I‘m not impressed by Al Gore’s Internet boasts, because I was surfing the web before the web was invented. In 1979, I enrolled at the University of Chicago, and in lieu of a social life, the university offered us a really great library with open stacks. While students at other schools were wasting their time having fun, I spent my college years wandering among the books, ogling really fulsome bibliographies. It was just like web browsing, except instead of an infinity of pointless websites, I was surfing an infinity of — well, actually, 3 million substantive books.
It is now September 27, 2000, and business has brought me to Princeton University. With a few hours to spare, I have procured a pass to the Fire-stone Library on campus, which has open stacks. So, notebook in hand, I’m inviting you to come along as I emerge from shelf-surfing retirement.
I enter on the ground floor of Fire-stone, with three floors of books above me and three below. It’s always best to go subterranean, because you don’t want to be distracted by windows or fresh air. Down on the A level, I stop at random at some stacks labeled with the Library of Congress call letters HD 9865 through HE 244. There are all sorts of fascinating books here: Developments of Handloom Industry, the Eastman Kodak annual report for 1902, Studies in British Transport History, 1870-1970. Quite by accident, I knock off the shelf a thin volume called The Plain Goods Silk Industry of Paterson, New Jersey written by Herbert S. Swan in 1937. Here’s how it opens:
Many years ago, Paterson’s industrial structure was based mainly upon silk. Then the war came along. Shipyard workers began to buy silk shirts at nine and ten dollars apiece. The price of raw silk went up to fantastic heights. As a result, considerable impetus was given to the development of artificial fibres to take the place of silk.
Put aside the Hemingway pacing of those sentences. One can only ask: Why on earth did shipyard workers during World War I suddenly acquire a taste for extravagant silk shirts? I browse through the rest of the book. I learn about the development of rayon, and about the wage scales for winders, quillers, and warpers. But nowhere is that question answered. That’s the problem with shelf surfing. It leaves you wondering.
Let’s go down a flight. We’re now on B level at a shelf that begins with JA84.USM4. I spot M. E. Bradford’s The Reactionary Imperative. Bradford was a paleocon professor from Texas who was nominated by Ronald Reagan to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, but had his nomination withdrawn after some of his anti-Lincoln writings came to light. Inside this book I find an essay called “Against Lincoln: A Speech At Gettysburg.” It was written after the whole to-do, for Bradford was much aggrieved to see his views distorted in the press. But he didn’t change his mind. Here he describes Lincoln as “the sad man from Illinois,” who is “duplicitous” and opportunistic, whose reputation was “transformed into something very different by the bullet of John Wilkes Booth.” There’s a lot of tilting at Lincoln piety here, quite bracing and quite distorted. But it was a little greedy of Bradford to want to be the brave iconoclast and at the same time get the big federal job. As I put the book back in its space, I notice that next to it somebody has misfiled a book called My First Time: Gay Men Describe Their First Same-Sex Experience. Bookshelves make strange bedfellows.
Down another flight, and I’m in front of shelves of books by and about Winston Churchill. Just above, though, a title catches my eye — Peace in Our Time, by Chamberlain. But it’s not Neville Chamberlain. It’s Austen Chamberlain, and it was published in 1928. It’s a collection of speeches delivered when Austen was British secretary of state for foreign affairs.
After some poking around the shelf, I find Austen’s memoir, published in 1939. He was born in 1863 to Joseph and Harriet Chamberlain. His mother died during his birth. His father later married Harriet’s cousin, who bore him four children, one of whom was Neville. She in turn died in childbirth, and her final child was buried with her in her coffin. “There is not a fibre in my whole being which has not been torn asunder,” Joseph wrote just after her death. “You can judge how desolate and solitary I feel, and how dark and difficult my future life seems to me.”
Nonetheless, Joseph went on to a sparkling parliamentary career, even serving with his sons. They were one of the glorious political families, apparently — at least until Neville borrowed his half-brother’s phrase, “peace in our time,” and made the blunder that became the family’s chief legacy.
You get the trivial and the tragic, shelf-surfing. And unlike on the Internet, you don’t meet techno-weenies who think they invented a whole new world.
DAVID BROOKS
