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SPEAKER_03: And I kind of agree.
SPEAKER_05: That's reporter Piers Gelly, although he's not normally a reporter. I'm a graduate student in creative writing, and for the past two years, I've taught fiction writing to undergrads at the University of Virginia.
SPEAKER_03: I assign a lot of reading, but mostly it's in the form of photocopied pages. Don't worry, the print shop pays for the rights. I don't want to force my students to buy too much, but I always make sure I assign at least one physical book. And I always try to pick something that's beautiful. One with a nice font, a lovely page design, a pleasing paper grain, and an intriguing cover. Don't get me wrong, the words inside matter too. But I think it's important for my students to have an object that accentuates the pleasure of the physical act of reading, and something they would hold onto after the class had ended. I personally toss hundreds of pages of radio scripts in the recycling bin every month, but I would have a really hard time throwing away a book.
SPEAKER_05: Once the pages have a spine, it's like they have a soul. It would feel wrong, like you're spitting on knowledge itself. It's so hard to get rid of books. This is a story about books, and, brace yourself, how to get rid of them.
SPEAKER_03: And in the words of REM, it starts with an earthquake. Downtown San Francisco in the background, and we zoom into Keynlstick Park.
SPEAKER_18: It was the most Bay Area sporting event imaginable.
SPEAKER_05: The Oakland A's were playing the San Francisco Giants in the 1989 World Series. Coming into the third game on October 17, 1989, the A's were in the lead.
SPEAKER_03: They had won the first two games. Allowing Jose Conseco to score, and he fails to get Dave Parker.
SPEAKER_03: But just as the third game was about to kick off,
SPEAKER_03: the TV broadcast cut out.
SPEAKER_05: When the signal came back, it was no longer a baseball game. This is Cheryl Jennings in the Channel 7 newsroom.
SPEAKER_14: As you may have noticed, our power was knocked out. These were the early minutes of the Loma Prieta earthquake, which struck near Santa Cruz.
SPEAKER_05: This was the first major earthquake ever to be broadcast live on national TV.
SPEAKER_14: We have a report of a person trapped in an elevator in Shelter Bay. Part of the Bay Bridge had been destroyed.
SPEAKER_03: There were fires, fallen buildings, widespread power outages. In all, there were 63 deaths and almost 4,000 injuries. But this is a story about what happened to the San Francisco Public Library
SPEAKER_05: after this earthquake, and because of this earthquake.
SPEAKER_03: The library suffered a lot of damage, especially on the higher floors. So one of the things about an earthquake is the effect of it is intensified the higher up you go.
SPEAKER_04: On the upper levels of the library, floors had caved in.
SPEAKER_03: Jason Gibbs was a new librarian there, but he couldn't go to work for two months after the quake. It was too dangerous. He says bookshelves had collapsed sideways or fallen on their faces, and books lay in piles everywhere.
SPEAKER_04: Like the books had been tossed around by some angry force.
SPEAKER_05: No one was injured at the San Francisco Public Library, but the earthquake dumped half a million books on the floor.
SPEAKER_03: Even after two months of repairs, the post-earthquake situation in the San Francisco Public Library was still pretty bad. Library management determined that the stacks weren't safe and designated a new room for public browsing, Librarians curated a selection of books that they thought the public would most like to read, and those books went in that room. But they realized along the way that not every book was going to fit.
SPEAKER_03: In other words, even this winnowed-down selection of books was too large for the available space. They needed to winnow it down even more. The earthquake just happened, we don't have this shelving anymore, we need to make space.
SPEAKER_04: That's a reasonable thing to do if you approach it in a thoughtful way. Because libraries do get rid of books. All the time.
SPEAKER_03: Earthquake or not. Put simply, there are so many new books coming in every day, and only a finite amount of library space. The practice of freeing up library space is called weeding.
SPEAKER_05: If you think about it, it sounds ugly, but it is a really good description.
SPEAKER_05: That's Sharon McKellar, she supervises teen services at the Oakland Public Library. Avery Trulman went down the street to visit her and see how she weeds. You have to weed your garden for the flowers to grow. I'm not a gardener.
SPEAKER_09: And weeding is not just about holding the book in your hands and asking yourself if that book sparks joy.
