Editorial: The New Yorker on Libraries

In true whimsical New Yorker fashion, the full-page, glorious color illustration for the magazine’s “seasonal look at books” (4/9/07, p. 79) is a hoot and brings the viewer up short at the same time. Titled “The Reading Room,” it depicts “the library of the future,” according to artist Bruce McCall, a regular contributor. The vaulted ceiling notwithstanding, his portrayal is like no library reading room you’ve seen, yet there are elements of truth in it.

Take a look at it: etched around the perimeter of the ceiling are A-list names like O’Donnell, O’Reilly, Stewart, Winfrey, and Disney. The shelf ranges are A-list, too. For History, there’s American Idol-Anna Nicole, Britney-.

Then there are the plasma screens showing Disney-type animated flicks. There’s a table for “Books on Cell Phone,” with devices lined up for the taking. Huge computer screens at tables and in the stacks would be the envy of many a librarian.

So, where are the books? In the foreground, a burly security guard drags a white-haired woman from the single stool that comprises the (closed) reading section, as her cane and book fall to the floor. Several feet away, a scruffy looking man digs through a tattered book-filled cardboard box that says “Bums Only.”

When I called McCall and asked what had inspired him, he said that the subject was handed to him “on a silver tray,” a rare occurrence. “They needed a page about the library of the future” to open the spring book section, said McCall. He mentioned the “Nicholson Baker thing a few years ago” in The New Yorker as a possible trigger but wasn’t sure about the specifics. (Baker famously damned the San Francisco PL for dumping books and the card catalog and attacked librarians for digitizing and, in the process, destroying newspapers.)

As someone who hasn’t used a library in years—though he describes himself as a “positive library rat...growing up in various Ontario cities...where I got most of what education I have (being a high school dropout)”—McCall has picked up extremely well on perceptions that swirl around the library’s future and around books. His drawing alludes to the DVD explosion, the “weeding” of books and classics, the ubiquity of computers and the Internet, the introduction of gaming, even the downgrading and elimination of library jobs—there’s nary a librarian in sight—and the not-always-beneficial influence of popular culture. On a positive note, McCall’s library appears to be thriving.

While the cartoon is wonderful (in the word’s multiple meanings), I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry. The drawing is as much a commentary on the fate of the printed book as it is on the library and librarians.

Of course, the real library wouldn’t be as funny as McCall’s vision—or as alarming. The illustration points to some veryreal perception problems that no amount of marketing and outreach has yet corrected: the idea that libraries are perfectly fine without librarians, for instance, or that books will surely disappear from them, or that the library is a place of disconnect (almost everyone has a headset on) rather than of community. We need to do a lot more to answer the “Why do we need a library anyway?” question, if this vision permeates our culture. We know what libraries offer; we need to make sure potential users do, too.