Forget the clichés about cat-eye glasses, buns, and the dread word “Sssh!” Marilyn Johnson’s This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All (Harper, 2010) is a hymn of praise to the endlessly helpful men and women who staff circulation desks, answering questions, guarding civil liberties, and checking out free DVDs. Her timing could not have been better. “People are blithely walking around asking if library service can be cut to the bone, seeing it as something frivolous,” the author maintains. “It’s really nice to be out there saying, ‘Are you kidding me?’”
Johnson asserts that libraries are more essential than ever in an information-soaked Internet age. While college students who used to hole up in the stacks may now turn to Google, there’s no substitute for trained hunter-gatherers. Librarians, Johnson says, are “civil servants whose job is to be nice to people and help them find what they need.”
They’re also a human safety net, catching the cuts in a battered economy. “There are not enough people to service needy populations, like people whose English is not very good, applying for unemployment benefits for the first time,” Johnson explains. “Where do all these problems go? They go to the library. If you cut this out, you’re putting people on the street who have no access to computers, who can’t penetrate the bureaucracy, who need help filling out basic forms—not to mention a warm place to sit. I just really don’t see it as an optional service at all. A library is staffed with professionals who are committed to serve everyone. Everyone.”
This commitment is exemplified by the missionary librarians Johnson meets in Rome, training developing-world colleagues to research social justice issues online, and by the Radical Reference Librarians who took to the streets during the 2008 Republican Convention to provide protesters with WiFi updates. She also interviews “writers’ librarian” David Smith at the New York Public Library’s 42nd Street mother ship during a sea change (“farewell, Persian-language librarian; good-bye, Baltic specialists”) and profiles the heroic Connecticut Four, who sued the government to protect their constituents’ library records from surveillance under the US Patriot Act.
“Librarians are incredible defenders of privacy,” Johnson says. “Can you think of a better profession to be in charge of our computers? When these National Security Letters go out—and they are still going out, make no mistake—the recipients are prohibited from bringing anyone else into it. What was so brilliant about the Connecticut Four is that they were prepared.” As soon as the Patriot Act was announced, the librarians established a chain of command in which no employee could hand over records without going through the head of their consortium, George Christian. During the anonymous “John Doe” suit, the National Security Letter gag order forced him to lie under oath. “How crazy is that?” Johnson asks. “To this day, I think you should read that chapter next to 1984.”
She calls the lawsuit “a cloak-and-dagger story with unlikely protagonists. If you met these people, nothing about them stands out. It’s that quiet fire you get with librarians, the poker face when people stand in front of them stinking and asking crazy questions. When you can get them to tell you a story like that, it’s stunning. They’re so much more comfortable as the guides on the side than the sage on the stage.”
There are more flamboyant librarians, like the ones who perform intricately choreographed book cart drills at American Library Association conventions, or catalogue punk zines, create virtual avatars, and blog on such websites as Awful Library Books and The Society for Librarians Who Say Motherfucker. “I get enthralled by those on the quirky end of things,” Johnson admits. Her readers learn that the American Kennel Club has an extensive dog library, and that the Museum of Sex has a trained librarian cataloguing its porno collection; who knew?
Once she lifted up the “plain brown librarian wrapper” to look underneath, Johnson remembers thinking, “Where are the anthropologists? These creatures are fascinating.”
Those words could be the rallying cry for all literary nonfiction, but Johnson didn’t start out in that field. After attending Oberlin College and the University of Pennsylvania, she studied poetry with Charles Simic at the University of New Hampshire, missing her MFA graduation when she was hired as an assistant by legendary Esquire fiction editor Rust Hills. As Johnson recalls, she and her classmates were celebrating at Simic’s house—”I think we did some damage to his wine cellar”—when the poet mentioned that he’d been invited to recommend a graduate for the position at Esquire. “Everyone else had a job except me,” Johnson laughs. “I was the default candidate.”