SPEAKER_03: There's really, really specific guidelines.
SPEAKER_09: We're not just randomly grabbing books off the shelf and putting them in the trash. McKellar and many other librarians at libraries all over the world weed their shelves using the same set of guidelines.
SPEAKER_03: And it has an excellent acronym. Musty. M-U-S-T-Y. M is for misleading.
SPEAKER_05: Or factually inaccurate. U is for ugly. This one's a little ugly. It's like the cover is a little broken.
SPEAKER_09: Isn't the fact that it's so beat up an indication that it was love? For sure. So if it's been checked out in the last three years, I'd probably actually buy a new copy of it. If it hasn't been checked out in the last three years, I would probably consider it for withdrawal. S for superseded.
SPEAKER_05: Buy a new edition or a much better book.
SPEAKER_09: This would be like an old manual for Windows 98 or an outdated travel guide.
SPEAKER_03: These are the kinds of books that get shredded.
SPEAKER_05: And the last two letters are T for trivial and Y for your collection has no use for this book. Because they really want that musty acronym to work.
SPEAKER_03: Those last two, the T and the Y, trivial and your library has no need for this book. These are the tricky ones. They're not necessarily statements of fact. They're judgments of value. What's trivial to me might be very important to you and vice versa. But even here, these judgment calls are made by librarians who specialize in the relevant section based on circulation statistics. You just have to trust that your librarians are doing their best for the public. We want to be able to keep bringing you the most relevant, most current information.
SPEAKER_09: And the only way to do that is by having room to do it. So the only way we can do that is by sometimes withdrawing the things that are not as useful anymore. Although some sections, according to the library guidelines, are generally self-weeding.
SPEAKER_03: In other words, they disappear.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, people steal them. Yeah, certain sections of the library tend to disappear more than others. Books about marijuana, the Bible, and the occult are probably the biggest ones I can think of. But for the sections that do have to get weeded, weeding is generally a touchy subject.
SPEAKER_03: The reason why is probably already clear to you. People don't like the idea of books being thrown away.
SPEAKER_05: We like books. A lot. And perhaps no one loves books more than librarians. There's a part of you that just winces every time you have to remove a book.
SPEAKER_04: I mean, books are dear to us. Part of my maturing as a librarian is to get over that a little bit. Yes, weeding is normal and necessary.
SPEAKER_03: But after the 1989 earthquake, the San Francisco Public Library started weeding an unusual amount of books.
SPEAKER_05: The librarians were told to move quickly, and they didn't use Musty or any sort of comparable system.
SPEAKER_03: The librarians were ordered to go through each collection book by book and insert a slip of paper into each.
SPEAKER_05: Green, yellow, and red.
SPEAKER_03: Green meant the book had been checked out that year. Yellow meant the book had been checked out in the last two years. And red meant that it had been over two years since somebody had checked out that book. And the red books were the ones that were in potential danger.
SPEAKER_05: Danger because management had decided that the red books had to go.
SPEAKER_03: Compared to the careful consideration of Musty, the system of the green, yellow, and red cards is a rather blunt instrument. It's certainly not the only measure whether somebody has borrowed it within the last period of time.
SPEAKER_04: It felt rather arbitrary.
SPEAKER_03: And it wasn't really clear where the red card books were going to go or if they would ever be used again. In Jason Gibbs' department, for example, the art and music collection, the discarded books got sent to an abandoned hospital owned by the city because there was nowhere else to put them. Even battle-hardened librarians like Gibbs felt that the weeding was happening too fast.
SPEAKER_05: You had librarians in different sections weeding furiously and not really communicating with each other. As a consequence, lots and lots of books were removed from the library. And no one quite knew how many because no one was keeping track. It was ultimately, I think, a weakness of management from the top.
SPEAKER_04: Jason Gibbs is a pretty even-keeled guy, but that's his diplomatic way of saying that the problems began with the head librarian at that time, a man named Kenneth Dowland.
SPEAKER_03: Within a year or two, you could be visiting the public library without leaving your home.
SPEAKER_02: In the years leading up to the 1989 earthquake, the San Francisco Public Library was starting to rethink its whole approach to books
SPEAKER_05: in light of a new little thing called the internet. Imagine plugging a computer like this one into any telephone in the world and being able to search any library in the world.
