"THE GUILD OF WOMEN-BINDERS"

The Guild of Women Binders was a short lived enterprise in which a London bookseller, Frank Karslake, seized the opportunity to exploit Queen Victoria's interest in promoting bookbinding as a respectable-enough occupation for what the late 19th century believed to be its "surplus women" problem.

Like the century's "surplus laborers," who couldn't hope to be paid a fair wage, its "surplus women" could apparently not hope to be married. Many also had experience in the decorative arts and could do their bookbinding at home.

Karslake put on an exhibition of women binders within a year of attending an exhibition on women bookbinders at the queen's Diamond Jubilee in. In doing so, he butted up against the opposition of a misogynistic labor movement, which blamed women for not being able to negotiate wage parity. But his efforts curried enough favor to catch the attention of the palace.

The Prince of Wales took a Guild of Women-binders bound album with him on a royal tour.

Although unnecessary from our vantage point, the times had sought after strange and now-incomprehensible explanations for the disadvantages that women suffered under the yoke of Victorian misogyny, assuming that women (and laborers) simply existed in excess numbers. The “surplus women” problem meant that some went unmarried. And so female employment was seen as a kind of charity meant to protect middle-class women from the degradations of poverty.

Seeing opportunity, Frank Karslake, a once-aspiring actor who suffered from too much stage fright ever to find success upon the stage, might not have been wrong in thinking that women also found an advantage in the era's taste for decorative novelties. The 1890s were a time when the public was looking for fresh designs. And these women were uninhibited by convention because they were literally unaware of it, being denied much of the training provided to male binders.

And so Frank Karslake, a man who had picked up the habit of American wisecracking from a short-lived stint working at a ranch just outside of Sacramento, CA, changed the name of his shop to “The Guild of Women Binders.” He employed women and promoted their work, which may or may not have actually always been created by their own hands, and ran a workshop where women could learn and enter the trade.

Thankfully, a beautiful reproduction of the Guild bindings is in the possession of the New York Public Library. The "Bindings of Tomorrow" includes chromolithographic prints with gilt lettering that makes it look almost like the books have been magically squished onto the page. The binders credited include Constance Karslake, Florence de Rheims, Edith de Rheims, Helen Schofield, Mrs. Francis Knight, Mrs. Macdonald, Hilda Goodall, Minnie King, the American Gertrude Stiles, Lillian Overton, and Mary Downing.

"NONFICTION — BOOK HISTORY"

"FLOWERS & SHADOWS" BY DAMON STANG

The sun is about to rise on the eve of Lunar Imbolc, the New Moon of February 15, 2018. Seven years ago, I was initiated into my current coven on the Full Moon of February. The season beginning at Candlemas is referred to by some witches as ‘The Bringing In Time,’ and for me, it’s always been a time of beginnings. With the subtle waxing of solar light, one truly feels that the worst of the winter months are behind us, and soon Calleach, dark winter’s hag, will have run out of firewood and turn back into a lonesome stone.

Outside my bedroom window, dawn is infusing the sky over Brooklyn with pink and gold, and later today, I’ll take the train down to Chinatown to buy armfuls of pussy willows, peonies, and azalea. For the next week, everything in Chinatown will be red and gold. The streets will pop and crackle with tom thumbs and other firecrackers to chase away the spirits of poverty and ill-favour. Likewise, the dollar stores of Brooklyn will be a festive array of red with shiny Valentine’s Day candies and plush bears, as friends in New Orleans sleep off their Mardi Gras hangovers. The world is coming back to life around me, and it feels counter-intuitive to resist the optimistic seasonal tide. This year feels very important to my life’s journey, so I’m rising as close to sunrise as possible to prepare for the coming spring.

From now until the Vernal Equinox, my rituals will be those of renewal and discarding, bringing light back into what has felt like a dark time on both a personal and global scale. I will collect fresh flowers for my household altars, glass vessels of cool spring water and beeswax candles. My statues will be polished and dusted, and my floors washed and scrubbed with water that’s been infused with white roses and moonlight. Over time, I’ve accumulated so much history, mementoes from so many different lives and landscapes, that I have many things that however cherished, have come to the end of their usefulness. What can be used by someone else must be gifted and what serves no further purpose must be disposed of as mindfully as possible. These are not easy practices. There are subtle nuances of sentimental attachment, necessity and personal history. For the witch, these personal excavations can hold an even greater complexity as we navigate our heirlooms, power objects and the sheddings of our former selves. But it must be done.

I’ve always had a pagan soul and an animistic one at that. The mysteries I revere have always involved the shifting of the seasons and the motion of planets. The equinoxes and solstices, those hinges of lightness and darkness, have often most called my soul. These are times of visceral and inevitable changes. Times when one can feel and see something happening to the living planet.

