The Lost Art of Reading

by Gerald Stanley Lee

And yet all the time down underneath I know perfectly well that there is no real reason why I should find fault with him. The only thing that seems to be the matter with him is that he keeps right on, every time I see him, making me try to.

I have had occasion to notice that, as a general rule, when I find myself finding fault with a man in this fashion—this vague, eager fashion—the gist of it is that I merely want him to be some one else. But in this case—well, he is some one else. He is almost anybody else. He might be a head salesman in a department store, or a hotel clerk, or a train dispatcher, or a broker, or a treasurer of something. There are thousands of things he might be—ought to be—except our librarian. He has an odd, displaced look behind the great desk. He looks as if he had gotten in by mistake and was trying to make the most of it. He has a business-like, worldly-minded, foreign air about him—a kind of off-hand, pert, familiar way with books. He does not know how to bend over—like a librarian—and when one comes on him in an alcove, the way one ought to come on a librarian, with a great folio on his knees, he is—well, there are those who think, that have seen it, that he is positively comic. I followed him around only the other day for fifteen or twenty minutes, from one alcove to another, and watched him taking down books. He does not even know how to take down a book. He takes all the books down alike—the same pleasant, dapper, capable manner, the same peek and clap for all of them. He always seems to have the same indefatigable unconsciousness about him, going up and down his long aisles, no more idea of what he is about or of what the books are about; everything about him seems disconnected with a library. I find I cannot get myself to notice him as a librarian or comrade, or book-mind. He does not seem to have noticed himself in this capacity—exactly. So far as I can get at his mind at all, he seems to have decided that his mind (any librarian’s mind) is a kind of pneumatic-tube, or carrier system—apparently—for shoving immortals at people. Any higher or more thorough use for a mind, such as being a kind of spirit of the books for people, making a kind of spiritual connection with them down underneath, does not seem to have occurred to him.

Time was when librarians really had something to do with books. They looked it. One could almost tell a librarian on the street—tell him at sight, if he had been one long enough. One could feel a library in a man somehow. It struck in. Librarians were allowed to be persons. It was expected of them. They have not always been what so many of them are now—mere couplings, conveniences, connecting-rods, literary-beltings. They were identified—wrought in with books. They could not be unmixed. They ate books; and, like the little green caterpillars that eat green grass, the colour showed through. A sort of general brown, faded colour, a little undusted around the edges, was the proper colour for librarians.

It is true that people did not expect librarians to look quite human—at least on the outside, sometimes, and doubtless the whole matter was carried too far. But it does seem to me it is some comfort (if one has to have a librarian in a library) to have one that goes with the books—same colour, tone, feeling, spirit, and everything—the kind of librarian that slips in and out among books without being noticed there, one way or the other, like the overtone in a symphony.

III
et al.

But the trouble with our library is not merely the new librarian, who permeates, penetrates, and ramifies the whole library within and without, percolating efficiency into its farthest and loneliest alcoves. Our new librarian has a corps of assistants. And even if you manage, by slipping around a little, to get over to where a book is, alone, and get settled down with it, there is always some one who is, has been, or will be looking over your shoulder.

I dare say it’s a defect of temperament—this having one’s shoulder looked over in libraries. Other people do not seem to be troubled much, and I suppose I ought to admit, while I am about it, that having one’s shoulder looked over in a library does not in the least depend upon any one’s actually looking over it. That is merely a matter of form. It is a little hard to express it. What one feels—at least in our library—is that one is in a kind of side-looking place. One feels a kind of literary detective system going silently on in and out all around one, a polite, absent-minded-looking watchfulness.

Now I am not for one moment flattering myself that I can make my fault-finding with our librarian’s assistants amount to much—fill out a blank with it.

No one can feel more strongly than I do my failure to put my finger on the letter of our librarian’s faults. I cannot even tell the difference between the faults and the virtues of our librarian’s assistants. Either by doing the right thing with the wrong spirit, or the wrong thing with the right spirit they do their faults and virtues all up together. Their indefatigable unobtrusiveness, their kindly, faithful service I both dread and appreciate. I have tried my utmost to notice and emphasise every day the pleasant things about them, but I always get tangled up. I have started out to think with approval, for instance, of the hush,—the hush that clothes them as a garment,—but it has all ended in my merely wondering where they got it and what they thought they were doing with it. One would think that a hush—a hush of almost any kind—could hardly help—but I have said enough. I do not want to seem censorious, but if ever there was a visible, unctuous, tangible, actual thick silence, a silence that can be proved, if ever there was a silence that stood up and flourished and swung its hat, that silence is in our library. The way our librarian’s assistants go tiptoeing and reverberating around the room—well—it’s one of those things that follow a man always, follow his inmost being all his life. It gets in with the books—after a few years or so. One can feel the tiptoeing going on in a book—one of our library books—when one gets home with it. It is the spirit of the place. Everything that comes out of it is followed and tiptoed around by our librarian’s assistants’ silence. They are followed about by it themselves. The thick little blonde one, with the high yellow hair, lives in our ward. One feels a kind of hush rimming her around, when one meets her on the street.

Now I do not wish to claim that librarians’ assistants can possibly be blamed, in so many words, either for this, or for any of the other things that seem to make them (in our library, at least) more prominent than the books. Everything in a library seems to depend upon something in it that cannot be put into words. It seems to be a kind of spirit. If the spirit is the wrong spirit, not all the librarians in the world, not even the books themselves can do anything about it.