SPEAKER_03: And a big part of this pivot was when, in 1987, San Francisco hired Kenneth Dowland as its new city librarian. As San Francisco's city librarian, Ken Dowling must make sure that two million people have access to 18 million books and other information on a limited budget.
SPEAKER_02: Dowling was all about the internet. He had recently published a book called The Electronic Library, in which he argued that technology was changing the way people used information, and therefore changing the role of librarians.
SPEAKER_03: This is a clip of him. The internet web world, if you will, collapses time, collapses distance, and is collapsing cost.
SPEAKER_12: If this sounds unremarkable, not to mention a bit quaint, keep in mind that Dowling was saying all this stuff as early as 1984.
SPEAKER_05: He certainly understood at an early stage what the internet was going to do for communication.
SPEAKER_03: But there was a flip side to Dowling's visionary concept of digitally networked libraries. Some people felt that Dowling had a distressing lack of concern for books.
SPEAKER_04: There was a sense that when it came to the physical collections, he just didn't have any interest.
SPEAKER_03: Dowling was also overseeing the design of a new main library for the city of San Francisco, which would complete his vision of the library of the future. The city is building a new $100 million library that is wired for computers as well as television.
SPEAKER_02: This new library would have twice as much space as the old one, but a big chunk of that space wasn't going to be for shelving books.
SPEAKER_03: Instead, much of the library's interior was devoted to an atrium in the middle of the building, which would rise 86 feet to a conical glass roof. Lots of librarians worried that this big empty atrium wouldn't leave a lot of space for books.
SPEAKER_05: The atrium was evidence that books were not the sole priority of this building, and Dowling wasn't going to let a good crisis go to waste. The earthquake was a perfect excuse to do what he wanted to do anyway—shrink the physical collection before the move to the new space.
SPEAKER_03: Dowling's administration started sending books to landfills. In the days after the quake, books were being sent out by the truckload several times a week. This is not normal library practice. Twenty-seven librarians signed a petition asking Kenneth Dowling for the weeding to stop, but that didn't work, so Jason Gibbs and his colleagues decided to do something.
SPEAKER_05: In any institution, you have a variety of people. There are some people who will just kind of do whatever they're told, and then there are other people who feel like they have a higher calling to the profession.
SPEAKER_04: Gibbs and librarians from several other departments felt that higher calling. They banded together and called themselves the Gorilla Librarians.
SPEAKER_03: Gorilla like the freedom fighter.
SPEAKER_04: Fighting for the freedom to not put little slips of red paper on books against the orders of management.
SPEAKER_04: Let's just say that we did not withdraw books because they hadn't circulated. We generally held on to the collection. Jason says that other Gorilla Librarians snuck into the stacks and replaced red slips with green ones, thereby designating the book as a circulating book and keeping it in the collection.
SPEAKER_03: The Gorilla Librarians wanted to determine exactly how many books had been weeded and how many had been dumped, but nobody had any idea how many books were being taken away, and there was a risk that they'd never be able to find out the magnitude of this massive clearing. Because Kenneth Dallin decided to get rid of the physical card catalog. Those files full of index cards chronicling each book.
SPEAKER_05: The card catalog is an artifact, an artifact, but I will not support the view that the card catalog is a working technology to help people find books anymore. It is not, and most of the libraries in the world know that and have moved on.
SPEAKER_12: He was right about this. Already at that point, more than 90% of the nation's libraries had computerized their card catalogs.
SPEAKER_05: The earthquake itself allowed the San Francisco Public Library to modernize their catalog. With the disaster relief money they were granted, the library was able to get electronic catalog software.
SPEAKER_03: So now, logically, Dallin wanted to get rid of the physical card catalog, which the library had stopped updating in 1991. San Francisco's old card catalog was not moved to the new library. It is locked up and inaccessible to the public.
SPEAKER_01: But this move to get rid of the old card catalog caused a surprisingly intense outcry from the guerrilla librarians.
SPEAKER_03: And it wasn't just a matter of nostalgia or personal preference. The physical card catalog said exactly what was in the library before all the arbitrary weeding. If a book was red tagged and weeded, it wouldn't be registered in the new digital system. There would be no record it had ever existed at all.