The Vernal Equinox is a time of powerful oppositional forces coming into equilibrium for a perfect cosmic moment, before falling out of balance once more as we transition from one holy alignment to the next.

On March 20, the Sun moves into the sign of the Ram (Aires) announcing the commencement of the Astrological New Year. In Persia, this day is recognized as the cultural New Year. The Sun and Moon will rise due east and due west respectively. The hours of lightness and darkness will be approximately equal. The magical hours (planetary hours, uneven hours) will align with the hours of the regular clock.

This year, the Equinox will fall on a Tuesday, the planetary day associated with Mars, which gives this particular Equinox an extra edge of aggressive, enthusiastic vitality and exuberance. The first hour of sunrise is ruled by the luminary associated with the whole day. Thus, on Tuesday, that luminary will be Mars. The day will be a powerful one for acts of magic and sorcery aimed toward acceleration, triumph, conquering, initiating, revival, and force.

Spring is not a gentle season no matter how hard we try to tame it. It is a season of bursting and blooming, of shooting upwards through layers of dark, a season of gushing and oozing, of thrusting and itching. Nature is in feverish delirium. The Equinox is the beginning of this process. Its culmination is not until the Bacchanals of May. So perhaps restraint is best and the rising raw tide should tempered to productivity and held steady by the witches’ will.

On the eve of the Equinox, I will hold vigil in my home. On this night, I will particularly enjoy the creation of egg talismans to be used as offerings the following day. This custom can be found in a number of European cultures. The traditional colour used is red, and I incorporate black and white sigils over the scarlet background. These sigils represent the manifestations I’m seeking in the coming season. It’s a very pleasurable and engaging activity. And with all of last year’s clutter catalogued and cleaned, I will sit with my altars and my thoughts, with my ghosts and regrets, with my dreams and my heartbeat, observing the passing of the hours. I will be as quiet as I can and listen to the steady ticking of the kitchen clock. I’ll prepare the Red Meal as my teachers have shown me and only then will speak to invite the Good Folk to join me for supper. We shall eat and drink together, both the visible and the Unseen. When supper has ended, I will set a plate aside for the Guest who has not yet arrived.

The hours between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m. will be the most precious to me—these are the kindly hours when I escape the world’s expectations and am free and safe from worry. In these hours, I can exist both simultaneously within my own mortality and also outside of it, in the awe-inspiring reaches of eternity, with something nearly resembling peace.

Just before dawn, I will brew up a big pot of African red bush, deer’s tongue, and raw honey for my bath. It will be dark and vital as blood, the water nearly scalding hot. I will bathe by candlelight and sing the songs I’ve been taught, the songs that call on the spirits with forgotten names, and will rise as the light breaks over the tops of the buildings. I will inhale the smoke of damiana and peer into the recesses of my heart, where old loves and desires roost among the rafters. I’ll ask them what they need to be of little trouble. Naked, I will step out of the bathroom, still swathed in steam, and play joyous music loudly (I like British pastoral music for this, or polyphonic Bulgarian chants). I’ll light all the candles in my house and open all the windows wide, strewing flowers across the threshold. I’ll dress in bright colours and adorn my hair with ribbons and flowers. Breakfast will be local and light—homemade breads, preserves, cheese, eggs, and mushrooms.

Over the past few years, Green-Wood Cemetery has been my go-to destination on this day of the year. The contrast of the funereal statuary against the extravagance of the blooming dogwoods, magnolias, forsythia, and many others is just breathtaking and truly magical. It goes without saying that being a traditional witch in Brooklyn can be very challenging. The most crucial rites call for an immersion in the natural world and escaping from prying eyes (and cell phone cameras) can seem quite impossible. Cemeteries tend to be good for this, and one can still wander the winding paths of Green-Wood in relative privacy. Sometimes I go alone. Sometimes with like minded friend or two. I have a few objectives in this, and the most simple and important of these is simply to walk among the trees, to listen to the trees, to perceive them, and to invite them to perceive me. I have felt the consciousness of trees since childhood, and nothing makes me happier than being around them when the sap is quick in their trunks and they’re crowned with swelling blossoms. I have my ways of greeting trees. I like to bring them things—honey, spring water, goats’ milk, pouches of herbs combined like wordless letters, blood. I have my favourites, but I discover new ones all the time.

