GoKawiilEssays The End of Books What happened when a dumpster arrived behind my university's library
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 the library came to be and all the many ways that Wharton used it, questions about the other half lingered. In her correspondence, she would thank a friend for the gift of a volume I could not pull off any shelf. She kept long lists of publications to be shuttled between her various homes in Massachusetts, Provence, and the Parisian suburbs, and I pored over those mini inventories, glimpsing a library I would never get to see. For even if I could reconstruct the ghost half using those documents, I couldn’t access Wharton’s engagement with it: all those penciled questions, comments, and squiggly lines—the whole record of her interactions, which had lit up the pages of her remaining books for me—would still be lost.
it was those haunting gaps in Wharton’s library that led me back to the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. I had first learned about Derrida’s notoriously difficult literary theories as an undergraduate and had been pretending to understand them ever since. In Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida concentrates on the idea of the text (a collection of ideas expressed as chains of words, or “signifiers,” as the structuralists would call them) as opposed to the book (the physical apparatus that houses the text). Both are instantiations of the process that we call writing, but the book is material, while the text is merely conceptual. The book can be destroyed; it can be burned, torn apart, or loaded into a dumpster and carted off to a landfill. But the text cannot be destroyed in the same way; it persists through interpretation and reinterpretation, always producing new meanings. By studying Wharton’s physical books, I could see from the annotations how she interpreted those texts, incorporating them into her own writing. The writer writes, according to Derrida, in order to discover what they think, including what they think about what they have read. That same writer then tries to convey those ideas to a new reader, who reads to discover what they think about what the writer thinks. But both writer and reader are playing (another favorite word of Derrida’s). Both are engaged in a game that has no end, and the text is the field or pitch or court on which it is played. Derrida calls that game deconstruction.
Without the medium, the connection between speaker and listener is broken, and the line goes dead.
But though he is best known for it, Derrida didn’t invent the process. Deconstruction is not something that one does to a text; it’s something the text does to itself. It’s an inherent feature of highly volatile processes, and one that turns physical books into objects of fantasy. Books exist to impose dreams of stability and order on the processes of reading and writing that are attached to them. The author might be living or dead. In either case, the book contains the event that is or was the text, to keep it alive and make it cohere. Or, to put it another way, the text is the ghost, while the book is the medium through which the ghost speaks. Without the medium, the connection between speaker and listener is broken, and the line goes dead. This is why, Derrida says, there is no history without language. We humans communicate knowledge about the past through language—through conversation, through storytelling, through education, and, yes, most of all through writing, which creates a semi-coherent, semi-anchored record of that language. We present that record in the form of a book, something that can be turned to and consulted over and over again. And then, finally, we store that book in a place where we can get at it: a library. For someone like Wharton, that can mean a personal library, filled with the remnants of one’s own engagement with those texts. But since few of us can afford to build a three-thousand-volume personal library, there are also shared libraries, the public ones in our towns and schools. That’s how a library becomes a final and crucial step on a chain of accessibility that permits contact with the text. There are, of course, other ways to gain access to the text: bookstores and classrooms and PDF files that can be downloaded, legally or not, from the internet. But those other ways place barriers—often financial, sometimes technical, sometimes physical—between the reader and the text. They introduce friction. Reading a bootleg PDF isn’t the same as reading a print book. Twenty years ago, UX researchers were already noting that in online reading, large sections of a text are skipped or scanned in accordance with digital scrolling habits. The eye, for example, tends to follow an F-shaped pattern across the screen. In 2023, researchers at the University of Valencia published the results of a study showing that print reading over sustained periods can yield a six- to eightfold increase in comprehension. From these examples, and countless others like them, we know that reading digital texts does not simply replicate the experience of reading print ones. Yet we still discount the tools that deepen comprehension in favor of those that are more convenient.
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