The books are not the first thing you notice when you enter a well-run library. It’s the weight of a few hundred years of someone determining what is worth preserving; it’s not the empty kind of silence. The head of acquisitions at the New York Society Library, a private membership organization nestled into a brownstone on East 79th Street, is Steven McGuirl. He spends his days reading a variety of publications, including Publishers Weekly, The Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and several others, in order to determine which novels merit a spot on the shelf. It sounds refined. Most of the time it is. However, beneath that elegant exterior is a system that is, in its own subtle way, brutal.
Fiction makes up about 25% of the 4800 books the library purchases each year. Some writers have standing orders, such as Martin Amis, Toni Morrison, and Zadie Smith. They don’t need to make a case; their new books come in automatically. First novels present a completely different challenge. Naturally, McGuirl and his two assistants use educated guesswork to try to predict what members will want. Three members place an order for a book. Every month, a committee of members convenes to address any issues that the staff may have overlooked. This system strikes a balance between enthusiasm and skepticism, which seems appropriate for selecting which voices will be heard by future readers.
However, getting a book is just the first obstacle. Things become truly uncomfortable after that.
Books are not kept in libraries forever. The space just runs out, so they can’t. The official word for taking a book out of a collection is “deaccessioning,” but most librarians are honest enough to refer to it as weeding. The Continuous Review Evaluation and Weeding (CREW) manual is the industry standard for this procedure, and its framework is more clinical than it may seem. Fundamentally, it is a formula based on three variables: years since copyright, years since last checkout, and a list of unfavorable characteristics denoted by the acronym MUSTIE. Misleading. ugly. Irrelevant, trivial, and superseded. Somewhere else. The copyright date is not particularly significant for fiction. Trivial, Ugly, Irrelevant, Elsewhere (TUIE) criteria failures and whether the book has been checked out within the last two years are important factors.
It’s worth taking a moment to consider that. A book may be eliminated if it hasn’t been checked out in two years. Two years is nothing in a busy urban library. A book that sits motionless on a shelf for twenty-four months before silently vanishing could take ten years to write. The author of the CREW manual takes care to state that “professional judgment calls and common sense” must guide every decision and that the formula is a guideline rather than a verdict. However, guidelines have a tendency to become rules in a library that is overcrowded and understaffed.
When writer Nicholson Baker started looking into the San Francisco Public Library in the mid-1990s, it was a case that brought all of this into stark contrast. What he discovered was astounding and was later published in The New Yorker before being expanded upon in a book titled Double Fold. Between 100,000 and 250,000 books disappeared between the time the SFPL moved from its old building to its gleaming new one, which has architectural flourishes but insufficient shelf space. not moved. not given away. Many of them were thrown away and buried in landfills. books that were unique. books with true historical significance. The presiding librarian had decided that the institution’s purpose was to serve the general urban reader rather than researchers, and that other need could be met by the university libraries in the area. It’s still debatable whether that was a justifiable stance or an act of cultural vandalism, but one thing is certain: once those books were gone, they were gone forever. A book that is thrown away doesn’t grow back, unlike a garden weed.
The New York Society Library has exercised greater caution. Because they see the collection as something of a historical record of what New Yorkers have wanted to read over the ages, the library’s librarians are hesitant to remove rare copies of fiction. McGuirl has come up with inventive ways to reclaim shelf space, such as removing duplicate copies of once-popular titles and relocating older anthologies of prize stories to closed basement storage. Space is found for the new inch by inch, as the annual report delicately puts it. It’s a sustainable strategy, but only because the library intentionally makes small acquisitions. The math would collapse if they purchased three times as many books.
The library at Wesleyan University is currently living that math. The institution is halfway through a three-year project to remove sixty thousand volumes, out of about a million, and the process has caused exactly the kind of conflict that one might anticipate in an academic community. Students and faculty have access to lists of books that have been flagged for removal, and they are free to support any title that interests them. Looking through those lists is a depressing activity. Literary criticism pieces written by once-young, aspirational academics are now subtly marked as having reached the end of their useful lives, just like their authors, as one observer noted with unmistakable sadness.
All of this is influenced by broader factors that determine what is read and retained. Reviews, awards, word-of-mouth, inclusion on a syllabus, and timing of a cultural moment are all important factors in a novel’s survival. After winning the Nobel Prize, Sigrid Undset is now mainly unknown. Once thought to be indispensable, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet has been discovered at library book sales and discarded from collections. Before Proust paid to have his own work printed, he was turned down by three publishers. Before Ulysses became the book that people claim has changed everything, Virginia Woolf met it with something akin to contempt. Merit is not obvious. Rarely is it at first glance, and a second one is never assured.
You can actually do something if you have a tendency toward small acts of preservation. Circulation counts are the final component of any weeding system. A book is vulnerable if it hasn’t been checked out in two years, but it remains in the game if someone does. If a book is important to you, locate it in any library you have access to and give it a look. Bring it home. Place it next to your e-reader on your nightstand. Even though you should probably read it, you are not required to. The return trip is crucial—giving it back to a librarian with the knowledge that the clock has restarted, the timestamp has been reset, and the argument for its survival has been subtly reinforced. It’s a small act, perhaps pointless, but it’s the kind of guerilla preservation for which there is no category in the CREW formula.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that we’ve developed complex systems to determine what should be remembered, and the majority of these systems prioritize what is already well-liked. The books that are least likely to pass the checkout threshold are also the ones that require the most protection.
