It Ain’t Library Science

 

Archaeologists recently uncovered the remains of a public library in Cologne, Germany, which they surmise was built in the second century of the common era by the Romans or the workers of the Roman client state in control of the region. The architecture follows the model of other large Roman libraries of the period, such as the one in Ephesus, on the western coast of modern Turkey. The reason for thinking it was a public library rather than a private one is the great size of the structure and its location in the public forum of the ancient city, where all buildings were public.

Bookplate of Edward Penfield
Bookplate of American painter and illustrator Edward Penfield (1866-1925). Bookplates are labels people paste into the frontispiece of their books to declare ownership. They were more popular a century ago than now, and as seen here some readers contrived custom bookplates.

 

A public library of two thousand years ago was not the same as a public library now, offering books on loan to members of the general public. Because books were hand copied into scrolls or codices, they were limited in number and expensive to produce. No one could walk in to a public library of two thousand years ago and expect to walk out with one or more books under their arm, to be returned after several weeks. People read the books in the library and the books never left the premises.

The meaning of “public” was also limited at that time to those who were literate and therefore had a reason to be there accessing the books. These would have been scholars of one sort or another, whether in the employ of government, academia, or a wealthy individual, and they would have been almost certainly all male. Lending libraries did not come about until the Renaissance, after the invention of the printing press made available large numbers of copies of books at lower cost.

 

Even then, the number and type of people who could borrow books was limited. Universities and colleges had their own libraries, with their collections available not to the general public but to students and faculty of the institution. That model persists to this day. Private societies lent out books to their members, who also contributed books. They were lending libraries, but in no sense were they public. It was not until civic groups and prominent citizens in Boston, Massachusetts, created the Boston Public Library in 1848 that the institution of the lending library as we know it came into being. The Boston Public Library was the first institution in the country that was open to all and was funded largely by taxpayers, with some assistance by private endowments and gifts of books.

BostonPublicLibrary BoylstonSt 1850s
An 1855 engraving showing the future building of the Boston Public Library on Boylston Street. The library moved into the building in 1858 and stayed there until 1895, when it moved into the grand building on Copley Square where it has remained to this day.

The model caught on, obviously, since today there are over 16,000 public libraries around the country. In the past 30 years or more, two great changes have affected those public libraries, and they are no longer what they were during their heyday in the twentieth century. The first change came from the effects of cutbacks in social programs starting with the Reagan administration. Homeless numbers increased as politicians undercut the social safety net and as mental hospitals could no longer afford to house indigent patients, setting them loose on the streets. Shelters that took in homeless people overnight often turned them out during the day, and the homeless gravitated toward public libraries for safe daytime shelter with access to bathrooms.

Boston Public Library Reading Room
Boston Public Library Reading Room in October 2013. Photo by Brian Johnson.

 

The second change came about with the rise of computers and the internet. Public libraries have gamely kept up with the technological changes despite cutbacks in taxpayer funding, and for the most part they have successfully integrated patrons’ interest in checking out electronic books as well as traditional paper books. Where conflict has arisen it is in affording access to library computers to patrons, some of whom had little interest in setting foot in their local public library until it installed computers with free internet.

With the influx of people who are not readers as much as internet users and are likely as not indifferent to norms of behavior in the library, and homeless people who sometimes abuse library facilities and even other patrons, librarians now have their hands full with duties that have nothing to do with their traditional training in library science. Patrons who are readers and have used their local library’s services in person for decades no longer feel comfortable there, and now often prefer checking out electronic books from the library’s website rather than visiting the library in person. Pity the unfortunate librarians then, who cannot escape the loud cell phone users, the raucous children who have been dumped by their parents in the young readers’ room as if it were a free day care center, and the homeless people who, often through no fault of their own, have been thrown on the good graces of the librarians, but who complicate the work day for those overburdened librarians by the criminal or mentally unstable acting out of some of their number.
— Vita

 

There but for the Grace of God

 


Roadside memorials for traffic accident fatalities have been appearing more frequently over the past 20 years, a period when the numbers of deaths per capita or per mile driven had been dropping until the last two years, when they have risen again. Since the increase in memorials has not been tied to overall traffic fatalities, there must be another reason. Unfortunately, no one seems to have a reason other than the increase in memorials being due to a snowballing cultural phenomenon. People become aware of the memorials, and then when a loved one dies in an automobile wreck, they feel moved to erect a memorial near that spot, and so the phenomenon builds on itself, this being its moment.

 


One force that could be feeding the movement is the amount of young people who are dying in traffic accidents, many of them on account of their own negligence due to distracted driving. Young people have always been overrepresented in the traffic fatality statistics due to their willingness to take foolish risks, but now add in their addiction to cell phones and they have become an even more dangerous element on the roads. Insurance companies, who put dollars and cents numbers on risky behavior, understand this and accordingly attach high premiums to policies for drivers under 30 years old. Having a relative taken away by death in a violent accident at a very young age is of course a more traumatic event than having one taken away by natural causes at an advanced age, and may be a factor in the urge of friends and relatives to build a roadside memorial.


Angel teddy bear memorial
Statuettes at a roadside memorial in 2006.


None of this is by way of claiming that most roadside memorials are erected by traumatized relatives on behalf of teenaged drivers and drivers in their twenties who were irresponsibly texting when they ran their car off the road and flipped it over in a ditch. There are scant statistics available to support such a claim, though a deep dive into state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) websites may turn up a breakdown of accident causes or contributing factors. Mainly it is speculation to suppose distracted driving may have been a primary cause of any accident marked by a roadside memorial. While texting is a phenomenon of the past 20 years, and as such coincides with the increase in roadside memorials, there is nevertheless a logical fallacy described in Latin as “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”, meaning “after this, therefore because of this”. Still, the coincidence bears consideration.

