Broken Books draft -- March 2004

Since I first started working at the library I wanted to mend books. Freshman year I decided I wanted to work in back simply because the girls in the back set their own hours and didn't have to tell students over and over every Saturday night that Requiem for a Dream was already checked out. I was working in front, so it was my job to watch the students’ faces crumple as I checked the DVD database. Again and again I repeated in what I considered a cheerful, but firm tone “No I can’t tell you who has it out, because that’s illegal.” As their voices collapsed into a whine I have to admit that I may have ,on occasion, given up, simply crossing my arms and staring them down. I am not good with patrons. I am surly, even. I am good with books. Well, better with books than with patrons. People demand a kind of patience and grace I don’t have- I couldn’t wait to be promoted away from them.

Now I am one of the girls in the back. Each morning I wander in somewhere near ten in the morning, usually fifteen minutes after, and say hi to Vanessa and Leah. Their presence and habits are comforting. Without fail, they waylay me to show off a new piece of beadwork or photos of their grandkids, and ask me with genuine concern how I’m doing. I stop to ooh and ah and answer “fine” or “you know, the same.” Then I start my routine in earnest. I throw my backpack on the floor of the technical services room, plug in the iron, walk back out, borrow Leah’s key, ride the rickety elevator to the staffroom and pour myself two cups of coffee. They slosh a little on myself or the floor of the elevator and clink as I hold them in one hand to give Leah back the key. Then wash my hands at the Technical Services Sink and sit down, pull the cheap library headphones over my head, press FM. The round table with Susan Arbetter.

I sit on a dingy brown office chair with flecks of old "juvenile" and "for reference only" stickers ground into the seat. I swivel a little and survey the scene. Technical Services sounds like something that might be digital and is at least clinical and efficient. In reality the Technical Services Room is a room full of useless things. There are the discarded card catalogs, empty binders, old pieces of metal, painted that certain library green from machines long since lost, cardboard boxes, a poster of the flags of the world (circa 1970s), empty shelves.

My workspace is a wide brown table. The back of the table is a low shelf full of cubbyholes. There is nothing useful in the cubbyholes either. I leave the dried up inkpads, glue sticks, and brittle tape in them as decoy materials. I don’t use them. I do use the tools in the blue mug next to the iron. Well, some of them. I use the Exacto knife, the blue-handled scraping knife, and the bone folder. I don't use the red scissors, the red scissors are notoriously dull. My little secret is that there is a small congregation of useful things in the cupboard on my left. Quart of white glue, fresh gluestick, two paintbrushes one thick one thin, 6 kinds of tape, silver pens for writing on the black tape, rubber bands, sandpaper… I reach down and pluck out the good scissors, slip the wax paper or cheesecloth out of their manila envelopes, mostly by feel.

The press is useful. It sits on top of the cubbyholes in front of me clamping the freshly glued text block of "Sacred Calligraphy of the East" between thin sheets of cheap wood. The clamp is old and loud, and it squeaks a rusty squeak as I tighten it down on a book, but it is useful. The boards are wrapped in wax paper. I wrapped them in wax paper. There are also bricks here. Bricks wrapped in butcher paper and a hot iron, something like a soldering iron with a head shaped like a golf club. I feel the faint heat of the iron next to me on my left arm as I work. I work first with a razor-blade, no handle.

I work mostly with a razor-blade because I usually have to destroy the book first. Student-workers in the front put books on my shelf when they need mending. They tuck a little slip between the pages. After “Describe Damage” they most often write “falling apart.” They do not know how the book works, and they do not know how to say what help they need. I love the colors of these old books. The rusty oranges, dirty blues and deep browns of their covers match the deep browns of the library walls, and the mustard yellow of the fading signs. They sit in a row of muted brokenness, and I know what they need. I pull down a book, and turn it over in my hands. The book is words, printed onto pamphlets, and these pamphlets are sewn together into the textblock. The back edge of the textblock is its spine, smooth uniform ridges running vertically, the back of the pamphlets, interrupted by ridges of waxed thread, running horizontally every inch and a half or so. The spine is glued together, with a strip of cheesecloth fastened over it forming little wings. These little wings are glued to either side of the cover, and endpapers are glued over the wings. Books have been made this way for almost two thousand years. Destroying these books is sensual and specific. It takes a kind of patience and grace I am very comfortable with.

