contained in this writing. It's the whole gestalt of the dream and I am sure the meeting is deep and wonderful I've just not been able to figure it out so it's back to the pillow in a few hours for some more research and oversized books and library dreams.