As a matter of personal experience, however, anyone who has been driving the past 20 years cannot help noticing the increase in distracted driving around them. Sitting at a red light behind a driver who is mesmerized by his or her phone means waiting extra seconds before accelerating after the light turns green, or even having to honk the horn to rouse that driver from smartphone induced hypnosis. Driving on a road behind or next to a texting driver means being alert to his or her sudden and unexpected accelerations and decelerations of their vehicle and jerking it from side to side, behavior that is exactly the same as a drunk driver. Getting out in front of a texting driver is not entirely safe either, as is obvious by glancing in the rear view mirror at the texting driver looking down toward his or her lap rather than up toward the road and the back of the car, your car, that they are dangerously closing in on.

A 2012 experiment in Belgium to demonstrate the dangerous foolishness of people who believe they can drive competently while texting. For additional views on the casualties of texting and driving, see the 2013 Werner Herzog documentary From One Second to the Next.
As they drive past a roadside memorial bedecked in flowers and balloon hearts and teddy bears, motorists reflecting on its meaning have no idea whether the memorial is for an irresponsible driver or the innocent victim of that driver, any more than a person walking through a cemetery knows the particulars behind the deaths of the people marked by the tombstones over their graves. If the driver thinks for a few seconds about how quickly life can be snuffed out, whether by foolishness or merely by bad luck, and checks their vehicle speedometer and puts their phone away in the glove compartment, then maybe the roadside memorial has served a good purpose after all. Taking it easy and laying off the accelerator and the constant jonesing to communicate, even though it be about nothing of note, maybe the driver reflects upon seeing the roadside memorial and thinks “There but for the grace of God go I”, and gets home safely.
— Ed.

 

Cooling the Customers

 

Air conditioning and movies – or movie theaters – go together so well that it’s hard to imagine a time without the benefits of both together. In 1902, just as movies were getting started, Willis Carrier (whose company made the political news in 2016), a mechanical engineer, invented the first modern air conditioning plant to help a Brooklyn, New York, printing company solve a paper wrinkling problem at its facility. It wasn’t until 1925 that Carrier got together with a movie theater owner to install air conditioning at the Rivoli Theater on New York City’s Times Square. It was a match meant to be, and from then on the summer, which had been the poorest season for movie theaters, became the richest as people attended movies as much for the air conditioning as for the entertainment.

When The Seven Year Itch, starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell, appeared in theaters in 1955, most houses and apartments did not have air conditioning. In the scene before this one, they leave an air conditioned movie theater after viewing Creature from the Black Lagoon, a 3D monster movie the appeal of which, for them, was probably not as great as the cool comfort of the theater itself.

Home air conditioners were still unusual in the 1950s and 1960s, but by the 1970s most homes had some form of air conditioning, whether central or window units. Movie fans no longer flocked to theaters in summer only for the sweet relief of a few hours respite from summer’s heat and humidity. People continued going to see movies in theaters in summer on account of children being out of school, and how air conditioning in theaters since the 1920s had established summer as movie season. Watching movies at home was still unsatisfactory because of small television screen sizes, low picture resolution and poor sound, and a lag of one or more years before Hollywood would release movies to television.


Meredith Willson 1967
Meredith Willson, when he appeared on the Texaco Star Theater television program in 1967. Willson, who was born in 1902, coincidentally the same year that Willis Carrier invented modern air conditioning, had a long career spanning Broadway theater, Hollywood movies, radio, and television.

All that has changed in the past forty years, of course, starting with home video technology and the ability to either buy or rent movies for home viewing. Theaters felt the pinch, and old style movie palaces shut down, relegating the movie theater experience for the most part to shoe box multiplexes at suburban malls. Drive-in theaters, another summertime movie going experience from a bygone era, shut down along with the air conditioned movie palaces. Now in the last ten years the home theater experience, for people who can afford it (and it becomes more affordable all the time), has progressed to the point that a fair portion of movie fans feel little pulling them toward returning to theaters. Their homes are air conditioned, their televisions and sound systems have gotten bigger and better, and Hollywood releases movies for home viewing so quickly that only the most impatient fans aren’t happy to wait a little while.
The old movie palace experience was something special that can’t be matched by watching a movie at home, no matter how comfortable and technologically sophisticated circumstances at home have become. Comedies and big, crowd pleasing musicals in particular seemed to take on a frisson of excitement when viewed in a well appointed theater among other patrons who were similarly enthralled. Now that theater owners around the country have finally gotten the message and are starting to move away from the nothing special, cookie cutter mall multiplex and toward building theaters that reestablish the grandeur that is only possible outside the home theater, it is questionable whether movie fans will return.

Meredith Willson’s most famous entertainment, The Music Man. Robert Preston, shown in this scene with Buddy Hackett, starred in the long running Broadway show before doing the movie version in 1962.

Some people have had time to drop the movie going habit, for one thing, and for another there is a relatively recent technology that has come into the equation which affects their enjoyment of movies – cell phones. In the theater, cell phone users interfere with the other patrons’ enjoyment of the movie, but at home, for those people who simply can’t do without their phone for even two or three hours, then at least they’re not annoying other paying customers, and for their own enjoyment of non-stop cellular connectivity there is always the pause button on their home theater remote control. Might as well stay home then to enjoy summertime movies, and keep your cool.
― Techly