{"id":8222,"date":"2025-05-15T10:12:19","date_gmt":"2025-05-15T15:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/?p=8222"},"modified":"2025-06-24T13:51:50","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T18:51:50","slug":"library-fadeout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/blog\/library-fadeout\/","title":{"rendered":"Library Fadeout"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Time Capsule<\/h2>\n

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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

The Library in the 1990s<\/h2>\n

Though not exactly Borges\u2019s \u201cLibrary of Babel,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cFire Exit,\u201d which was not a fire exit, and through which you entered a place called the \u201csub-basement,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cAlive with words, \/ vibrating like a cymbal \/ touched before it has been struck,\u201d1<\/sup><\/strong> like the hum of a machine, and after all a \u201cbook is a machine to think with\u201d 1.5<\/sup><\/strong> and a library is \u201ca memory machine,\u201d2<\/sup><\/strong> so why wouldn\u2019t you hear these vibrations, from ten million machines running quietly in the background? A library of libraries and a machine of machines.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A nearly-endless card catalog lined both the north and the south hallways of the second floor:<\/p>\n

\"View<\/a>
View of the second floor north hallway showing half of the card catalog.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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)\u2014librarians 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 \u201conline card catalog.\u201d<\/p>\n

Descending to the basement, passing the Newspaper Library on the left and the University Archives on the right (\u201c\u2018You think you run an archive,\u2019 Meadowes said. \u2018You don\u2019t. It runs you\u2019\u201d3<\/sup><\/strong>), 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<\/sup><\/strong>) 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\u2019s 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<\/em> journalist declared it \u201cgraffiti headquarters,\u201d5<\/sup><\/strong> and it wasn\u2019t the usual scrawled folderol either. The aforementioned journalist described this graffiti as \u201chomosexual confessions,\u201d 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<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe University has made us go to the johns to find our satisfaction,\u201d 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cruising can take place anywhere: at an adult store, public parks, bathrooms at the mall or at the Undergraduate Library.6<\/sup><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 \u201clibraries\u201d (there were dozens of them, after all)? The sentence lazily meanders its way from an almost indifferent \u201canywhere\u201d to an emphatic \u201cUndergraduate Library,\u201d evidently the sine qua non<\/em> of cruising at the University of Illinois.<\/p>\n

An unusual book, which you would have found in the \u201cDelayed Access Area\u201d 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:<\/p>\n

Undergrad Library: First and second floor men\u2019s rooms. Busy in the early to mid-afternoon, and again after 7 p.m. If you hook up, the Graduate Library offers more privacy.\u201d7<\/sup><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Sexplorers<\/a>
SeXplorers<\/em> was a guide to sex tourism for gay men. This entry for Champaign-Urbana, from the 1995 edition, gave the Undergraduate Library top billing.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The \u201cGraduate Library\u201d 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 (\u201cIt 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\u201d8<\/sup><\/strong>).<\/p>\n

In my opinion, however, nothing in the library could have been more intimidating than the Undergraduate Library\u2019s plate-glass, pivot-hinged doors.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 Deucalion and Pyrrha, by the sculptor Lorado Taft:<\/p>\n

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