Singing is a significant part of my practice, and I incorporate it into all of my magical workings. I have a number of songs for different occasions: nursery rhymes, ballads, neo-pagan chants, folk songs, songs I’ve written, poems I’ve set to music. As I mentioned, I experience walking as a magical practice. More often than not, on a magical walk, I’m singing at the same time One of my favourites for this time of year is the Fith Fath song. It was written in 1978 by Caitlin Mathews, and I imagine it’s somewhat derived from the confessions of Isobel Gowdie, a Scottish woman who confessed to witchcraft in 1662. It is based on a specific part of her testimony where she described her process of shape shifting:

I shall go as a wren in Spring,
With sorrow and sighing on silent wing,
I shall go in our Lady’s name,
Aye till I come home again.
Then we shall follow as falcons grey,
And hunt thee cruelly for our prey,
And we shall go in our Horned God’s name,
Aye to fetch thee home again.
Then I shall go as a mouse in May,
Through fields by night, and in cellars by day,
And I shall go in our Lady’s name,
Aye till I come home again.
Then we shall follow as black tom cats,
And hunt thee through the fields and the vats,
And we shall go in our Horned God’s name,
Aye to fetch thee home again.
Then I shall go as an Autumn hare,
With sorrow and sighing and mickle care,
And I shall go in our Lady’s name,
Aye till I come home again.
Then we shall follow as swift greyhounds,
And dog thy steps with leaps and bounds,
And we shall go in our Horned God’s name,
Aye to fetch thee home again.
Then I shall go as a Winter trout,
With sorrow and sighing and mickle doubt,
And I shall go in our Lady’s name,
Aye till I come home again.
Then we shall follow as otters swift,
And bind thee fast so thou cans’t shift,
And we shall go in our Horned God’s name,
Aye to fetch thee home again.

As I walk and sing (softly and only to myself or perhaps a companion or two), I will be listening also, not with my ears but with my spine and my heart, with my bones, and also with my feet. My body will lead me into the more secluded parts of the cemetery, to more forgotten places where the trees are overgrown and secretive and where even the groundskeepers forget to go. I will be listening for a particular presence among the trees, looking for the rooted one who is waiting for me. When I find her, I will greet her, first with silence and reverence, and then with libations. If she would like, I’ll tell her the stories of the lands I have walked through, of the rivers and oceans of distant times, and the friends who have been lost to darkness. I will place my red eggs among the hollows of her roots, and I’ll tell her what I hope for and also what I fear. I will tell her in allyship and kinship and not expect anything but her kindness and blessing in return. With an antler, I will pierce the ground and dig a small hole. I will draw the saining signs and marks of my craft. I will mark them out in flour as I have been taught. Into the darkness of the hollow will go the Master’s portion of the Red Meal and a fairy supper for the dwellers of that place. I will sing more charms and place my tears in the dark earth. I will ask that tree if we are ever to meet again in this time and place. If the answer is yes, I’ll enquire as to how I can be of service when next I visit. But if the answer is no, I will solemnly nod and with a sharp knife fashion for her a wooden doll of twigs and leather and leaves. And I shall leave it with her as a memento of our communion. I will leave the area in silence by a crooked way, and I will not look back.
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NONFICTION — OCCULT

"NIGHT AS EGRESS" OR "CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE DENDROPHILE" BY DAMON STANG

When I was young, around 12 or so, I was struck by an odd compulsion, almost as strong as the other, more pubescent directives of my teenage years. I began to walk at night. Only very late at night, and well past the midnight hour. By the time my family and the rest of our small suburb was securely in bed, I had been plotting my escape for hours. There was something calling me from an unseen distance, a sensual plurality insisting upon my surrender to wandering, without any linear directive. The inevitability of my heeding its call lived in my bones, in my marrow, and the very thick of my blood. But the nocturnal journeys always necessitated a carefully planned and executed escape from my home, which I shared with my family and a fluctuating number of short and long term residents.

My home was unusual in that it served as a sort of half-way house for children mainly, through a turbulent political environment. Although that’s not what this story is about. The walls, doors and fences around the house I grew up in were reinforced, not just as structures upholding physical boundaries, but also the political and ethical ramparts within which my family had become encrusted. To imagine this place as a fortress in its own humble way could be well argued. The house was always alive in its reality as a place simultaneously of sanctuary and risk. Our eccentricity, our defiance, and our inability to entirely mask my mother’s political sedition made us a constant target of scrutiny from evangelical neighbors. They gossiped, they watched, they glowered. Eventually they would run us out of town. But that’s not what this story is about either.

The house was surrounded on every side by a multitude of trees. A Peach tree, an Apricot tree, an Acacia with beautiful and long white thorns, a voluptuous Wisteria Vine. A Syringa that bloomed purple in the Spring, three Apple trees, a plum tree, a lemon tree that produced a supernatural all-year harvest, a pepper tree, a Pomegranate, and 2 Marula trees. It was the trees that ruled that plot of land. And still to this day, when I think about that time and that place, I remember each individually, the feel and the smell of them, the bark against my skin. When many were felled shortly after our exodus, we took it very personally.