SPEAKER_05: And so the old card catalog was more than just a card catalog. The card catalog is evidence. Evidence of a purge.
SPEAKER_06: To get to the card catalog, the librarians pulled out their secret weapon. Nicholson Baker.
SPEAKER_03: I'm Nicholson Baker and I am a writer of books, fiction, non-fiction.
SPEAKER_06: And I became, for a brief period of time, a library activist.
SPEAKER_03: Baker is a writer of novels and essays that celebrate the minutiae of daily life. And in 1994, Baker had gotten national attention for a New Yorker article about the disposal of physical card catalogs, a practice that had become increasingly common and which upset Baker a lot. The San Francisco Public Library had a very ornate, beautiful card catalog.
SPEAKER_06: That feeling that you have when your fingers would dance over the little cardboard pieces and you could tell a subject that was popular because the tops were darker. There's all sorts of, you know, tricks that were just fun.
SPEAKER_03: The guerrilla librarians reached out to Baker for help. By now, it was 1996 and the new library was nearing completion. The lost books, evidenced only by their locked away card catalog, were teetering on the edge of disregard. In their email to Nicholson Baker, the librarians wrote, You are the only one who can save it now.
SPEAKER_05: Part of me thought, Oh, God, this is going to get complicated.
SPEAKER_06: Oh, it would. At the time, Baker was living just across the bay in Berkeley.
SPEAKER_05: So he made a formal request to inspect the card catalog. Kenneth Dallin denied that request. So Baker sued the library for access to the card catalog.
SPEAKER_06: Never sue anything if you can avoid it and don't sue a library.
SPEAKER_03: This lawsuit took a while and it was a bit of a mess, but it automatically classified the card catalog as a public document. Now the library had to keep it. And then Baker and the guerrilla librarians got to work in secret.
SPEAKER_06: And, you know, you can imagine this with kind of Mission Impossible music going. Yes, please.
SPEAKER_03: The guerrilla librarians snuck into off-limits areas in the library. They took away books that were going to be destroyed. In other words, they stole them.
SPEAKER_05: The guerrillas stockpiled hundreds and hundreds of library discards in their homes, in their cars, in their offices, in lockers, in boxes, all in the hope that they would someday be returned to the library.
SPEAKER_03: Nicholson Baker stole books, too. I was driving back and forth across the Bay Bridge with my car full of books that I had actually found in this place that was the deselection room.
SPEAKER_06: Baker ignored the staff-only signs and walked right into the deselection room, the basement storage, all the places where the SFPL were storing books.
SPEAKER_03: He picked up a bunch of books that had no match in the online catalog and found some real treasures. They had stored all these, you know, including 17th century very valuable books and stuff was down there.
SPEAKER_06: Baker, along with a historian, began comparing the online catalog to the physical card catalog.
SPEAKER_05: As they cross-referenced the two lists, it turned out that a lot of books were missing, way more than anyone had expected. Let me tell you what an opening day celebration today.
SPEAKER_05: At last, in April of 1996, the new Main Library opened its doors with panache. Talk about fanfare. Nothing less than a parachute jump into Civic Center with the man holding the symbolic key to the new library.
SPEAKER_13: And in May of 1996, about a month after the library opened, the Guerrilla Librarians organized an event in the library auditorium where Baker delivered a speech stating what he had found.
SPEAKER_05: Baker contended that Dowland was responsible for a massive destruction of books, the systematic removal to a landfill of at least 200,000 volumes.
SPEAKER_06: And I just said it right there in the library itself, in a talk, and I think it really startled people.
SPEAKER_05: The phrase that got Baker the most attention was when he called this mass disposal a, quote, hate crime directed at the past. This really upset library management. And it became this kind of minor dust up in San Francisco.
SPEAKER_06: Word had begun to spread that Baker was writing another story for The New Yorker, one specifically about this whole weeding debacle.
SPEAKER_03: So the president of the Library Commission wrote to the New Yorker's editor at that time and attempted to kill the piece by discrediting Baker. It didn't work, and Baker's article came out in October of 1996. It was called The Author versus the Library.
