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.
No comments:
Post a Comment