A typical teenager, I hated the town I grew up in. It was an angry town. It was politically conservative, bigoted, and controlled by the Dutch Reformed and Baptist churches. My burgeoning queer identity led me into an early outspoken and adversarial relationship with organized religion. Unsurprisingly I was a frequent target of violence and derision, but so was my family as a whole. We were outcasts generally regarded on a spectrum of being somewhere between Satanist and terrorist. The truth fell somewhere in an unnamable middle ground far beyond the expected, but that’s also not what this story is about either.

Before my parent’s marriage officially collapsed, my mother had been attempting to renovate our home into a school of sorts. She wanted to build a private center to progressive education. She was the most dangerous kind of idealist, the kind whose beliefs and actions are formed in isolation and without support. Her convictions were entirely her own. They were ferocious, and they were admirable. My father, a man of Puerto Rican descent, frustrated by her unquenchable political activism, left, and with him also the secondary income that would have barely allowed her dream to come true. This would not stop her though. The house would always remain unfinished, somewhere between a residence and an institution. A building poised between revolution and failure.

That’s where we lived.

The heat of Summer would keep me listening to cassettes in my bedroom until I felt the dreams of the other residents gather like a cool mist. I would stop the tape, lean in with yearning to the other things that filled the abyss. Once the absence of the day was tangible, once possibility and a potential of solitude was heavy and deliciously swollen, that’s when I would escape. That’s when I would leave to meet my lovers in the shadows.

After bending back and climbing through the bars of my bedroom window, I would have to clamber through the branches of a dense, low growing pomegranate tree outside my bedroom window. The smell of rotting fruit on the mud left from recent rain is rich and kind. The air is at first still and then dances in gusts of dry and cooling whispers. The sound of locusts and the slow drone of industrial machinery is grinding on the outskirts of town. My sisters are asleep in the girls’ room next door, so it was crucial not to make a sound lest I set off a chain reaction of anxiety among the younger ones that would surely thwart my efforts and bring down a punishment that would not be cruel but certainly exacting.

I was a lonely child. My family situation necessitated a strange balancing act between interaction and isolation. We were encouraged to put our best faces forward but were discouraged from allowing anyone into the secretive operations of our home life. On more than one occasion, I found myself disassociating, often to the point of retreating into the bushes, crawling into a ball, shutting my eyes and willing myself into an altered state of consciousness. To the best of my knowledge, I was never discovered doing this, another well-kept secret, a footnote in a love letter. Is there such a thing? Of course, there is.

With a neat vault over the garden gate, which even my gangly inaptitude could manage, I would be in a river of darkness. I would be in a stream of possibility and fateful meanderings. On those nights, I became ears, nose, feet, and heart. A thing both Alien and Native, but truly neither. The shorter and sacred hours of the night invited me in as a refugee fleeing to arrive in an amnesty of mysterious expectations and alluded possibility.

There were many ways of going forth by night. Sometimes I would be running at a full lupine sprint, or skipping, or leaping. In certain areas, thick with bush and vine, I would indulge in a leopard crawl. Among a grove of Blue Gum trees — fresh and bracing — I would be going in balletic twirls. In these times, I was perhaps no longer a person with linear sentience but really a collection of impressions, a matrix of condensing sensations in a river of darkness. That’s what this story is about.

Nobody had any business being out late in that town. There were few streetlights and the times of the era were seething angrily. I had seen more than one murder by then. I was afraid of the night. I have been afraid of many things. But fear is not my enemy, a companion maybe? Fear did not stop me.

My wanderings were a remaking. The road wasn’t treading backwards nor forwards, but inward. I began to walk with my eyes closed for stretches of terrain, rehearsing blindness, mapping the night as an eternal homeland, borderless and made only of smell, the sound of leaves churning, and the screaming insects. I would open my eyes, assess the landscape (quite familiar to me) close my eyes and walk again. I learned to walk with confidence. I walked to where I was called to be. Through the church grounds, across the rail road tracks, a few miles to the edge of town, just before the salt marshes, is a grove of Pin Oaks barely 100 years old. The trees are young, lithe, but sovereign in their girth. At the tipping point of Summer, particularly when the moon is full or waxing, their leaves are vital and fragrant from the heat. This was my place. These were the lovers my blinded feet could find.

I would never divest myself of clothing. I would sit for a very long time. Sometimes chattering voices, and sometimes brief and quicksilver lights, but always the deep low thrumming roots sonorously pondering. The grove was fairly populated, and in its presence were my strange lovers, the peculiar voiceless storytellers. Lovers to whom I held passion, and who beckoned me back repeatedly. There was no sexual aspect to this at any time, but a steep sensuous swoon. Those trees made me feel beautiful and powerful, that’s a fact. I consorted with them frequently. I would touch them each gently and only by invitation. I would observe their dances, tell them my stories, lay my head in their hollows. They were too tall to climb, but I would linger among the trunks watching the cascade of leaves above. I stand by those nights, I put four Summers into that grove. My spine grew tall in that grove and my voice learned to carry. I was nearly an adult when I said good-bye. It was the end of Summer. There had been a flood. There was no reason for my family to rebuild. It was an entirely different country, and we decided to go our separate ways. With my back against the moon, I buried my letters, and my coins, the spine of a snake, the shell of a pigeon egg, and the key to our old front door. I left in the night.