SPEAKER_11: A current New Yorker article called it the great book purge, claiming more than 100,000 rare and one of a kind books were hauled to the dump.
SPEAKER_03: And then things got a little out of hand. The library hit back, condemning Baker for accusing them of a hate crime and saying that he misunderstood the problem. They also tried to discredit him because of some bad math he had reported. It turns out one of the guerrilla librarians had messed up the measurements of the old library shelves.
SPEAKER_05: In fact, the new library had much more space for books than the old one. It was a very bad era.
SPEAKER_06: It was very embarrassing, although it didn't change the fact that the library had taken so many books to the dump.
SPEAKER_05: Then both sides started lobbing insults at each other as the local and national press piled on. One paper compared Baker to the Unabomber. It was basically an analog Twitter feud. I wasn't prepared to be part of it. I didn't know that I was getting into that. It was kind of a battle. It was really ugly.
SPEAKER_06: And even from guerrilla librarian Jason Gibbs' standpoint, the whole weeding controversy got a little blown out of proportion.
SPEAKER_04: It probably was not as horrible as Nicholson. Baker made it out, but it was horrible enough.
SPEAKER_05: Meanwhile, the new library itself had already been built. And it was, judging from the influx of visitors, a success. As charges and counter charges fly, three times as many visitors stream through the doors of the new library, an indication that some book lovers welcome the change.
SPEAKER_05: Some of those books saved by the guerrilla librarians in boxes and lockers were transferred back into the collection. All the books in the Jason Gibbs department, art and music, made it back. But he says that many of the other books didn't. They stayed gone, and many of them probably got discarded. Nicholson Baker says he still has some of the books he stockpiled.
SPEAKER_03: Given the painful experience of the controversy, the library wasn't really interested in reshelving them. But at the end of the day, the controversy wasn't only about what to do with old books. It was a debate about what books are.
SPEAKER_05: Are they beautiful objects that we can smell and touch and collect? Or are they eternal sources of knowledge, accessible to everyone in the ether?
SPEAKER_06: Well, and it's both. In a given research quest, you and I might want to find out what is in a book in the fastest possible way. Well, nowadays it's miraculous. Sometimes you want the words. Sometimes you want more than the words. You want the words laid out on the page.
SPEAKER_03: Clearly, Nicholson Baker can see Dowland's perspective. But Baker maintains that we shouldn't give up on the printed page. His argument, and the public battle around it in the 90s, was a big reason why the San Francisco Public Library totally overhauled their collections policies.
SPEAKER_05: They made it a policy that if a library branch is considering weeding a last copy of some book, they must send that copy to a subject specialist, who will decide if it can be weeded or not. And for the books that do have to go, the San Francisco Public Library developed a community redistribution program to make sure the extra copies of popular books can live on somewhere else.
SPEAKER_03: We distribute them to schools. And city colleges and prisons.
SPEAKER_05: And strangely enough, one of the biggest changes to the modern practice of weeding is something that Kenneth Dowland himself helped establish. Online communication between libraries.
SPEAKER_04: In an ideal world, you might want to have every book, but we just don't have the shelf space for every book. So you rely on somebody else's shelves to hold the book. Some libraries spell musty with an I and an E at the end instead of a Y for misleading, ugly, superseded, trivial, irrelevant, or elsewhere.
SPEAKER_03: Like if a copy of the book is at another library nearby. Jason Gibbs at the SFPL and Sharon McKellar across the bay at the Oakland Public Library can now communicate with each other instantly so they can share book space and make different volumes available to readers in both cities. And this has huge implications for what gets weeded and why. In this respect, Kenneth Dowland was very right.
SPEAKER_05: He certainly failed in terms of managing the collection, but he succeeded to the extent of bringing us into the wider network of libraries online.
SPEAKER_04: And yet still, because of Baker's 1996 lawsuit, the SFPL has kept the old card catalog. They are legally required to.
SPEAKER_03: The card catalog was a way of holding onto the memory of a quarter of a million books that they had gotten rid of.
SPEAKER_06: Those cabinets full of cards are still there in storage.
SPEAKER_05: Practically barricaded in by all kinds of other supplies, but I'll go down and visit it every now and then.
