Rhetorical Devices for NYPL Trustees

Dear Dr. Marx and trustees of the New York Public Library,

I was so pleased to learn of your decision to scrap the Central Library Plan, the proposed renovation that would have gutted the main branch of the research library. I was surprised and dismayed to learn, however, that the stacks will be left in place simply as architectural support for the reading rooms, with the books that were removed to storage sites under Bryant Park and across the river in New Jersey remaining where they are, in part because the removal was done so hastily that things are now badly out of order and there is no inventory of what is where and what items have been damaged in transit.

This — "kafkaesque," in the words of David Levering Lewis — preservation of the stacks but not the books was not what any of us who were agitating against the CLP were working towards, and I think I understand the problem. Please allow me to explain the rhetorical devices at play in the slogan "save our stacks" that appear to have created this confusion, in the hopes that a clearer, plainer communication of the issues at stake will lead to a quick resolution and a restoration of the books to the library:

Image via @saveNYPL

1) Synecdoche is a rhetorical device that names an object or an idea with its most salient component.

Example one: On a tour of a pharmaceutical company, the tour guide might point to the laboratory and say "the brains are in here." He would, of course, be referring to the scientists, identifying them by their most salient and relevant part. (There's a slight chance that there might actually also be some disembodied brains in there, depending on what is being studied in a particular laboratory, but that's neither here nor there.)

Example two: A whole coterie of award-winning and world-renowned writers and artists might, in the face of a destructive plan to renovate a world-class research library, might rally around the cry: Save our stacks! In this case, they are using the word stacks as a small component to refer to the entirety of the library, including its books and archives.

2) Metonymy is a rhetorical device that substitutes the name of an idea with an object or concept that is closely associated with or representative of it.

Example one: The phrase 'the pen is mightier than the sword' does not literally suggest that a person could succeed in jousting, fencing or hand-to-hand knife combat by arming himself with a fountain pen, ball-point, gelly roll, or Sharpie. Rather, it uses those concrete items to indicate larger concepts, in this case espousing the belief that ideas and speech will always ultimately win out over violence.

Example two: Imagine a wide range of researchers in the humanities and social sciences, some of whom are affiliated with universities and some of whom are not, using the phrase "Save our stacks!" as a watchword to guard agains the destruction of a world-class research collection that is freely open to all, regardless of whether or not they hold a university appointment. In this case, the word stacks in their slogan refers to all the knowledge, actual and potential, facilitated by the full function of those stacks as housing for the research collection of books and other archival materials.

I hope that this clears up the confusion. There may be some books about this topic over in New Jersey that you can read if you need further clarification. And if you can find them.

Love and literal-mindedness,
Sarah

Editors of the Book*

I had the chance to attend a workshop at the NYPL on the Complutense Polyglot, a multilingual bible composed in early sixteenth-century Spain. The workshop was led by a colleague I know from #medievalTwitter (and it was really nice to finally meet him in person this week) for two classes of students at Yeshiva University and Stern College. In addition to learning about the book, it was also a great opportunity to observe someone who is a very lively teacher and has developed an effective way of teaching history of the book for beginning-level students.

The really poignant thing, a completely unintended** and subtle irony of the talk was that one of the themes was the extent to which major institutional early modern library collections that are still intact even today in Spain are instrumental in being able to reconstruct the editorial process that created the Complutense Polyglot. Scholars are able to make determinations about what was read in conjunction with what else and which editors, based on what is known about their travel and living patterns, would have had access to what kinds of sources; and that says an awful lot. And here was the value of institutional library collections as collections being lauded in a library that is on the verge of dismantling its own.

***

*I briefly thought of entitling this post 'And the Word Was Made Flesh' but ultimately that seemed more kinds of inappropriate than kinds of appropriate.
**I'm reading a strange critique of the internationalist fallacy this week. More on this soonish.

The Poet in New York in New York

I visited the "Poet in New York" exhibition at the New York Public Library this weekend. It contained a variety of his letters, drafts, and personal effects, such as his passport and his Columbia University library card.

A number of his drawings were on display, and the exhibition served to set those into the history of Spanish visual culture.

The Empire Strikes Back. (Er, an update on the NYPL situation.)

While I was away, there was some movement on the NYPL Central Library Plan issue. Not progress, so much, but movement.

First, there was an email to all signatories of the petition against the plan sent out by the president of the library. You can read the text here. No word yet on what came out of the meeting mentioned at the end of the letter. But if Mr. Marx things that the philosophical, principled reasons for opposing the plan are overblown rhetoric, then how about this, plain and simple?: Hands off!

