The Yale Review | Sheila Liming: “The End of Books”

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The End of Books

What happened when a dumpster arrived behind my university's library

Sheila Liming

Preserving the library alone will not rescue reading, Sheila Liming writes, but it is a good place to begin. Getty Images

on a june day in 2018, I watched a construction loader pour thousands of books into a big green dumpster. It had appeared overnight, parked behind the library at the university where I taught English. I heard the books before I saw them; the terrible crashing sound reached me in my un-air-conditioned basement office, interrupting my own work on the manuscript of my first book, by then nearly finished. The volumes in the dumpster were being “deaccessioned,” as the practice is known in information science. The library was being renovated. Large open lounge areas would be created. And so the shelves were being cleared to make space—not for more books but for space itself.

A few months before the dumpster arrived, I had been drawn into a bitter dispute over the imperiled books. It had started with a spreadsheet from library staff naming several thousand titles that were to be eliminated from the collection due to low checkout rates. My colleagues and I were given a few weeks to identify any books we thought worth keeping. This resulted, at first, in a burst of energy. We added comments. We wrote impassioned defenses directed at the librarians doing the culling. We shared the list with our students, who checked out titles that were slated for removal—a last-ditch attempt to boost their circulation. And we agreed to take some of the rejected books ourselves, to house them in our offices or classrooms or shared campus spaces, since a state university’s property, even if it’s been deemed trash, cannot be transferred to private individuals.

My investment in the fight was personal as much as professional: the manuscript I was working on that June day was about a library—or half a library. The books it held once belonged to the writer Edith Wharton. Half of the volumes still exist today, but the other half is a ghost, with titles such as Louis Couperus’s novel Eline Vere, perhaps the chief source of inspiration for Wharton’s House of Mirth, reduced to mere entries in a spreadsheet. As I watched the big green dumpster fill with books, I saw another ghost library in the making.

There were times when the missing half seemed to speak louder than the books I held in my hands.

My obsession with Wharton’s library had emerged five years earlier, and somewhat by accident. As a graduate student in English, I had received a fellowship to the Mount, Wharton’s home in Lenox, Massachusetts, where I became convinced that to know and understand her as a writer, I had to understand her as a reader. Paging through nearly three thousand library books, I saw her talk back to them, disagree with them, question and antagonize and struggle with them. In one, she penciled the word succotash—the nineteenth-century equivalent of nonsense; on the fly of another, inscribed to her lover William Morton Fullerton, she composed a four-stanza poem that does not exist anywhere else in her own hand. These physical traces allowed me to see how she had read her books, but they also showed me where she had wilted under another writer’s power. Her underlinings and exclamation points and squiggles became an atlas by which I discerned both her evolution as a writer and her battles as a reader to understand texts written in six different languages.

I spent five summers working at the Mount, cataloguing and digitizing Wharton’s library and, all the while, learning from it. The stories it told were not just about Edith Wharton. They were also about what it means to try to know something—to arrive at knowing, to fumble for it with the help of books. Though Wharton became known as a writer of fiction, she was a reader of everything: her books spanned not just languages but subjects ranging from botany to ancient Rome. One of them, Francis Meynell’s The Week-End Book, contained instructions for lawn games and a recipe for peanut-butter-and-olive sandwiches.

But I had to keep reminding myself that the volumes I saw on the shelves comprised only half of her collection. There were times when the missing half seemed to speak louder than the books I held in my hands. When Wharton died in 1937, without any children, her will bequeathed her library to the sons of two friends of hers. The first, William Royall Tyler, Jr., stored his half in a warehouse on the outskirts of London. The other half went to Colin Clark, who let the books molder for decades at his family castle in Kent until financial troubles prompted his brother to begin selling off chunks of it to various dealers in rare books. Clark’s half was painstakingly recovered and brought back to the Mount, but the other half was destroyed in 1941, during the London Blitz.

As I researched how...