A Time Capsule

At the beginning of this school year, the Library celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the Main Library building. Part of the celebration was the opening of a time capsule that had been placed inside the cornerstone of the building. I have, for fun, assembled a time capsule of my own: objects, documents, and memories that record what the Library was like when I was a student here, not a hundred years ago but thirty.

The Library in the 1990s

Though not exactly Borges’s “Library of Babel,” the University Library in the 1990s was a library of libraries: over fifty libraries scattered across campus, from Beckman Center Library on the northern boundary of campus to the Veterinary Medicine Library on the southern. Most of these libraries were devoted to specific academic disciplines (the Geology Library), but some were for specific ways of finding information (the Illini Union Browsing Room), or specific source formats (the Newspaper Library), or specific types of patrons (the Undergraduate Library). Libraries seemed to be everywhere. The residence halls housed eight libraries of their own.

The greatest of all the libraries was the Main Library, comprising twenty-five libraries on four floors (plus a basement). It must have been designed to keep your mind fit and trim: it was a method of indirection and redirection, with odd numbered rooms on the south side, even numbered on the north, and countless unnumbered or split-numbered rooms: reading rooms, reference rooms, periodical rooms, bookstacks, seminar rooms, offices, break rooms, staff workrooms, faculty studies, patron carrels, rooms within rooms, secret vaults, cages, locked doors, mezzanines, and staircases leading nowhere. The second floor became the fifth if you walked through the wrong door, and the part of the building housing the Main Stacks, despite being no taller than the rest of the building, had ten floors, not four. Moving west through the Main Stacks, you began to find floors between floors, breaking the rational run of integers like the sharps and flats on a piano keyboard. In the basement was a doorway, marked “Fire Exit,” which was not a fire exit, and through which you entered a place called the “sub-basement,” a place that ought to have been a metaphysical impossibility but then the whole library sometimes felt like a metaphysical impossibility. The Main Library made you think that Sarah Winchester had worked on too trifling a scale.

When you entered the Main Library building you first saw hallways and doors: look around all you like, you would see no books. Still, it was a palace of the printed word, and with its hidden libraries and sacrosanct silence, the place felt “Alive with words, / vibrating like a cymbal / touched before it has been struck,”¹ like the hum of a machine, and after all a “book is a machine to think with” ^1.5 and a library is “a memory machine,”² so why wouldn’t you hear these vibrations, from ten million machines running quietly in the background? A library of libraries and a machine of machines.

There was no History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library then. The History and Philosophy Library was on the fourth floor, the Newspaper Library in the basement.

A nearly-endless card catalog lined both the north and the south hallways of the second floor:

The card catalog was located in close proximity to Acquisitions (room 246, currently home to the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library), Cataloging (room 220, currently the Media Commons), and the Reference Library (today, the Shebik Family Reading Room)—librarians from all three of these units were the principal users of the card catalog, which remained, at this time, the definitive record of library holdings. For many years, patrons continued to call the online version of the catalog the “online card catalog.”

Descending to the basement, passing the Newspaper Library on the left and the University Archives on the right (“‘You think you run an archive,’ Meadowes said. ‘You don’t. It runs you’”³), you found yourself walking east through an underground tunnel. Though you might not know it, you were leaving the Main Library. The tunnel ended, paradoxically, in a large antechamber, a mostly-empty space with self-help pamphlets (Addiction, ADD, AIDS, Alcohol, Allergies, Anti-depressants, Anorexia, Anxiety, Birth control, Bulimia, Career guidance, Child abuse, Counseling, Cults, Depression, Drugs and drug abuse, Eating disorders, Family, Friendship, Headaches, Healthy lifestyle, Insomnia, Loneliness, Love, Marriage, Men’s issues, Mental health, Motivation, Pain, Phobias, PMS, Pregnancy, Relationships, Resume writing, Self esteem, Weight management⁴) in transparent acrylic display racks screwed onto unlovely dark brick walls; a coin-operated photocopy machine; two drinking fountains; a vending machine that sold school supplies (ear plugs, erasers, Excedrin, floppy discs, No-Doze, paper clips, pencils, pens, Post-It Notes, three-by-five notecards, whiteout); and the bathrooms. The men’s bathroom stalls were covered with lubricious graffiti, for which the Undergraduate Library was famous, at least as far back as 1979 when one Daily Illini journalist declared it “graffiti headquarters,”⁵ and it wasn’t the usual scrawled folderol either. The aforementioned journalist described this graffiti as “homosexual confessions,” but it was really more like a kind of trysting: someone might declare himself willing (even eager) to perform such-and-such an act, and a respondent might leave a date and time when he would avail himself of this opportunity. These assignations were, apparently, real and not at all uncommon; you could read about them in the Daily Illini:

“The University has made us go to the johns to find our satisfaction,” one homosexual said. He said the most common cruising places for homosexuals in the community are Lincoln Square, the Illini Union basement, and the Undergraduate Library.

Cruising can take place anywhere: at an adult store, public parks, bathrooms at the mall or at the Undergraduate Library.⁶

So strange how each of these quotations, written decades apart, culminates in the Undergraduate Library. And how odd that the second quotation should begin with the general and end with the definite: four categories of place, and then, suddenly, the Undergraduate Library, conspicuously concrete and exact. Why not just say “libraries” (there were dozens of them, after all)? The sentence lazily meanders its way from an almost indifferent “anywhere” to an emphatic “Undergraduate Library,” evidently the sine qua non of cruising at the University of Illinois.

