| ONE day, apparently before the rise of Google Book Search, Marilyn Johnson made an odd request at the New York Public Library. She needed to find the symptoms of an imaginary illness called "information sickness," which she recollected from a 1981 novel by Ted Mooney, "Easy Travel to Other Planets." She couldn't find her own copy, so a team of librarians went spelunking in the stacks, wearing miner's helmets, as Johnson tells it. They surfaced with a copy preserved, strangely enough, on microfilm, and soon Johnson was reading the dimly remembered passage in which a woman keels over, blood gushing from her nose and ears as she raves about disconnected facts. When the woman recovers from her fugue state, she says: "I was dazzled. I couldn't tell where one thing left off and the next began." If Johnson herself displays symptoms of information sickness, she has a glorious form of the disease. In "This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All," she offers a lively parade of people and places, all related to library science, or sort of related. Johnson ushers us into the American Kennel Club Library and introduces us to the inevitable graying librarian in a boiled-wool jacket with a Scotty pin. She also teleports over to a Las Vegas "gentlemen's club" called the Library, where ladies wearing spectacles (and not much more) slide their way down stripper poles. She peppers the book with lots of random instructions, like how to remove odor from an old Graham Greene paperback. (Use a sheet of Bounce fabric softener.) This is one of those books, in the vein of Mary Roach's "Stiff" (about human cadavers), that tackle a big topic by taking readers on a chapter-by-chapter tour of eccentric characters and unlikely locations. Given Johnson's attractions to wild tangents, the journey often dissolves into a jumble. It is a testament to her skill as a writer that she remains fascinating, even in the throes of A.D.D. Johnson begins by recounting the impulse that led her to libraryland. While researching her previous book, "The Dead Beat" (about obituary writers), she noticed something peculiar: Dead librarians are more interesting than any other type of dead person. Johnson was particularly beguiled by a woman named Henriette Avram, who "beckoned from the obits page, with her mysterious, knowing smile, the chain-smoking systems analyst who automated the library records of the Library of Congress and wrote the first code for computerized catalogs." Like Henriette Avram, the heroes of "This Book Is Overdue" are resolutely hightech, engaged in "activist and visionary forms of library work." Johnson takes us to the Chappaqua Library in Westchester County in 2007, where the staff is overseeing the migration of text from the doomed ecosystem of paper into the limitless frontier of the Internet. In an era when the most arcane fact can be fished from the air via wireless, some librarians have headed into virtual worlds like Second Life, where "extreme virtual librarians" help patronavatars answer various questions. Others have hit the real-life pavement - for example, during the 2008 Republican National Convention, when "street librarians" from a group called Radical Reference milled among the protesters, handing out bathroom maps and legal aid information while fielding questions through a live hookup to their reference desks. Johnson cheerleads for these Brave New Librarians, championing the efficiency of online searches and digitized archives. And yet, without meaning to, her book comes off as a paean to a previous age, when fact-finding meant trekking through the Dewey Decimal System. Johnson writes best when she's meandering and browsing, in the manner of a woozy reader exploring the stacks. In her most absorbing passages, I felt as if I were back in the children's library, scrutinizing a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia, where the entry on "pachyderm" sat near the disquisition on "pachysandra," a kind of ground cover. Johnson's book carries the same kind of associative magic. Rather than taking us on a brisk, orderly march, she lets us ride on the swaying back of an elephant, glimpsing treasures glimmering through the fronds of pachysandra. At the end of her travels, Johnson whisks the reader to a cat-hair-covered living room where a professional archivist pores over the work of her dead husband, a song lyricist and unpublished science-fiction writer named Joseph Victor (Jersey Joe) Hamburger. He was not famous, but the archivist is trying to find a library that will accept his stories, lyrics and place-mat scrawlings, storing them in archivally correct boxes until the day he is accepted into library heaven. "She thought his work was worth saving, and so it was saved," Johnson writes. "That is the story of all archives." At such moments, Johnson tips her hand, revealing what fascinates her about both librarians and obituary writers. They are people who struggle to bring the dead back to life. Johnson's characters desperately care about half-forgotten brawlers, freedom fighters and canine celebrities. They are the guardians of all there is to know. It doesn't matter whether they carry on their efforts in analog or digital format. For they are waging the holy battle to resurrect the entire world, over and over again, in its entirety - keeping every last tidbit safe and acid free. Johnson is nostalgic for the days of trekking through the Dewey Decimal System. Pagan Kennedy is the author, most recently, of "The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories." If Johnson herself displays symptoms of information sickness, she has a glorious form of the disease. In "This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All," she offers a lively parade of people and places, all related to library science, or sort of related. Johnson ushers us into the American Kennel Club Library and introduces us to the inevitable graying librarian in a boiled-wool jacket with a Scotty pin. She also teleports over to a Las Vegas "gentlemen's club" called the Library, where ladies wearing spectacles (and not much more) slide their way down stripper poles. She peppers the book with lots of random instructions, like how to remove odor from an old Graham Greene paperback. (Use a sheet of Bounce fabric softener.) This is one of those books, in the vein of Mary Roach's "Stiff" (about human cadavers), that tackle a big topic by taking readers on a chapter-by-chapter tour of eccentric characters and unlikely locations. Given Johnson's attractions to wild tangents, the journey often dissolves into a jumble. It is a testament to her skill as a writer that she remains fascinating, even in the throes of A.D.D. |
