Books Like Angels
by Michael McGrorty
The library is many things, but in the aggregate a resource offered free for the pleasure and enlightenment of all. The best measure of freedom is access to information, the raw material that gives meaning to the choices of democracy.
In America we reflexively resist censorship. This is not so much from the spirit of toleration as from the fact that we resent being told what we can do. We don't reject the censor because of the Constitution but because he dares to do our thinking for us. This is true even if we have no desire to read about Lady Chatterley's adventures. The American likes latitude and possibilities. He wants to feel that he can read anything he has a mind to pick up, especially when it is offered for free at the library.
Librarians take a position at the pointed end of this attitude, directly in the path of those who would restrict access for some reason or another. Doing this, being this way, is merely part of the job: the librarian, every bit as much as the teacher and the policeman, is a guardian of the public's opportunities.
Imagine then the atmosphere in the San Francisco Public Library in a recent summer, when the staff first discovered that someone was systematically destroying their books and yours. In the main library and the Chinatown branch, somebody had slashed, defaced or hidden many books and magazines on gay and lesbian themes. The Main Library's Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center lost 200 volumes, some irreplaceable. Within a few months over 600 books were ruined. It was easy to see that the vandal had a focus, but he was certainly no genius; in addition to gay and lesbian books, he destroyed works by Gay Talese and historian Peter Gay, and even ruined a poem about the Enola Gay as well as Catholic missals and works describing the Catholic Church's stand on homosexuality.
The San Francisco libraries suffered these indignities, but not without response; the problem is, libraries are built for access rather than security. Freedom is the principle and trust the glue that binds the whole. The vandalism continued for many weeks, and it was not only books that were attacked but the idea of the library that was steadily being defaced, torn apart, pulled down.
Librarians and volunteers staked out the stacks, hoping to catch the vandal. One day a librarian, working on her day off, saw a man hiding a book on lesbian and gay history beneath a shelf. A search of the man's clothing revealed a razor blade and pages torn from a book about lesbianism; a police search of the man's home turned up bits of vandalized books.
The court system deals with justice and leaves the explanations to others. In the end, the culprit pled guilty to a felony charge, was fined a few thousand dollars and given a term of probation whose terms included that he stay away from the public libraries of San Francisco.
That was in September of 2002. In the interim the library has attempted to fill in the gaps in its collection; that much would be expected. If a book is valuable enough to keep it is important enough to replace -- if it can be. But the library and the city suffered a loss that couldn't be made up with new books alone. Something had been torn from the library and the community, the sense of place and freedom and unfettered choice that the library offered had been attacked, left bleeding and damaged in a way that the end of the tragedy did nothing to repair.
Libraries are not merely buildings and processes. There is desire in their beams and stones; a solemn purpose fills their structures. It was left to the San Francisco library to cleanse itself of the stain left by the vandal, to remove the taint remaining after the rest was done. And so the library and its community put out a call for healing. The result is "Reversing Vandalism," an exhibition of over 200 original works of art created from the damaged books. The works that the vandal thought he had destroyed have returned, transformed like angels, made more beautiful than in life, come back to bless the library and the idea behind it. Their printed voices come together in a chorus of joy and triumph: joy for the idea of the library, triumph over the attempt to destroy that idea, to forbid the freedom to read, to think, to enjoy, to be fully human.
The vandal might have thought he was attacking gay and lesbian ideas, but his blade cut all who think and feel. In San Francisco they will heal that wound together, in a library that is as proud and inextinguishable as the hills and the fog and the great wide bay.
Reversing
Vandalism
An exhibition of the San Francisco Public Library
January 31 through May 2, 2004
Main Library, 100 Larkin Street (at Grove)