Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [11]
Oblivious to the strange grandeur adorning the periphery, the middle of the reading room is occupied by a phalanx of utilitarian desks that wouldn’t look out of place in a poorly endowed twentieth-century lecture hall. The timeworn beige and roseate flag-stones that ennoble the floor’s perimeter transform beneath the desk legs into ugly linoleum, creating the impression of a Versailles receiving gallery grafted onto an obscure Midwestern auditorium haunted by censorious priests. It’s the sort of setting hastily supplied by the subconscious, in preparation for a dream about an unannounced exam and forgotten clothing. And yet, so much thinking has been done in this room over such a long period that the room’s eccentricities achieve an unexpected harmony. The ugly desks assert their citizenship as firmly as the dangling cherubs, the room’s unapologetic anachronisms providing a sanctuary beyond the incidentals of time and place.
Returning to the hallway and turning right reveals the rear corridor where the card catalogs begin. They are singly unimpressive—any one of them would be perfectly comfortable in a small-town library—but in aggregate they are breathtaking. The hallways of the National Library are long and narrow and its walls are one continuous line of card catalogs, a parade of wooden drawers fronted by handwritten labels. Though the National Library claims a modest inventory of computers, these are relegated to the catalog rooms, and even there they are dwarfed by the sheer number of card catalogs surrounding them. These cabinets are a reminder of how sensual a library can be. They attest to the perpetuation of a different kind of digital experience, in which fingers trace the length of a drawer rather than tap at a keyboard. Each catalog drawer, when opened, exhales the scent of old paper, a subtle interplay of dust and glue and wizened wood pulp. The cards vary: some are white cardstock, some are a pale mint green, and others are onionskin. Some are typed, some are mimeographed, and some are handwritten. Each moves beneath the finger with a subtly different gravity. Some have the softened, yellowed edges of frequent fingering, while others exhibit the crisp, unsullied corners of a hidden treasure. Though America has not wholly forsaken its card catalogs, they have become the doddering aunts of its libraries, burdens to be shouldered as lightly as possible so as not to detract from the computers that have replaced them. It’s easy to forget that the data on those computers was entered by hand, each glowing catalog entry transcribed from a paper predecessor. The National Library’s card catalog is the paper equivalent of Prague’s mosaic sidewalks, in which the effort of a human hand is apparent in the placement of every paving stone. Hundreds upon hundreds of small paper rectangles nest inside each drawer, secured in place only by the past intention of the anonymous hand that once undertook their meticulous alphabetization. Time’s slowed passage means that the National Library still relies on trust and not technology for its well-being. Its holdings have not been scanned onto microfiche, and its extensive catalog can be disrupted with the single, fluid motion of a hand yanking a drawer from its housing.
The library’s resistance to the march of progress stems from a grim rather than romantic source: the National Library is in dire financial straits. The flood that struck Prague in the winter of 2002 was a disaster for the Library, damaging some of its most precious holdings and undermining its very foundation. There is talk of moving the entire institution to more stable ground, a massive