At the time, she was hitchhiking to campus from an uninsulated cabin in the woods nicknamed “the spider house.” A friend’s mother gave her $200 to buy a respectable outfit and fly to New York for the interview. Hills hired her on the spot, and Johnson sublet “the worst apartment in Manhattan. Someone broke in, and couldn’t find anything to steal. There was a broken typewriter. That was it. So those were exciting times.”
Her duties at Esquire included wading through slush piles of story submissions and screening forthcoming novels for excerpts. “I think I’ll do this for a summer,” Johnson recalls thinking. She stayed for five years.
She also started writing magazine features, married fellow journalist Rob Fleder, and moved to Westchester County to raise their three children. While her colleagues at Esquire and Life were sent to exotic locales like Mt. Everest, Johnson struggled with crossing one time zone. When she flew to Chicago to interview Oprah Winfrey for Life, their time was cut short and Winfrey generously offered another half hour—two days later. With three kids under 10 and Rob working full-time at Sports Illustrated, Johnson went into frantic schedule-juggling mode.
For the Life story, Johnson interviewed every writer Oprah had featured during the book club’s first year. Some were hard to pin down. Toni Morrison finally returned a call while Johnson was making hamburgers for her kids. Tucking the phone under one ear, she took notes on a grease-splattered pad while she finished cooking. Luckily Morrison sympathized, and told her about having scrawled down a sentence after her young son threw up on the page. (In This Book Is Overdue! Johnson muses about the archival value of this nasty scrap.) But the difficulty of scheduling interviews with famous people sent her career in a new direction.
“Obituaries were the answer. They’re dead—you don’t have to sit around waiting for them,” Johnson laughs. “It was the perfect job to do from home. Give me a dead celebrity any day.”
After penning obits for the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Johnny Cash, and Princess Diana, she explored the unexpected nooks and crannies of obituary culture in The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries (HarperCollins, 2006). An infectiously lively read, the book was a Borders Original Voices selection and a Barnes & Noble Discover Prize finalist. And it was while researching The Dead Beat that Johnson found her next subject: some of the most fascinating obituaries were those of librarians.
Once again, she was poised to observe a profession in massive upheaval. “With the obituary book, I was watching both the dying of the newspaper business and the explosion of the Internet,” she explains. In 2006, when she started researching This Book Is Overdue!, libraries were undergoing a similar seismic shift.
“It was changing under my feet,” Johnson says. Her first draft included a passage explaining what Twitter was. By the time she turned in the manuscript, everyone knew. “I had to inoculate myself against feeling obsolete,” she says. “I was terrified that events would overtake [the book]. And it needed to be out there as part of the debate.”
“I remember going to our neighborhood library in Memphis,” says Johnson, who lived there from preschool through sixth grade. “You could take out as many books as you wanted at once. I remember the smells. I adored it. I read obsessively—series about animals, biographies of people like Queen Liliuokalani. I would get fierce about it. They were my books.”
In high school, she had a job as a page at the Geauga County Library in Chardon, Ohio. “I can still tell you where the Thurber is in that library,” she asserts. Her pay was 95 cents an hour. After a year, she requested a nickel raise. When it wasn’t forthcoming, she quit. “Pride goeth before a fall—that was the end of my library career,” she sighs, echoing Brando in On the Waterfront. “I could have been a librarian!”
Alongside her enthusiasm for virtual reality librarians and cutting-edge technology, Johnson has a palpable fondness for old-fashioned reading rooms lined with books. “We’ll always need printed books that don’t mutate the way digital books do; we’ll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we’ll always need brick-and-mortar libraries,” she writes.
Besides, says the self-described research fanatic, “The Westchester librarians have had my back since the beginning.” They certainly have: In gratitude for her new book, they’ve waived Johnson’s overdue fines.
Marilyn Johnson will appear at the Empire State Book Festival on a panel with David Smith of the New York Public Library, missionary librarian Kathy Shaughnessy, and Peter Chase of the Connecticut Four on Saturday 4/10 at 1:45pm. Empire State Plaza, Albany. www.empirestatebookfestival.com.
This article appears in April 2010.