SPEAKER_04: Just to say hi? Yeah, well, just to know it's there.
SPEAKER_03: After this weeding debacle, Nicholson Baker became even more vested in philosophies and practices of archiving and went on to publish a book that touched on all this called Double Fold. It looks at these events in the much broader context of the digitization of libraries. And this book is now commonly assigned in master's programs in library science. We read the Nicholson Baker book in library school.
SPEAKER_03: That's Sharon McKellar again from the Oakland Public Library. She says that the debacle at the San Francisco Public Library has become a case study about weeding.
SPEAKER_09: Why we do weed and how we should weed and what could be done, you know, how to do it well and what to avoid and all that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_05: And when it's done well with care and consideration, weeding isn't so bad at all. For me, weeding is fun. It's a chance to really touch the books and see how they're doing and see what people are interested in.
SPEAKER_03: That's what all this comes down to. It's what people are interested in. Weeding isn't just about what to cut. It's also about what to keep. It's about what the public wants to read.
SPEAKER_09: Your voice does matter and we're maintaining a collection for the public and for the people who use it.
SPEAKER_05: And so every time you check out a book from the library, you are casting a vote to your local librarian roving the stacks to keep this title in circulation for everyone to read.
SPEAKER_05: Coming up, more radical librarians doing good in the world. This time on horseback after this. If you want to give your body the nutrients it craves and the energy it needs, there's Kachava. It's a plant based super blend made up of superfoods, greens, proteins, omegas, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and probiotics. In other words, it's all your daily nutrients in a glass. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious protein packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you just add two scoops of Kachava super blend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. You know, treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10 percent off for a limited time. Just go to Kachava dot com slash invisible spelled K A C H A V A and get 10 percent off your first order. That's K A C H A V A dot com slash invisible Kachava dot com slash invisible. What's more important, making sure you're set for today or planning for tomorrow? You can actually do both at the same time with annuity and life insurance solutions from Lincoln Financial. You're not just taking care of you and your family's future. You're also helping yourself out today. Lincoln's annuities offer options to not only provide you with your guaranteed retirement income for life, but to help protect you from everyday market volatility in their life. Insurance policies not only provide your family with a death benefit, but some can even give you immediate access to funds in case of an emergency. Go to Lincoln financial dot com slash. Get started now to learn how to plan, protect and retire. Lincoln annuities and life insurance are issued by the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Products sold in New York are issued by Lincoln Life and Annuity Company of New York, Syracuse, New York, distributed by Lincoln Financial Distributors Inc., a broker dealer.
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SPEAKER_16: The Kitchen Sisters are Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, two audio documentary pioneers who are like the godmothers of the radio topia collective.
SPEAKER_05: You can hear their stories regularly on NPR, and we're lucky to have their podcast called The Kitchen Sisters Presents on radio topia. The current series they're working on is called The Keepers. It's all about the guardians of history, the eccentric individuals who take it upon themselves to protect the free flow of information and preserve some part of our cultural heritage. And when we were producing our story this week about the preservation of the SFPL's book collections, I thought a lot about The Kitchen Sisters Keepers series and this story in particular, and I wanted to share it with you. This episode is called The Pack Horse Librarians of Eastern Kentucky.
SPEAKER_20: My name is Mary Ruth Schuler-Deeter. I'm 97 years old. We traveled on horses riding down in the mountains of Kentucky. Very poor country. I was delivering books to the children. The Pack Horse Librarians, that was one of the works of President Roosevelt.
SPEAKER_07: That's Ruth, one of the last of the Pack Horse Librarians. Today, episode two in The Keepers series, stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors, and historians. The Kitchen Sisters present The Pack Horse Librarians of Eastern Kentucky.
SPEAKER_00: Our problem is to put to work three and one half million employable persons, men and women, who are now on the relief roll.
SPEAKER_21: In the Depression, those horrible years after 1929, the Appalachians were hit so hard. Coal mines were being shut down. Lots of people in dire poverty.
SPEAKER_23: Eleanor Roosevelt decided to help create projects that would specifically benefit women and children. My name is Heather Henson, author of that book, Woman. Eleanor Roosevelt felt very strongly about The Pack Horse Library Project.