First, if it has not fallen out already, I cut the textblock from the cover, slicing down through the endpaper and cheesecloth. I love to scrape off the endpapers; it is like nonstop scab-picking. You have to angle the blade just right and tuck it in, low and tight. The paper either comes off in tiny tight curls or rips off with the top layer of cardboard in long satisfying strips. I peel the endpapers off, curls falling onto my lap, and dust rising to settle in my hair and coffee. By the time I am finished The Rountable is over and the soundtrack for cleaning the spine is classical. I pick the brittle old glue off bit by bit, tiny sparks of yellow popping into the air and landing on my sweatshirt. I am gentle with the yellowed pages, eaten by their own acid, supporting the textblock upright between the two bricks. When the book is naked, and a little worn with all my scraping, I dust it off, cut it new cheesecloth, and clamp it down. Just as I am about to start gluing the UPS man comes with his billow of cold air and electronic pad for me to sign. I sign and smile, then sit down to swipe the new clean glue along the old spine and position the cheesecloth on it and dip the brush in glue again until I know this spine will hold. I leave and wait and come back in the morning with new coffee, with another episode of The Roundtable.

These hours are a kind of respite from my own uselessness. I cannot care for plants or pets or people well. I don't understand them; they do not let me scrape their spine. I have little to offer the world now except my late-night papers, a few cheap drinks, or a quick phone call. My professors enjoy me, my friends like me, and my family loves me, but I none of them need me. Neither do the books, I know. They were mended before I came, and will be mended after I leave. But for now, I do the mending; I cradle them, cut them fresh endpapers, with the grain of the paper running the right way, so they will not buckle and split with time. I write their names in silver pen along their newly smooth spines and put them back on the shelves.

I often go mend books in the evening when I am lonely and restless. My friends wonder why I work more than I need to at only $6.75 and hour. Maybe I do it to have a desk where things are just so. Maybe it is to escape. Maybe I mend broken books to hold back the tide of all the breaking in the world, of all the leaving behind and throwing out. My granddad is a master bookbinder. His bindery is an annex to his house, with many wide tables covered in glass bottles and worn brass tools. The air is thick and smells of wheat paste, velum, and leather. He mends much more expensive books, and owns little wheels to press gold leaf onto covers. On Tuesdays for a year he taught me about books. He would not let me touch the paper until I had shaped my own tools. He had plenty of bone folders, but he wanted me to start at the beginning, to get the idea of hurrying out of my head and hands. He made bookmaking a kind of meditation, a meditation on method and patience. So I stood at the grinder, shaping my bone folder, enveloped in a cloud of bone dust, the sharp taste of bone settling on the back of my tongue. My grandfather and I stood in our matching denim aprons with matching frowns of concentration, silent beside each other.

He taught me how to make books. They were all blank books. I pretended they would be journals, but I was afraid to violate the pages with so much as a simple “dear diary.” He did not teach me how to mend books. He mends books as an expert, with whisper-thin Japanese tissue for the torn pages and gentle acid baths for the aging covers, and I was never even near to beginning to learn the proper techniques. I mend books by default, because there is not much use in the world for blank books. I am slow, and it is not difficult work, and I am not particularly skilled, but I do it. The books are there and they need mending. I hope my grandfather would understand the awkward black tape I use sometimes, the tape the books need not to keep them pretty, but to keep them in circulation. Many of them aren't worth it, but I consider it a great and secret pleasure to spend six or eight hours on a book that would not cost much to replace. The basics of the craft were a gift from my granddad, but the desire the rescue books must come from farther back, from my granddad’s granddad, from something deep in my genes. This is my ugly gift to them, sometimes fifty and a hundred years old, black tape and circulation, a chance to be checked out to the patrons again, by the girls up front, when Requiem for a Dream is out.