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Web Exclusives:
Under the Ivy May 11, 2005: A
‘labyrinth of dark stacks’ Two striking pictures appear in the April 1, 1938, issue of PAW: One shows two bookcases double-crammed with books and journals, fronted by an enormous black pipe resting on a pile of brick; the other, stacks upon stacks of bound volumes piled on shelves and on the floor pressed up against a commercial-size vacuum cleaner. Such was the state of Princeton’s library in the late 1930s. A gift from Mrs. Percy Rivington Pyne, the mother of M. Taylor Pyne 1877, Pyne Library seemed spacious enough when it replaced Chancellor Green Library in 1897. But a few decades later, students such as Allen Whipple ’39 were desperate for more, and better, space. “In every upperclass course,” Whipple wrote in PAW, “reference books, placed on reserve, are included as part of the required reading. Owing to an insufficient number of copies – aggravated by an insufficient amount of space even in the reserve desk – the time each student may be in possession of any book may be, and usually is, rigidly restricted. Seniors doing thesis work, juniors preparing departmental papers, spend days in the labyrinth of dark stacks and quiet, noisy reading rooms.” He tells of an athletic team at an away game hungrily devouring their assignments in the other team’s spacious library, a student who commuted to Columbia to use its library, professors who guarded the location of their private research niches like state secrets. “Books are stored all over town – in garrets, basements, storerooms and dormitories,” Whipple complained. “The time may come,” he added, “when we can look back in amusement at the noise in the stacks, our insistent demands for rubber-soled shoes and heels for the Lorelei, the ludicrous hole in the earth called the Newspaper Room, the farcical Departmental Seminars, our whimsical demands for compulsory flashlights and safety patrols (we remember too vividly the time the lights went out while we were on the top floor of the stacks and we had to stay where we were until they were repaired, lest we fall down an unprotected shaft in our gropings.) We can laugh when and only when the new library is in use.” (The reference to the Lorelei is unclear to this modern reader; they must have been the female library staff who roamed the stacks in irritatingly loud heels, perhaps earning their nickname for their ability to distract the male students by their sound and, of course, their sex.) Though Whipple and his generation had to suffer, by 1949 the revolutionary Harvey S. Firestone Library opened its doors. Named for the father of its five principal donors, the library broke with the tradition of buildings constructed chiefly to hold large collections of books, with little thought for the user. Instead, notes the Princeton Companion, Firestone sought “to bring books and readers together, serving as a scholar’s workshop,” with its innovative open stack system. Upon its 20-year anniversary, university librarian William Dix explained to PAW that before World War II, university libraries “were designed as symbols, located in the center of campus and built to look like the Baths of Caracalla, which is all well and good; but little attention was given to the interior function.” With the wails of Allen Whipple and his contemporaries still ringing
in their ears, the planners of Princeton’s modern library
– still vibrant today – made sure that submersion within
the library would be as satisfying as gazing upon it from without.
Jane Martin ’89 is PAW's former editor-in-chief. You can reach her at paw@princeton.edu
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