Dearly departed books

Keep them on the island

If only I’d listened. NUVO’s David Hoppe warned us that Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library CEO Linda Mielke is conducting a massive, Stalin-style purge of old and rare books from the library’s collection to make way for DVDs and copious multiples of new best-selling books (Hoppe, “Unionizing the Public Library,” April 12-19).

I’ve spent a lot of time in the Central Library since I moved to downtown Indy in 1979. The camaraderie I shared with many of the obscure old books in Central’s collection over the last quarter-century outlasted many of my human friendships. From time to time some of these tomes parted company from me, deleted from the library’s inventory due to decay beyond economical repair, or the inscrutable caprice of the library gods. But that was life at Central.

What’s been happening at the interim Central Library lately isn’t life. It’s wholesale death. And on a recent visit, I found out they’d come for my old companions.

Book after book that had been judged fit to live on Central’s shelves for untold decades, suddenly gone. I desperately called up their entries in the library’s catalog system, hoping they’d only been checked out; that they’d come home eventually, safe and sound. But their catalog entries had become obituary notices: “Copy/Holding Information: No Item Information.”

These dearly departed books do pass into the brief afterlife of IMCPL’s Secondhand Prose book sales. But have you ever BEEN to one of those things? Orpheus had a better shot at rescuing Eurydice from Hades’ realm than I have of liberating my lost loves from the hell-pit of those sales.

From all accounts, Mielke believes in management by statistics. In April she gave The Indianapolis Star some insight into how she picks her victims: “If it’s in my inventory and hasn’t been checked out for years, that’s a clue.” Fair enough. If Mielke likes metrics, let’s show her some metrics. If there’s an out-of-print title in the library’s collection that ever caught your eye, check it out! Vote to keep it on the island. Together, we may be able to save something until better times.