What remains to this day is that no matter what country or city I find myself wandering in, I will find my roots in the hot dark shadows gathering thicker and tighter as the warm days collapse toward the Equinox, and then the frosts. It’s the story of years and years, built upon an endless sequence of nights, of how I am becoming a witch.

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NONFICTION — OCCULT

"RADICAL LIBRARIANS” BY PETER DOWEL*

The young professional operating in the world today might be forgiven some degree of ennui. Depressed in the very bloom of their youth, they could be permitted a few moments of despair, thinking that life in the colorless bureaucracy of a dying empire is destined to be forever enervating. In fact, due to an over-professionalized elite, they may feel they lack the models on which to build a future career. However hungry they may be for an alternative way of doing things, they are, to some degree, stuck with systems that continue to exert active harm on a diverse public. And they will join the ranks of the gainfully employed in the lowest possible of positions. It may be years before they are empowered to do anything about it. By then, they may very well be coopted in the patterns and habits of their institutions.

We are grateful, of course, to find a long history of activism among library professionals, who can provide a counterweight to this assault on an already-exhausted population, that is at once over-worked and underpaid, by monsters who are obviously willing to destroy what little is left of our democracy for what can only be described as $100 million homes. In researching this rich history of activism, I have been able to find a roadmap for how the organization of the world’s information and alternative cataloging methods could help make this task of contributing to a better world seem more possible tomorrow than it does today.

SANFORD BERMAN
Sandford (aka Sandy) Berman went into retirement the way that many people dream of going into retirement — with a three page memo that was received poorly by his supervisors. Unfortunately, many of the advances that were made in cataloguing under his watch at the Hennepin County Public Library in Minneapolis were abandoned following his dismissal. A journalist described the offending memo as a volume “thick with ampersands and blobs of correction fluid, typed over letters, and words.” According to this journalistic account, the memo was “a bit crumpled and smudged at the edges, and had the visceral stink and charm of an era that’s all but gone.” (CITY PAGES JULY 14, 1999.) Two years earlier, in the 1996/1997 biennial anothology that Berman co-edited (Alternative Library Literature), Berman gave his own account of his life’s work in an article called “Unreal: How HCL Catalogs Fiction.” In this account, Berman explains how much more thoroughly he was able to catalog children and teenage literature than the Library of Congress. He included access points for intergenerational friendships, interracial friendships, non-racist and non-classist literature, nonsexist literature, non-lookist literature, homeless people and orphans. He was a man apparently compelled to bestow information on anyone he thought might be in need of it and eventually waged his own guerrilla clipping service against the monsters who had pushed him out of a job. He was an advocate both for the inclusion of leftist material in public libraries and someone who tried to “brush the barnacles off” highly offensive Library of Congress subject headings, once complaining to a journalist about “bibliocide by cataloging.” (AUGUSTYN FEB 22, 1993). In another article published in Celeste West’s Revolting Librarians, Berman explained, “If you’re a bank manager, real estate broker, or stock market player, you’ll emphatically dig at least one large, well-funded public library in the LA area. It’s got everything to satisfy the financier and major-league rip-off artist… and a number of expensive investors’ services like Moody’s and Standard & Poor. But if you’re young, hip, radical, impecunious, Black, Chicano, or into one of the many ‘liberation’ scenes, you won’t dig it so much.” (50 REVOLTING LIBRARIANS) In that same article, he defended the literary tastes of the avant-garde, arguing that long-haired freaks are, in fact, as much a part of the community as anyone else.

DOROTHY PORTER
Dorothy Porter was a librarian at Howard University who built the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center into what is today the largest repository of books, documents, and ephemera of the global black experience in the world today (MOORLAND-SPINGARN). She was also the first African-American to graduate from Columbia with a library science degree (DOROTHY B. PORTER WIKIPEDIA). She encountered in her career a Dewey Decimal System which classified black work primarily in one of two categories: 326, which meant slavery, and 325, which meant colonization. As remarkable as it sounds, Porter was the first to classify works of black writers by genre and author, making it accessible for a demand in black literature that she has said in interviews didn’t exist when she began her efforts (NUNES N. PAG). Porter’s approach, which built upon earlier work at Howard University by other four earlier librarians (Lula V. Allen, Edith Brown, Lula E. Conner and Rosa C. Hershaw) identified additional categories for black-authored books, such as art, anthropology, communications, demography, economics, education, geography, history, health, international relations, linguistics, literature, medicine, music, political science, sociology, sports, and religion. She built the collection not on the strength of an endowment but by grit and determination, forming relationships with book-dealers and securing the material despite a lack of funds. A journalist writing for the Smithsonian Magazine quotes Porter from an oral history interview by Avril Johnson Madison, “I think one of the best things I could have done was to become friends with book dealers... . I had no money, but I became friendly with them. I got their catalogs, and I remember many of them giving me books, you see. I appealed to publishers, ‘We have no money, but will you give us this book?’” (NUNES N. PAG) It is worth noting that bibliographers of the period when she began her work were unable even to evaluate the price of black work and refused to do so, citing their unfamiliarity with the material.

