State of the Art

A book came out this week, This Book Is Overdue!, by Marilyn Johnson. The book's complete title goes on, as they all do: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All. It is non-fiction. 

Nearly 50 years ago the East Orange, New Jersey police arrested several people after midnight, in their homes, for possessing overdue library books. The fact that some of people were unable to post bail should have surprised no one. If they couldn't afford to return the books and pay the fines, how were they going to post bond? They spent the night in jail until their arraignment. 

The new book (which is so new it can't yet be overdue) and the news story are linked. As a teenager I remember reading the 1961 news accounts of the East Orange arrests. I myself had overdue library books now and then, but always managed to trudge them back and bump up the 2 cents a day fine for each book. (There is absolutely no truth to any stories that I used to challenge to flip the librarian double or nothing for the fines.) You can find several links to this news story by going online to NYTimes.com and searching for East Orange Overdue Library Books. 

At the Times site, money will be required to read the February and March 1961 stories. This can cost several dollars, and is realistically not a very economical way to satisfy frequent nostalgia urges. Or, you can go to a library that is equipped with digital database access and read them at a computer for free. You can add the expense of paying 20 cents per page if you want to reprint the stories. This is now what I do. 

Ms. Johnson traces this evolution of library services. She even shares her own retrieval story that certainly is public proof of her propensity to read A LOT and remember what she's read when she describes finding the passage in a book (fiction) that contains a female marine biologist who has sex with a dolphin, that puts her among the other people in her world who suffer from information sickness. (Waaaaaay too much research can apparently do this to you.) 

Ms. Johnson's book has 12 chapters that fairly easily bring you up to a few minutes ago. Reading is not going away, but where the words are held is changing. And access to those words is changing too. Some of this I like, and some of this I hate. But to paraphrase from Nick the Greek, a famous gambler whose 1966 obituary I was also reunited with on my latest digital pull, the "read" is the thing. 

http://onofframp.blogspot.com/