In the Stacks: Short Stories about Libraries and Librarians (review)

In the Stacks is a carefully diverse selection of short stories about libraries and library workers. The nineteen authors come from seven countries, and original publication dates span most of the twentieth century. Genres include mystery, science fiction, comedy, and romance. The stories provide commentary on the cultures, both real and imagined, that support libraries. They also offer portraits of the librarians who must persuade society to support them. Many of the stories are absorbing, and the book makes good commuter train reading. But the lack of bibliographic information and a rather uninspired lineup of authors makes the anthology a disappointment overall.

One of the better stories is Italo Calvino's "General in the Library" (13-17). A special commission is charged with the task of examining the holdings of a large library because government officials suspect that the "books [contain] opinions hostile to military prestige" (13). When the commissioners take over the library, the small, meek librarian is retained to offer readers advisory services. He leads the commission into an ever-deeper mire of subversive ideas that ultimately spoil the commissioners' minds for all things military. Calvino indulges in a few deliciously catty remarks about the library's poverty in comparison to the wealth of the military.

In Joann Greenberg's 1966 story "Gloss on a Decision of the Council of Nicaea" (24-39), a small-town librarian breaks segregation laws by allowing a young black man to borrow library books from the public library. When "Miss Myra, the careful librarian of Tugwell" (25), joins a group of protestors in front of the library, she catapults out of a stereotype and into a jail cell. The story takes on the themes of white privilege and the challenges of forming interracial coalitions.

In "Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?" (64-79) by Gina Berriault, the hero is Alberto Perera, a germ-phobic librarian nearing retirement at the San Francisco Public Library. He develops an unlikely affection for a tubercular homeless man whose pockets are full of poem fragments from which he is trying to grasp the meaning of his own life. When the homeless man asks Perera to let him spend the night in the library, Perera refuses to break the rules for the sake of compassion. He spends the rest of the story trying to make amends for failing to make the library a true refuge.

The book's only murder mystery, "QL 969. C9" by Anthony Boucher (originally published in 1943) revolves around a tediously obvious clue involving a Library of Congress classification number. The victim has been feeding information about patron reading habits to the federal government, a practice that holds renewed interest for many librarians today as we respond to the USA PATRIOT Act.

The book's organization leaves something to be desired. Cart does not include any contextual information, not even the original publication dates of the stories. The short author biographies (265-68) give very little information about the authors' relationships with libraries or whether libraries are a regular theme in their fiction. This limits the anthology's usefulness for library historians, who might use this collection as a starting point to draw conclusions about how writers in the twentieth century interpreted libraries for the reading public. I also regretted the dearth of emerging writers. Lorrie Moore (born 1957) and Lisa Koger (born 1953) are the youngsters in the group. Only Lisa Koger is a relative newcomer to the literary world. The most recent stories in the anthology were both published in 1996, but their authors, Ray Bradbury and Gina Berriault, have been writing for many years.

An obvious omission was Elizabeth McCracken's "Some Have Entertained Angels, Unaware" (in Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry [New York: Random House, 1993]). The story revolves around an alcoholic reference librarian with a ramshackle...