An unusual book, which you would have found in the “Delayed Access Area” of the Main Stacks, was a guide to sex tourism. The authors gave the Undergraduate Library pride of place in their listings for Champaign-Urbana, with the Main Library receiving secondary honors for the superior privacy its accommodations afforded:

Undergrad Library: First and second floor men’s rooms. Busy in the early to mid-afternoon, and again after 7 p.m. If you hook up, the Graduate Library offers more privacy.”⁷

The “Graduate Library” is what many people mistakenly called the Main Library, probably because it was located opposite the Undergraduate Library, and possibly also because people felt that only a graduate student could be smart enough to master its intimidating complexity. The complexity of libraries in general, and research libraries in particular, was famous, their organization often seeming arbitrary, making them easy targets for parody and satire (“It was difficult for someone who was not a specialist to make sense of the catalogue, since the titles were arranged not in alphabetical order, but according to the number of pages in each, with notations as to how many extra sheets (in order to avoid duplication) had been pasted into this or that book”⁸).

In my opinion, however, nothing in the library could have been more intimidating than the Undergraduate Library’s plate-glass, pivot-hinged doors.

Leaving the Undergraduate Library, crossing a plaza back to the west, you encountered two plinthed statues appearing to be studies of bodily deliquescence. Actually, they were the daughters of  Deucalion and Pyrrha, by the sculptor Lorado Taft:

I remember being told they were meant to symbolize rebirth through knowledge. If you had been a dilatory student, and if it was the semester’s end, then they probably looked more like symbols of complete mental breakdown, possibly the very mental breakdown you yourself were barely managing to parry, embattled as you were by deadlines, your mind pressurizing itself with the knowledge that you needed to research and write an entire term paper in three days (“The bridges were unbuilt and trouble coming”⁹). A knowledge of deadlines, you suspected, was not the kind of knowledge the sculptor intended to idealize. If I had not been told, I doubt I would ever have known the mythical referents, and if someone had given me the clue, “classical mythology,” I probably would have guessed the story of Jason and the dragon’s teeth, new beginnings being not always a cause for celebration, especially when the thing that is new is your work on a term paper, and then another and another…

Speaking of battle…I loved the old, battleship linoleum on the Main Library’s third and fourth floors. It was saddle brown, but when the sun shone upon it through the stairwell windows it could look almost as light as stained maple. Whatever the exact color, it was the most mellow shade of brown (although so simple, attractive, and functional a color ought not be savaged by superlatives, and anyway I don’t even know what it would mean for a color to be the “most mellow,” possibly a comatose shade of brown? But it was not that either). Less attractive, to me, was the silly-putty colored dado.

Small burn marks in the linoleum marked the spots where patrons and staff had extinguished their cigarettes on the floor. I remember assuming that these burn marks must have been made long ago, but I find that, as late as 1989, an admonishing notice was the lead story in the library staff newsletter:

The Library has been designated as a no smoking building. This means that there is to be no smoking in the building (including the restrooms and the tunnel) with the single exception of the fourth floor staff smoking lounge.¹⁰

Ah, those troublesome bathrooms again! That much I can understand: the bathrooms were clearly dens on iniquity. I’m less sure why the author felt it necessary to explain, in considerable detail, what it meant for a building to be designated a “no smoking building.” And I’m confused why the word “staff” should be typographically emphasized, as if to suggest the existence of a fourth floor patron smoking lounge, in which patrons were prohibited from smoking, its “smoking lounge” name notwithstanding—the kind of arbitrary paradox that would have been unimaginable anywhere else, but that in the Main Library felt completely unsurprising. Mainly, however, this notice seems to be evidence that people must have been smoking all over the library as late as 1989, otherwise such a cease-and-desist letter could hardly have been necessary. Whenever it was that people actually stopped smoking in the library, it was before my time as a student, and the burn marks in the linoleum made the past feel present: I imagined Comp Lit students discussing nineteenth-century French novels with youthful avidity. You thought, back then the library must have been a sanctuary for reading, reflection, and discussion (and smoking).

In places this linoleum seemed to crack and crunch beneath your feet; places where, I assume, the adhesive had lost its hold on the subfloor, much as you might have been losing your hold on the semester’s steadfast reality.

At the north and south entrances, in contrast, the floors were an elegant, poured terrazzo, the south entrance especially beautiful, like jeweled enamel:

On the north end, the builders for some reason omitted the jewel-toned green, choosing instead to run apricot terrazzo right onto the stairwell pier:

Here, at the north entrance, Dr. Gallaudet slouched in repose—not the repose of a recumbent knight on a stone bier in a medieval church, but the repose of a teacher, which is to say no repose at all. What sights must he have seen, after midnight, when the Main Library closed, as he slouched there with his eyes open: the ghosts of happiness, the happiness of larking students long gone, lucky in learning, lambent with the glee of knowledge, a glee like the glow said to be produced by inhaled nitrous oxide.

Notes

10. Dale S. Montanelli, “No Smoking,” Library Office Notes, February 20, 1989.

9.  W.H. Auden, Poems (New York: Random House, 1934), 26.

8. Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 54-5.

7. SeXplorers: The Guide to Doing It on the Road, ed. Scott O’Hara (San Francisco, Calif.: PDA Press, 1995), 31.

6. Rich Cahan, “The Gay Community: For Some, Living Borders on the Impossible,” Daily Illini, October 27, 1973; Kim Rice and Kate Ruin, “Forget the Yacht…Cruising for the Landlocked,” Buzz Weekly, February 4, 2007.

5. John Dickison, “Aiming for the Best Porcelain Relief,” Daily Illini, February 24, 1979.

4. [Self Help Information Center Advertisement], Daily Illini, September 15, 1995.

3. John le Carré, A Small Town in Germany (New York: Coward-McCann, 1968), 131.

2. Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, trans. William Weaver (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), 236.

1.5. I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1924), 1.

1. Marianne Moore, Observations (New York: The Dial Press, 1924), 75.