Filed under: Book, China, Culture Clash, Industrial Design, Law school, Library, New College, Wonder
My walk this evening landed me in the main library. Understand, I’ve only spent time an appreciable amount of time in four college libraries: The New College Library, a two story behemoth sports a whopping 267,000 volumes; the music library at the University of Florida, where I spent a couple of days reading and photocopying Scarlatti scores; Zhejiang Normal University library, which was an incredible building that opened while was teaching in China and featured mostly books in Chinese and about 40 copies of MacBeth and Jurassic Park (somehow I don’t believe the homepage when it says they have 226,890,000 books); and most recently the Emory Law School library, which has the best natural light in town, but is mostly useless for browsing (those ALRs and regional reporters just don’t do it for me). That’s it. So imagine my surprise when I ended up in the stacks at the Robert W. Woodruff library (there wasn’t any difference between The Stacks and the rest of the library at new college). Ten stories of wall to wall books. They have so many books the shelves are on tracks so they can move together and fit more shelves in each room. These tracks work with the push of a button, which freaked me out when I pushed on for fun and then realized that I hadn’t checked to make sure no one would be crushed to death (the law library has movable shelves, but ours are manual, with big wheels a the ends each shelving system). There are over 3,000,000 books in the library. And that’s not including the eight other libraries on campus.
The part of the library where people hang out and do work (the computers have giant 20-some-odd inch screens!) is an amazing marble building. Students are everywhere studying late into the night (open 24 hours!) and goofing around. It reminded me of an episode in the first season of Felicity where they’re staying up late studying for finals in the library and everyone keeps shushing them (which my friend does at the law library when people are being loud; it’s awesome). There’s a wonderful reading room with big leather chairs and dark oak desks. But the stacks are in a monstrous building from what I guess is the ’70s. The ceilings are low and the light isn’t good. It’s incredibly claustrophobic, but that’s OK because it’s miles of books. More books that you knew existed. I originally wanted to look at some Peanuts comics, but found myself quickly lost and roaming from Virgil to Erasmus to books in German and French and Sanskrit (he says as though he’d know what Sanskrit looks like). I even got suck on an elevator trying to get up to the ninth floor to find some books on the philosophy of art (I eventually made it and got two for winter break). It was quite an adventure. This library is so high tech I was able to do a self-checkout for my books. It was like shopping at Smith’s again (I’ve been missing New Mexico lately, but more on that some other time).
To complete my suspiciously authentic university experience I went to one of the dining halls (yup, they have more than one, including a cafe in the library that’s open 24 hours) to get french fries at 10:30 at night. When I was an undergrad, if you wanted to eat after 9:00 (when the C-Store closed) you had to get in a car and drive to Perkins (oh, Perkins who I miss you and your pot roast at 2:00 AM on a Tuesday). Then I walked around the quad and breathed in the night air.
The static electricity is so intense here that I dread shutting the car door and touching my ipod. The cat has it particularly bad. She's white and incredibly fluffy (which causes me to hate her every time I want to wear a black suit jacket). She has been known to try and lick the metal legs of the chair. There's an audible pop. At night, on the wool blanket, in the dark, she comes to you and demand to be pet. You can see the electricity when you run your hand down her back or rub her ear. It's pretty; like stirring up phosphorescence in the Gulf.