Then there was the curious apologetic work explaining how the new plan is really the only way to save the library. My hackles were raised especially by the suggestion that . It's not that our sensitive, book-fetishising, ivory-tower souls can't bear contact with the hoi polloi, it's that, frankly —and I know this will be an unpopular and unpopulist position — the hoi polloi destroy books and destroy the environment. I don't want to not see them; I don't want them there. I grew up in San Francisco, a city where you cannot go sit in the main branch of the public library all day because there are homeless people sleeping in the stacks and you can't use the bathrooms because they are a well-known and well-used shooting gallery. New York City has dealt much more effectively with drugs and homelessness, but the possibility of populism in a library still makes me cringe at the sense memory of the smell of old books mingled with devastating and devastated human odors. Why risk it?

Zadie Smith wrote a lovely meditation on public libraries that could be used by either side in this particular case. I don't think I have as much faith in humanity as she does; or perhaps social ills in Britain manifest themselves differently. It's also not a perfect analog: The issue with the NYPL isn't a case though of a library being destroyed to redirect the funds to other kinds of projects; it's a case of a unique library being destroyed for the sake of making it common.

And finally there was an insidious, newspeakish attempt to marshal rank-and-file, non-research library patrons in support of the plan on the basis of what was written in the "defenses" of the library. I really hate it when overeducated people in positions of power try to exploit people who don't have the resources (through no fault of their own!) to understand the full dimensions of the issue.

An Open Letter to the New York Times Editorial Board

Dear Sirs,

Digital technology is funny in the unexpected ways that it changes writing and the transmission of information. To sit down to write an open letter in a blog is completely different than sitting down to write a more old-fashioned letter to the editor that one would print out and wait, breathless, to see if it would appear in the paper, or even on the web site. The exaggerated tone of horror that would mark the latter genre — "Dear Sirs, I am appalled and dismayed by your recent editorial!" —  somehow seems inappropriate here. And truly, although they are both epistolary, they are quite different genres.

Such nuance does exist even in minute changes in the way in which information is disseminated — because on the face of it, an emailed letter to the editor and a blog post don't seem all that different. That I notice it as a reader makes me think that as journalists and as denizens of the electronic frontier you must notice it, too, and think about it and consider how to take it into account. And so while I was deeply disappointed in your editorial this week in which you advocated for wise spending in the revamp of the NYPL main branch — thereby completely skimming over your implicit endorsement of the plan —and implied that the "library lovers" who "want nothing to change" are mere stuck-in-the-mud book fetishists, it was the attendant insensitivity to the subtle changes wrought to the substance of text by the means of its delivery that truly surprised me. A researcher approaches her subject very differently if she knows with relative certainty that she can walk into a library and have access to the books that she needs than if she is not sure if or when she can have access to them: She can afford, at an almost subconscious level, to be more deeply invested in her subject matter if she knows she won't have to alter the course of her research or argument for lack of references. And so, likewise, while reading a book inside the library and outside of it are two totally different experiences (and I speak as someone who actually prefers to read in non-library spaces) that is not the difference in dissemination that should be privileged or played up. This is hardly the only reason why the Central Library Plan will be disastrous if implemented and why it is not a mere question of fetishism to want to see it stopped.

But it is a different phrase in the editorial that leads me to address myself to  you rather than (or, in addition to, more to the point) to the governors of the NYPL: Yes, I was disappointed by the substance of your collective opinion. But where I really felt shocked was that as journalists you would unquestioningly accept a bureaucrat's assurance that even though he was making information harder to obtain, that it'll still be okay: "Mr. Marx has said getting off-site books should take about a day." My first reaction to that sentence in the editoral was: Really? You actually believe that? Even if it were true, it means that those of us who need the books that we cannot access anywhere else in the city — and in some cases anywhere else in the world — will not be able to walk into the library and just use its resources. It may not seem it, but that's huge. As scholars we of course plan our research trips in advance, but sometimes we also realize we need things at the last minute, and as our scholarship — as the best scholarship does — takes us in unexpected directions, we don't always end up needing the books we thought we might have. Everyone in the profession has a story about making a major discovery in the last hours of a research trip or library visit.

The heart of the matter, though, is that like assurances you often receive from city officials that they'll get you the information you need in all haste or in its completeness, this one rings hollow. It should take about a day, but what about when it doesn't? What about when it does but the wrong book is inadvertently brought in? Does the scholar have to wait another day? What about the axiom that the more time an object spends in transit, the more likely it is to become lost or damaged? What about the mold that can often become a problem in the less-tended off-site storage facilities? What about when there are more budget cuts and they decide they can only afford to shuttle books back and forth once a week? So while your world and mine operate at different paces, access and immediacy are our shared values. You're writing the first draft of history and I'm writing the second: How is it conscionable to throw me under the bus for a flimsy promise of trendiness and reduplication of services?

I would, as the language of an old-fashioned letter to the editor might have it, urge you to reconsider your position.