TERRY BELANGER
Terry Belanger retired as the Founding Director of Rare Book School in 2009, although he still teaches two courses on book illustration processes there today, which Kyle Triplett, the rare book teacher at Pratt, said was so exhaustive that he left the class thinking that the sky was looking a bit like mezzotint (the class runs from 9:00 a.m. until about 10:00 at night). Belanger came to our attention on the basis of a small volume that we found, quite by chance, in the library at the Manhattan campus, entitled “Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books.” It is well-known that cataloguing represents the values and hierarchies of a society and the individuals involved and also impacts the accessibility of information. It is perhaps also important to acknowledge just how many people have thought that the criteria by which books should be judged was the size of the objects themselves. Samuel Pepys, an English diarist and naval officer who left important accounts of both the bubonic plague and the Great Fire of London, due to the sheer volume of his record keeping, preferred to fashion high heels of various heights to ensure that all the books in his library lined up to an even appearance along their upper edge. He bequeathed 3,000 books to Cambridge College in 1724 numbered from 1-3000 on the basis of size, fitting exactly into 12 bookcases, some of which can still be seen at Magdalene College, Cambridge, today (BELANGER 5). Alistair Cooke is another unusual example. He had an entire wall of books on America in his New York apartment and ordered them like the map of the country, so that books on California were on the lower left side, and books on Maine were in the upper right (BELANGER 11-12). The celebrated book collector Sir Robert Cotton, whose manuscripts formed the founding donation of the British Library, had 12 bookcases himself, each adorned on the top by a bust of one of the first 12 Caesars. Belanger reports that the only known manuscript of Beowulf, which was part of Cotton’s donation, was originally catalogued Cotton MS. Nero D IV, because it was the fourth book in, on the fourth shelf down, in the bookcase with the bust of Nero (BELANGER 13). Writing In the Tract of the Bookworm in 1897, Irving Browne described allowing for more diversity on his shelves as his matured. “There was a time when I loved to see my books arranged with a view to uniformity of height and harmony of color without respect to subjects. That time I regard as my vealy period.” His tastes eventually evolved to allow for “a little artistic confusion—high and low together here and there, like a democratic community … just as children in velvet and furs sit next to a newsboy, or a little girl in calico with a pigtail at Sunday school, or as beggars and princes kneel side by side on the cathedral pavement” (BELANGER 7).

CELESTE WEST
Celeste West was a librarian and polyamorous lesbian writer who co-founded the first woman-owned library publisher in the country, Booklegger Press, in 1972 (CELESTE WEST WIKIPEDIA). In the introduction to Revolting Librarians, the press’s first publication, she wrote of the “riproaring satisfaction” it brought her to publish “outright and upfront what some of us really feel about the library world: how it relates to our personal being.” West felt that acknowledging personal experience and identity was more important than pretending to an objectivity that doesn’t exist in the real world. This, West wrote, displeased the “hierachs and sachems.” It was West’s objectives that librarians stop playing “follow the leader” and take orders “as hacks, apologists, or nitpickers.” She believed her responsibility as a librarian was not to the power structure but to the library patron who she served. It was West’s opinion that books should balance their collections but push materials that are on the side of liberation, rather than oppression. In publishing her first anthology, West wrote that she was planting a tree, believing that liberation was contagious, and that the mechanisms of power benefited from too serious an approach. She cited the Merry Pranksters in defying the “CREEPING MEATBALL.” This, she wrote, was a “mocking refusal to dignify the big bumtripping forces of evil, which flourish on reeespect.” (REVOLTING LIBRARIANS N. PAG)

WORKS CITED
Augustyn, Frederick. “Cataloging the 1990s: Sandy Berman’s Challenge to LC.” The Library of Congress Information Bulletin. Feb 22, 1993. Accessed by: https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/93/9304/berman.html

Belanger, Terry. Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books. Oak Knoll Books. 1982.

Berman, Sandy, and Danky, James, editors. Alternative Library Literature, 1996/1997 A Biennial Anthology. McFarland & Company. 1998.

