In The New York Times recently (December 24, 2021), Julie Lasky (real estate beat) wrote about Reid Byers of Princeton. Reid wrote The Private Library . . . : The History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom, because he found no other books specifically about private libraries about experiences of creating and using private, domestic libraries and why some people continue to build, curate, and preserve them. (See also The Times' slideshow.)
Byers' term "book-wrapt" extends the meanings and connotations both of the homophone rapt (as in enraptured) and wrapped as in surrounded-by or encased-in. A well-curated library "should feel like easing into a hot tub, strolling into a magic store, emerging into the orchestra pit . . . it is a setting forth, and it is a coming back to center." In contrast to a living room without people (a room without the living), a library without people casts a spell. "I like to be in a room where I've read half the books, and I'd like there to be enough books that I cannot possibly read them in my remaining years," Byers says in The Times. (Think of the Japanese term tsundoku --books that remain unread.)
David Atlas (The Atlas of New Librarianship) writes, "I have long contended that a room full of books is simply a closet but that an empty room with a librarian in it is a library." (p. 16) While I have long appreciated Lankes' reminder that librarians are the key to libraries' purpose, I have also long felt that Lankes is gliding over something important in a bid to re-assert librarianship in the face of digital complacency. (The sense that "everything is going digital" and "software is eating the world," so why bother with anything else? —a sense especially promoted by anyone selling anything digital.) What is Lankes' missing? The center of libraries' fundamental identity: libri -- books. From scrolls to codices to streaming text, books have been the distinguished feature of libraries for millennia. (I cannot restrict "book" to mean "binding.")
Book-wrapt captures the setting out and re-centering or entering-in that a good library provides for its humans. Librarians are, above all, library people. Were books suddenly magically and mysteriously removed from human habitations, librarians would lack their primary referent—one wonders even whether the term or function would any longer be intelligible.
Academic librarians have become aware of a paradox: students do not particularly like library spaces where there are no books. The bookless library of Applied Engineering and Technology at the University of Texas (2010) remains an outlier (though most engineering and technology libraries have drastically weeded print collections). In 2009 the Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, MA intended to remove all its printed materials to become an all-digital library for the 21st century, but after a change in leadership (!) a librarian was engaged in 2014 to re-balance the library's collections and restore print resources. Surveys and studies of user experience have shown that students do want books, at least in the background.
On the other hand, print circulation everywhere is far less than 2002 or 2012. Students seem to want books in libraries, but don't particularly read them. Younger Americans do seem to use libraries and know about them, as much as do older Americans, but follow typologies similar to those of other ages, from distant admirers to library lovers. (Those Pew studies were published before the rise of marked anti-intellectual distrust in some sectors of the American population.) I have not yet seen anyone solve the apparent contradiction: if younger Americans use libraries at rates exceeding or similar to their elders, why is academic library circulation of printed books down? I believe it may be because of different kinds of uses of different genres of books: academic books are rarely meant to be read cover-to-cover, unlike popular or literary fiction (whether textual or graphic).
I suspect that the term "book-wrapt" might give a hint about why students want books in libraries, but don't actually use them (whether internally or circulating).
When students enter a space with many books, they are seeking a space to get and keep themselves on task: they manage technology carefully, especially at crunch time. In a built environment wrapped in books, these students can become enrapt in their work. I suspect students like the backdrop of books because it reminds them of possible personal journeys. As Reid Byers says, masses of books represent "delights that we hold in possibility." Books represent explored worlds, roads not yet taken. (—or never to be taken?) Students want the company of books because in their spell they become re-centered: they are both setting out on tasks and and coming back to a sense of themselves as students and not just consumers or customers.
My insight might strike some as simple-minded romanticism. On the contrary, I have seen students remain remarkably on task in libraries. For at least some students, the books physically represent the learning they would like to achieve (whether achieving simply for a grade, a career, or genuine learning for the sake of growing up and coming home in the world). The books are somehow talismanic of their better selves.
The books represent relationships with the outside world, with history, with what many students would like to become. Those who see students as merely "revenue units" will never understand this. The symbolic power of books and libraries is easily underestimated but nonetheless potent, as every aspiring authoritarian and dictator knows. The enduring portent of book-burnings and the novel Fahrenheit 451 are a mirror image of book-wrapt. A library without books would turn its users into academic refugees—and maybe that is the intent of reductive and disruptive digital capitalism. As ever, books somehow slip the net, and with them their readers.
Disclosure: I have known Reid Byers although I doubt he would remember me. I knew his father, Arthur Byers, who for many years was Secretary of Princeton Theological Seminary. Reid was educated there as a Presbyterian minister several classes before me.
Image: Theodor-Heuss-Haus, Feuerbacher Weg, Stuttgart-Nord Arbeitszimmer von Theodor Heuss (mit einer Auswahl seiner Bücher) Public domain in wikimedia