Where I live, in a condo community in Florida, one of the “amenities” is a library of sorts. I go there regularly, but it's slim pickings. What I want most is trade paperbacks—e.g. something published by the Vintage Contemporaries imprint—but mass market paperbacks are mostly what's available. All the books come from donations and, from the looks of it, my neighbors here are apparently middlebrow readers at best. Harlan Coben is a favorite. I tried reading one of his books but gave up after 10 pages.
I've been going to the library for years, but the collection has barely changed. Two elderly women volunteers are in charge of stocking the shelves but they don't do much.
As an experiment, I picked two shelves at random. Counting, I found that 16 of the 18 books are by women authors I'd never heard of. I read books by both men and women, but the volunteers prefer women by a wide margin. My observation is that they operate this library to please themselves. They spend their time at the “librarian” desk looking at their collection of 2x4 cards listing all of the titles on the shelves. Their main concern is keeping their records straight, not getting new books on the shelves.
The library shelves are half-empty, but there's about 25 plastic bags full of books sitting in the corner under a sign that says: “Please do not open these bags. Thank you.” The bags have piled up for at least six months. One librarian told me the bags were donations that haven't been put on the shelves yet, while the other one said they've been culled from the shelves because nobody has checked them out. One of these women isn’t telling me the truth, which I find baffling and annoying.
These officious women think they run the library they're rarely in, but they don't. So I ignore the sign and open the forbidden bags. So far I've found two Kurt Vonnegut novels, one of Paul Theroux’s travel books, and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. But books of this quality were removed from the shelves because nobody checked them out? I doubt it.
Instead of putting good books on the shelves, the volunteers’ main priority is taking books off of the half-empty shelves if they haven't been borrowed within a limit they set. When they're looking at their 2x4s, I think they're searching for such books to remove.
Sensing I'd be stonewalled, I've always avoided voicing my concerns to the volunteers, who are old and set in their ways. I doubt they love books. But recently, after a chat with another disgruntled visitor, I decided to go ahead with my plan. I opened up a bunch of the bags and put the good books I found on the shelves after grabbing a couple for myself. My plan is to, little by little, go through every bag and do the same. This upsetting of their apple cart is going to drive them up a wall—an added bonus.
The next day, I told one of the volunteers that if I looked through the verboten bags that've piled up, I bet I could find some good books. She scoffed at this. Her arrogance irked me. There's at least 200 books there, but she knew I couldn't find one that I'd like? She told me that if I touched any of the bags, I’d mess up their system. I asked her how it could mess up the system if the books had already been removed from the system prior to being donated to Goodwill. This threw her off her game.
“Nobody wants to read them. Why would you want to read a book that nobody wants to read?” she replied, changing the topic.
“I don't care what other people read,” I said. “And if they're bad books nobody wants to read, why are you giving them to Goodwill? The bookshelves at Goodwill are packed. You're giving them trash that they'll probably throw out.
“Maybe their customers will like them.”
“The Goodwill store is a quarter of a mile away. Why would their customers have such radically different taste in books than the people who live here?”
“We have a system here.”
The farcical nature of this conversation reminded of Major Major from Catch-22, who’d only allow meetings with him to be scheduled for times when he wouldn't be in his office. If people came to see him when he was in his office, they couldn't get in. After he’d left, people could get in, but he wouldn't be there. There was no way to get any information out of him. Major Major got promoted overnight from private to major due to a computer error. This woman promoted herself to head librarian on her own. The words I heard sounded like a non-stop computer error.
Eventually, I wore this person's bureaucratic mind down to the point where she said I could take individual bags home and remove any book that I liked. I asked why I couldn't do this in the library, which I was going to do anyway. In Heller’s Catch-22, a “system man” is someone who thrives within a rigid bureaucracy. He, like this “librarian,” values the system more than what the system is supposed to be accomplishing. I was Yossarian—the airman dedicated to getting around the system by any means possible.
My direct questions upset the bureaucrat so much that she began saying the same thing over and over. She asked me about five times if I was a year-round resident or a “snow bird,” the question that was both irrelevant and absurd, given the fact that it was August, way after the snowbirds had all fled back north. The conversation had become circular, so I ended it. I retreated to my desk. On her way out, the volunteer stopped by and was conciliatory, admitting that she couldn't stop me from doing anything I wanted to do. I lied and told her that she was a hard worker who’s doing a good job.