“Celeste West.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 22 August 2023 last updated. Accessed by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeste_West

“Dorothy B. Porter.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 26 November 2023 last updated. Accessed by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_B._Porter

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NONFICTION — INFORMATION SCIENCE

"STALKER, A MOVIE BASED ON A NOVEL" BY GERALDINE FIRE*

Stalker is a 1979 film by Andrey Tartovsky. It is a haunting and slow-moving but incredible evocative film in which the characters don’t even have names. A guide, called the Stalker, takes two characters, nicknamed the Writer and the Professor, into a forbidden zone where strange and dangerous things seem to occur. In the film, no one knows if this strangeness is on account of a mysterious meteor shower or aliens from another world. Mostly, the point of the film is just to survive the journey. The danger is heightened by the knowledge that no one could hope to survive without the expertise of a guide. None of the three men seem to have met previous to their trip. One of them is drunk. They enter the Zone by following a heavy transport vehicle through the gates that guard the perimeter. The main action of the film is that three men move about two hundred yards through unfamiliar territory to a Room, where they think they will be granted their greatest wish in accordance with technology that the aliens (or some other mystery) may have left behind. Although the ultimate meaning of the film is open to interpretation, there is some parallel between the Zone and areas of industrial and nuclear pollution. The story has been said to anticipate the contamination zone around Chernobyl. Alarmingly, the film was, in fact, shot downstream from a chemical plant, and the toxicity of that location has been blamed, not only for the death of the director (who died of cancer in 1986), but also the death of Larissa Tartovsky, the director’s wife, and Anatoly Solonitsyn, the actor who plays the Writer.

Compared to the novel it’s based on, I would say that the movie is deeply compelling, even while its premise is less clear. There is something that can not be comprehended in the film. In the opening scene, the audience is shown a syringe, a half-drunk glass of what could be water. The camera pans over motionless bodies that could be asleep or dead. It is as if the camera were panning over a photograph. A child is asleep. The father is looking at a motionless woman who is staring at the floor. It takes several minutes before the man crawls out of bed. His wife eventually follows him into another room. She is sure she knows what he’s going to do. “You’ve made an old woman out of me,” she screams, “and you’ve ruined my life.” She is trying to keep her husband, the Stalker, from going back to the Zone, afraid that he’ll end up in prison. The film then introduces us to another character, more glamorous and less jaded, speaking to a younger woman whose name he does not know. “The world is ruled by cast-iron laws,” he tells her, “and it’s insufferably boring.” It is eventually revealed that this second man is the writer and a drunk, about to go on this perilous journey with the Professor and the Stalker as a guide. Beyond that, we don’t learn very much about them (in the film at least).

The historical perspective, coming from a late Soviet empire, is bleak but also non-elitist. The area around the Zone is under the jurisdiction of the Institute, which is not a site of action or resistance. There is no professionalized strategy of a humanity capable of survival, as is often the case in American fiction. The bureaucracy is very much in the background of these people’s lives, technically ruling over it all. There are no experts, ready to save the day. Nor are there brave young men willing to fight or discover what the aliens have left behind. There are just three deeply flawed and unimpressive people, each breaking the law to serve their own interests. In the film, the Stalker has even come at the expense of his wife and child. It is a world where almost nothing can matter. That attitude toward life is part of what propels the film forward. Apparently, life in the late Soviet Union wass a bit depressing. According to the Writer inside the film, even an alien civilization would likely be the same: another set of iron-clad rules without meaning. At the same time, Tartovsky is able to create a world that is so visually compelling it doesn’t require much explanation.

Reading Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (the novel that the film is based on), one wouldn’t necessarily see the same potential. For one thing, the books’s authors do not refrain from naming their characters. The book begins with an excerpt from an interview (as does the movie), although the information conveyed by this interview is more extensive in the book and far less mysterious. A man called Dr. Pillman is being congratulated on the sort of discovery that is known worldwide (known by everybody—even to school children). But he denies himself credit. In this way, the outcome of their adventure becomes immediately clear. We know that a wish has been granted. The man has made it through the Zone alive. And we know what he asked for (a prize-winning discovery). The mystery comes from the fact that he seems so haunted by the experience.

In the movie, the narrative drive comes from the narrative tension (there is great danger of even the smallest misstep inside the Zone) as well as the provocative imagery and the mystery surrounding the whole premise of the film. In the book, the narrative drive also comes from something the brothers are trying to communicate beyond the mere facts of the plot. The story, importantly, comes from the Soviet Union, which had been subject to decades of censorship. The novel ends with some explanation of its purpose. Red (the Stalker in the film) comes across the Sphere (which the movie calls the Room) where a piece of alien technology is supposed to grant him his wish. He says, “I’m an animal, you can see that I’m an animal. I have no words, they haven’t taught me the words; I don’t know how to think, those bastards didn’t let me learn how to think. But if you really are—all powerful, all knowing, all understanding—figure it out! Look into my soul, I know—everything you need is in there. It has to be. Because I’ve never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! Figure out yourself what I want—because I know it can’t be bad! The hell with it all, I just can’t think of a thing other than those words of his—HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!”

