THE BOOKMAN'S DIARY

One of the great pleasures that I have enjoyed in the first weeks of this winter season has been to take a few hours out of one day each week to work in the public library. In fact, it is where I am sitting just now. Libraries have been much changed over the past years, largely as a result of the development of and the shifts in information technology. Some have gone so far as to question whether collections of physical printed books will be at all necessary in these institutions in the future. There have been some extreme examples of the deaccessioning of library collections already, such as the gutting of the San Francisco Main Library in the late 1990s, when something on the order of half a million books were dumped.

A library without stacks of bound books strikes me as a bleak vision of the future. It also strikes me as dangerously foolhardy to consider trading physical volumes for digital files. Formats for file storage or recording change rapidly. While we can still reliably open and read any book extant book we can put our hands to, from papyrus rolls to Darwin’s Origin of the Species, how many of us have the technological capability to play a recording made for a mini-Victrola, or even a standard LP for that matter? I have a box of VHS tapes that are no longer of any use to me. I have written it before, but it once again applies here: Books are a perfected technology, they always work; the only real problem with them is the issue of storage. In my mind, here lies much of the responsibility of our libraries.

Despite this worry, there remains much comfort to be found in the mere fact of the existence of these institutions. Here we have a space set aside for scholarly pursuit, for individual advancement, for cultural exposure, for learning. These places are simultaneously sanctuaries and monuments. Prolific book critic and author Nicholas Basbanes devoted an entire volume to the subject of book collections, how they are assembled, who assembles them, how they are maintained, and the difficulties they face. Patience and Fortitude is a discussion of the library, both the public sort of library as well as private libraries and personal collections. This volume is the best consideration of the very idea of the library,  from the perspective of a devoted bibliophile, that I have ever encountered.

For readers interested in books, Basbanes’ work should not be overlooked. He has written syndicated columns on books for years, and has authored numerous volumes on books, bibliophily, and book culture, beginning with A Gentle Madness in 1995. Later works include Among the Gently Mad (2002), A Splendor of Letters (2003), and Every Book its Reader (2005), and Editions and Impressions (2008).

Works of narrative non-fiction that have a strong sense of place have a particular attraction about them. Such writing that focuses entirely on place, especially forbidding or difficult places are even more compelling. Tales of people living in a landscape, trying to make “place” for themselves, or tales of people merely fighting to survive in hostile environments are at the core of the drama of human existence. Now, for most of us, our daily lives are quite distant from these struggles. We live ensconced in centrally heated and cooled homes and transport ourselves in vehicles that make exterior conditions irrelevant. We may no longer face regular reminder of how hostile nature can be to us, but literature born from the experience of that hostility beckons to us. It is that fundamental struggle that draws us to accounts of exploration and adventure. I have found that I have been often writing about people and the land or people in nature, and it is this classic tension between our reverence for and our struggle with the elements that keeps bringing me back.

I recently read Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land. It is entirely a story of place, and the place is the vast plains of eastern Montana. In part it is a work of history, chronicling the period of the second Homestead Act which opened eastern Montana to would-be farmers and ranchers from the east in the early 20^th century. It is also a sort of travel writing, as Raban recounts his experience of the same place at the very end of the same century while he is researching there.

At the urging of the great railroad interests and of eastern banks, Congress passed the Enlarged Homestead Act in 1909. According to the Act, half-section (320 acre) grants of land in the area formerly known as The Great American Desert were made on easy terms. Claims were proved up by keeping the grant in cultivation for five years. Along its route to the west, the executives of the Milwaukee Road arbitrarily invented towns at regular intervals along the line. Raban writes,

“Trains need to be filled with freight and passengers, and it was part of the essential business of railroads to furnish its territory with customers, to create ready-made communities of people whose lives would be dependent on the umbilical of the line.”

At the same time a new pseudo-scientific method of agriculture was introduced that claimed to make it possible to raise cash crops and livestock in arid lands. Campbell’s Soil Culture Manual became a marketing device for the railroaders and the central source of optimism for recent immigrants and land hungry easterners alike. The Campbell Method proposed to instruct dry land farmers in methods of cultivation that would conserve the little moisture they had, and even suggested that new agricultural activity would attract increased precipitation through magnetism; somehow the act of working the land would improve the circumstances its geography.

The ranchers dispossessed of their former grazing lands by the Act regarded the notion of farming small sections of the dry prairies as destined for failure. They derisively referred to the homesteaders as “honyockers,” and thought of them as foolish, at best. Of course, the ranchers were correct. They knew that it required vast areas of the arid grassland to graze just a few head of cattle. But, as the homesteaders were fencing off the open prairie and bringing their first harvests to market, the Campbell Method seemed to be proving itself and the banks were eager to loan to the new farm owners.

Early optimism crumbled as the first few years of greater than normal precipitation passed, and typically dry conditions returned. Coupled with the brutality of winter on the northern plains, the conditions quickly brought failure for many of the homesteaders. Some hung on and scratched a living from parcels slightly better suited for agricultural production, but the scene recalls the iconic dustbowl imagery of the Joads, as most of the failed families struck out for point further west with what little they had left strapped to their Ford.

Raban structures his narrative around the stories and experiences of a few of the original homesteaders. He traces the thread of the these families to the current era, meeting the some of the descendents still on the land, and visiting the crumbling structures of former claim shacks and farm houses. Raban’s own experience of desolation and loneliness out in that vast and virtually featureless landscape is palpable, and it leads one to wonder at the resolve it must require to keep hanging on in a place so forbidding.