Sincerely,
SJP

Bibliophiles, Please Pack Your Knives and Go

Having only relatively recently discovered the full extent of wonder of the world that is the New York Public Library, I was dismayed to learn of a major restructuring that is afoot that would lead to loss of jobs among staff and would take some books offsite and allow others to circulate (and be dropped in puddles and lost in the backs of closets). It would fundamentally change the character of the institution.

A letter in opposition to the plan is being circulated for signatures; and while I generally make a point of not signing petitions (in fact, I never have), I have added my name to this one. The most compelling part of the letter, to my mind, makes a distinction between a democratic cultural institution and one that has been dumbed down:

One of the claims made about the CLP [Central Library Plan] is that it will “democratize” the NYPL, but that seems to be a misunderstanding of what that word means. The NYPL is already among the most democratic institutions of its kind. Anyone can use it; no credentials are needed to gain entry. More space, more computers, a café, and a lending library will not improve an already democratic institution. In fact, the absence of expert staff will diminish the accessibility of the collections to those who aren’t already experienced researchers, narrowing the constituency who can profitably use the library. They will be able to borrow books, to be sure, but they won’t be inducted into the world of archives and collections if staff aren’t there to guide them.

In other words, NYPL is already democratic, elite without being elitist. The possibility of such a distinction is almost totally lost already amidst all the bashing of expertise in the public sphere. It is a question of preserving knowledge and access and also of remembering that the English language allows for shades of gray, for elitists and for elites. Seems like a library would be a great place for all of that.

When we last left our intrepid young assistant professor, she had just discovered that the two books she thought she needed to consult were indeed owned by her friendly, local world-class public library...

... In this installment we learn of the conclusion to her research emergency.

***

Today I spent the day up at the main branch of the New York Public Library. It houses its collection in a gorgeous beaux-arts building, which made it feel rather like I was on some fantastic European research trip rather than a mere two miles from my office:

Upon my arrival, I discovered that there is currently an exhibition on loan from the Bodleian about Percy Bysshe Shelley, an Oxford man who was sent down (which I knew) for promoting atheism (which I didn't know). Since I was there to track down the sole printed edition of a manuscript contained at the Bodley, I took this as a positive omen.

The marble lions guard the outside of the building, and the Lego lions guard the door from the other side.

I set up shop in the sun-drenched Judaica reading room.

It is so sun-drenched, in fact, around 11am, that I had to move away from the windows because I was starting to feel snow-blind because of all the glare from the pages.

But what could be bad about sitting next to this guy for the remainder of the day?

I was thrilled to discover that both the edition of the main text as well as the catalogue that accounts for the second manuscript to which the translator's note is appended contained the full text of that note. The books were both in really bad shape, though, so I wasn't allowed to photocopy the pages I needed. 

I copied out the translator's note by hand (it was less than two pages in a 12mo-sized book). And then I decided that, just in case and in the interest of fiddling with technology, I'd try to photograph the pages of the volume as well. I had managed to leave the battery for my fixed-lens digital camera with macro mode in the charger at home, but I decided I'd try it with my iPhone camera to see how it would work. All the photos in this entry were taken with my iPhone camera, which, photographically speaking isn't very good at all. But it was definitely sufficient for taking very legible photos of pages. They're not publication quality, but without a tripod (prohibited) and studio lighting (impractical) I wouldn't have gotten publication quality images with my camera, either. All things considered, I was really impressed with the results and now have a photographic copy of the whole volume. The edition is a little problematic, so I'm definitely going to have to look at the two manuscripts before my book appears in print, but this is definitely enough to get me through the workshop respectably.

Once I finished my work, I took some time to look at the special exhibitions. Photography wasn't allowed in the Shelley exhibition, but there is an online version. The best thing by far was the first edition of Frankenstein signed by the author to Lord Byron. Well, actually, maybe that was second-best to the autograph draft pages of same. The exhibition also features also the only surviving copy of an 1811 pamphlet that PBS had published anonymously in support of an Irish dissident who had run afoul of the libel laws. It's only been recently re-disovered; it had previously been thought to have been completely lost to posterity. There were also some fragments of Shelley's skull (apparently Shelley-relic keeping was common in the wake of his death). I was also really interested to learn that there is actually a reason why Mary Shelley's middle name is Wollstonecraft. I'd always assumed that it was an homage, but in fact it was a family name; her mother was the Mary Wollstonecraft.

The library had letter-press printed cards with quotations from PBS's poetry. They were placed in old-fashioned file drawers around the exhibition, with encouragements to take them.

I also went to see the Rose Family Haggadah, which was on display for passover. The mix of iconography is quite interesting.

And I finished off the day by stopping in on Christopher Robin Milne's friends.

All in all, a total success and a very enjoyable day: the best of all worlds! To celebrate, I think I shall watch the marvelous Shelley episode of Lewis tonight before getting back to work first thing tomorrow.