The plot, although already given away in the book by the opening interview, is the scaffold onto which the brothers have draped a way of looking at the world. Unlike the film, the book is written in a documentary style that is actually very heavy on facts. It does slow down time the same way as the film, and the book does not make a mystery of itself. In fact, before we even begin the first chapter, we are told more about the Stalker than we learn in the entire film. We are told that Red was once a lab assistant in the Harmont Branch at the International Institute of Extraterrestrial Cultures (what becomes simply “The Institute” in the film). We learn that he is named Redrick Schuhart and that he had a mentor who was obsessed with studying “canisters” from the zone. This curiosity (pointless in the stalker’s view—just a scientific inquiry meant for worthless accolades) leads to the mentor’s death. From the first chapter title alone, we even learn his relationship status. Red starts the chapter single and then decides to get married.

Unlike the film, the book moves through backstory and, being science fiction, works rather extensively with the very facts that the film withholds from its audience. Rather than focusing exclusively on the eeriness of the experience of moving through the Zone as a team, which encompasses almost the entire scope of the film, the book has a much broader horizon. It tells something about Red’s life. Red is also more interested in providing for his family in the book. Rather than simply ignoring his wife’s pleas not to go back the zone, he is actually willing to selling “hell slime” to a rather questionable vendor, bent on producing a weapon of mass destruction, in order to provide for her. His daughter is, unfortunately, deformed in the novel because of his activities, covered in light fur, and affectionately called the monkey.

For me, the book was propelled forward not by mystery of the situation but by the cleverness of dialogue and the relatability of the characters. The story deviates from the usual science fiction of its era in being centered on the everyman. These are not “players” in any sense of the word. They are small-time people. The dialogue reflects this. At times, all three characters wonder whether deviating from their normal, daily habits and procedures was even worth the trouble. Success in such a society as the Soviet Union is something to be scoffed at, perhaps because the standards of success are questionable (being the judgement of the state). At one point, Red thinks about his wife waking up in her bathrobe with the pillow mark still on her cheek. “I shouldn’t have gotten mixed up in this, he thought. Five hundred thousand [dollar or rubless] … What the hell do I need five hundred thousand for? What, am I going to buy a bar?”

The book and the film are both very clearly based on the Fermi Paradox, which holds that alien life could be so different from our own that we might not even recognize each other as physical lifeforms. In the book, it becomes clear what has happened: this is a first-encounter story. An alien species has come to visit earth. What differs from other first-encounter stories is that the aliens didn’t care one bit about us. While incredibly significant in the history and psychology of mankind, the event doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact on the aliens at all. They came, they stayed for a while, and then they left. It was as if they had interrupted their joyride and stopped on the side of the ride for a picnic and didn’t notice the ants. They left behind their trash, which is marvelous only from the perspective of the pitiful humans they left in their wake.

The pace of the film is far slower than the book and commands our attention by the maintenance of narrative tension—related to the extreme danger of the landscape—and highly evocative imagery. At different moments, the characters appear as if they are frozen against a moving backdrop. Over the course of a minute, you might see the Stalker struggle over a rock and climb a ladder. The three men might enter a strange ruin. The camera might pan over what remains of a mosaic, with the sound of dripping water and no other action, for several minutes at a time. In one scene, there is simply an extended shot of the three men moving across a field. This is done to great effect.

In the book, there is comedy in the character’s abjection. Even the exposition coming inside of dialogue serves a purpose: this is a world of campy mansplaining. The men, although not held up as exemplary, are sometimes eager to explain and do so, sometimes at length. At times, they are too much themselves, too depressed and jaded to take credit for their own accomplishments or acknowledge the miracle of what they’re seeing. In the film, this is less emphasized but not absent. In one scene for example, the group is reunited after the Professor risks his life to go back for a knapsack filled with his underwear. The three of them start talking about what glories could come from their journey, literally, as they are lying down to sleep. Talk of such things as Nobel Prizes are literally making them want to shut their eyes and fall down, right in the mud where they were standing. “What’s important,” the Stalker says, “is the Professor’s bag with his underwear is safe.”

When challenged, he continues to mock the need to think any more about it, “What is there to understand? Binomial theorem?”

The film, while stripping the story of a lot of data, stays true to the central purpose: which is the idea that there is no universality to our cognition. It creates an atmosphere of evocative imagery in which this point is still made clear.

NONFICTION — film