The Firestone lounge?

Seven months ago, in a column about books at Princeton, I suggested (parenthetically) that the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library was in danger of turning into a "lounge." This notion was quickly pooh-poohed by various campus pooh-bahs, and one of my colleagues in the Department of Classics came to my office the next day to ask what on earth I was talking about. So it came as rather a shock to some when, just a few weeks later, samizdat plans for a new-and-improved Firestone fell onto our desks. There is much to say about these plans, created — no doubt at considerable expense — by the architectural firm Shepley Bulfinch, whose report from November 17, 2004 [pdf] is in the public domain, but I will point out here just one remarkable color-coded feature. Books, by which I mean "written or printed treatise[s ...], occupying several sheets of paper or other substance fastened together so as to compose a material whole" (Oxford English Dictionary), are designated as light blue — an attractive color that is entirely absent from the plans for the third floor, the second floor and the ground floor. The dominant colors on the third floor, which currently houses the volumes of greatest interest to three well-regarded departments (my own, philosophy and religion), are gold (for "Instructional Space") and light green ("Work and Study Space"). No wonder the Latin Salutatorian, Maya Maskarinec '07, now a Fulbright Scholar in Austria, spoke passionately to the Commencement crowd in June of "[f]earing lest the library should lose its books, as silly parchment plans of architects foretell." Bruce McCall's full-page cartoon "The Reading Room" in the April 9 issue of The New Yorker, which depicts a space similar to our current Trustees' Reading Room (designated light green, so no books in its future) but with a large "history" section on "Britney" and a table of "books on cell phone," is presumably not what Shepley Bulfinch or Nassau Hall has in mind, and yet it is difficult to see how replacing perhaps one-third of the collections on the six floors with chairs could be anything other than a dumbing-down of one of the world's finest libraries, a Barnes-and-Noblification, the creation of ... a lounge.

When Firestone opened almost 60 years ago, it was the largest open-stack library in the world. Two weeks ago, crossing the plaza, I heard a tour guide tell an intent group of would-be freshmen and their parents that it is even now the largest. I doubt that this is so, and it certainly will not be if these plans, or anything like them, come to fruition. Of course every university must provide classrooms and space for quiet study, and I certainly do recognize that everyone from a first-month freshman to a tired old professor sometimes longs for an easy chair rather than another stack of buckram-bound tomes. But removing easy access to books is intellectual suicide. Princeton's reputation in the humanities — keep in mind that Newsweek last month ranked us "Hottest for Liberal Arts" — is based above all on our flagship library, without which juniors simply could not write their JP's, seniors their theses and faculty their monographs.

People often say, "But everything's available online." This is false. As a test, I decided to check out the online availability of the secondary sources in two recent papers of mine (never mind the primary ones in languages like Hittite). In one, on the linguistic and poetic implications of a newly recognized word in Ancient Greek, I cite 65 references: 41 books or chapters in books, not one of which seems to exist in full in virtual form, and 24 articles from 15 different journals, only four of which are on JSTOR or otherwise electronically accessible. And as for the 124 items in the other paper, which cites almost entirely different things in the course of solving a longstanding problem of Indo-European verbal morphology, all 86 books are absent from cyberspace, and only five of the 38 articles (from 22 different journals) can be read electronically. (I might add that some items are not to be found at Princeton in any form, though the splendid Rebecka Lindau — who is, very sadly, leaving next month to become head librarian at the American Academy in Rome — has spent her years here working wonders at filling gaps.) If you accept, for the sake of argument, that my scholarship is worth the paper on which it's printed and that I cite exactly — all and only — those items of secondary literature that are appropriate, then you see the problem.

Jorge Luis Borges famously said, "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." Paradise should be light blue.

Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics and a Forbes faculty adviser. He can be reached in Firestone Library — or at jtkatz@princeton.edu.