They say the shortest route between two points is a straight line, but in the extraordinary little world where I work, the shortest route is often through the bookstack.
The New Bodleian Library, for those unfamiliar, is a big square stone building in Oxford on the corner of Broad Street and Parks Road. It is large and anonymous like so many of the other University buildings in our city, neither as columny as the nearby Clarendon Building nor as pretty and nobbly as the glorious Old Bodleian, with its 15th century bits and its gargoyles.
It is, however, deceptive. The New Bodleian is actually two buildings with a third perching on the top; the outer, stone structure is where the public bits get done, (although now the original six reading rooms are reduced to two) with offices and workspaces around the outside, then inside that is a nine-storey concrete and steel structure-- the first in Oxford to be entirely lit by electricity-- which is where the books live. The third building, the Indian Institute, was built on a flat roof overlooking the Sheldonian Theatre in the 1960s. It is connected to the rest of the building but has always been a separate entity from the Bodleian, having originally lived across the road in what is now the History Faculty Library.
My interest for this post, however, is the bookstack. Although I have never officially worked there, the stack has been an integral part of my job since I began in the Oriental Reading Room in 2003. We did all our own fetching and replacing, so my job included venturing into the shadowy recesses of H-Floor or up to the lofty heights of A-Floor (the floors are lettered A-L, but there is no floor I because of possible confusion). As I became more familiar with the stack I ventured further; the Oriental collections occupied some space on most stack floors, with many of our valuable manuscripts on the locked floor below ground and still others, rare Chinese printed books and even Egyptian papyri encased in glass on other floors towards the base of the structure.
By the time things began to change, when the reading rooms began to be amalgamated in preparation for the refurbishment of the New Bod (which is frankly long overdue in some respects), I was familiar with most of the floors, knew where the Oriental stuff was and more importantly, knew where other things were too. The stack was somewhere I could go and hide when things in the reading room got beyond clash-of-personality and headed towards me-saying-something-I-shouldn't. I got a great deal of satisfaction out of spending a meaningful half an hour pootling around, putting things away.
Lately, though, things are changing. The stack is not what it was. The special collections material has been moved out and the floors which used to be bursting with Victorian books classified using a system devised by a former Bodley's Librarian, E.W.B. Nicholson (which contained over 6000 divisions) have been rearranged and in some cases emptied. The muted chirruping of legions of people with yellow hi-vis vests on can be heard as they stick barcodes to every book in the stack before they are removed to a new facility in Swindon which will do wh
at the stack has done for 60 years only with better climate control and less chance of leaks. The shelves of A-Floor are partially empty; their former inhabitants currently in boxes in a salt mine in Cheshire (yes, really!). D-Floor, where the Music material is kept, no longer has a special lock on its doors.It is all progress, all change which is happening before even more change happens. Soon the New Bodleian will close, be refurbished, and reopen as the Weston Library, a flagship Special Collections Library for the 21st century.
I'm not saying any of it's wrong; I just wanted to go on the record to say I for one will miss the bookstack. I'll miss taking photos out of the window on A-Floor, watching the traffic on Broad Street while I wait for the lift, banging on the door of said lift when some idiot leaves the door open, traipsing up and down the stairs looking for the lift when some idiot leaves the door open and then walks away... I will miss the shadowy forms of the stack people, who do such an amazing job making sure the books get to the reading rooms but among whom I have never counted myself. I will miss the tunnel, which is about to close and which has been invaluable in allowing one to get to the Old Library without getting soaked on wet days, and the particular smell of the floors which house the old stuff... a proper library smell!
Still, everything changes, doesn't it? I am honestly looking forward to most of it, but I am also a little sad to see the end of such a unique and remarkable institution, which most people who use the library are blissfully unaware of.