SPEAKER_15: The women are willing to do this because it's going to help their neighbors. I think we'll win out.
SPEAKER_21: The Pack Horse Librarians, mostly women, rode circuits around 18 to 20 miles. They followed animal paths, fence lines. I'm Kathy Appelt. I co-wrote down Cutchen Creek, the Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky. They would stuff their saddle bags or a pillowcase with books and strike out, buy horseback or mule, to provide library service to the remote areas of the Kentucky mountains. Going into the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky was going back in time. No running water, no electricity, very few schools. Families lived way up in the mountains. A creek bed, that would be the road.
SPEAKER_23: We forded Greasy Creek, taken horses across, got really wet. Way up to your... You don't get afraid. You do your job and that was it.
SPEAKER_20: You had to be hearty, being able to clamber up the side of a mountain on a horse. You had to know the roads and creek beds.
SPEAKER_08: My name is Eliza McGraw. I wrote a story about the Pack Horse Librarians for the Smithsonian.
SPEAKER_10: One county would start a pack horse library. Another county would hear about it. They would want one. Then that community would ask the WPA to let them hire carriers. Many of them were women between 25 and 35. There weren't people coming in from outside to take jobs from people who were in the community. They were local women familiar with the people who wanted to read and what they might want to read.
SPEAKER_18: My grandmother, she was a horse pack librarian. She was involved with the WPA because that was the workforce of the time. Because Eastern Kentucky, you either worked or you starved to death. I'm Rick Overby, grandson of Grace Caudill Lucas. She would ride that horse. Carriage trails, mud holes, going back up into these hollers. She didn't own the horse. She rented it for 50 cents a week. She would arrange the books in a pack that would ride behind her on the saddle. She would haul around up to 100. Not only books, but magazines of the time and newspaper.
SPEAKER_21: Grace was a young mother with two small children. Her husband left. In the Depression, a lot of men did that. My father left home when I was two and my sister was about a month old. My name is Richard Overby and I'm the son of Grace Caudill Lucas, my mother.
SPEAKER_19: She'd get up every morning about 4.30, feed me and my sister and take us to my grandma's until she got home that night. Then she would feed us and put us to bed and start all over the next day. A dollar a day, she was glad to have it. She bought groceries and things that we'd never had before.
SPEAKER_10: The only thing the federal government provided was the salary for the carriers. My name is Jean Schmitzer, co-author of Down Cut Shin Creek, Path Course Library of Eastern Kentucky. Lena Nofseer, one of the leaders in the Kentucky Library Association, really goes to bat for this project. She started something called the Penny Fund. It asked for all of the state parent-teacher associations to donate a penny. Children donated pennies. One little school collected enough pennies to make a dollar and they sent the dollar in.
SPEAKER_08: This being the Depression, it was hard for people to give up anything. I mean, even a penny drive was taxing.
SPEAKER_10: People from all over the United States learned about this. They would donate. Cast-off, magazines, used books, Swiss Family Robinson, Heidi.
SPEAKER_21: Better Homes and Gardens, National Geographic, Popular Mechanics. By 1937, they'd gotten 60,000 books.
SPEAKER_22: The librarians would go through these ragged magazines and dilapidated books and they would cannibalize them, deconstruct them, remix them, and create these new scrapbooks. I am Jason Vance, librarian, Middle Tennessee State University. Library Manual for WPA Path Course Library Projects. The following scrapbooks have been found useful. Recipes, Mountain Ballads, Kentucky History, Odd Names, Articles on a Particular Subject, Dogs, Spain, Nazis, Model Airplanes. Carriers would collect recipes and patterns for quilts from people on the route, put them together into a scrapbook, and share county to county.
SPEAKER_10: In 1940, there were 2,582 of these scrapbooks. They became part of the circulating collection.
SPEAKER_22: The pack horse librarians were creating these cultural artifacts, snapshots of life in eastern Kentucky during the Great Depression.
SPEAKER_20: They were so happy to get a book, kick her to death. We always sat under the big old chestnut tree. They didn't know how to read, so I read it again so we could understand it.
SPEAKER_08: Kentucky in 1930, illiteracy in the southeastern counties was anywhere from 19 to 31 percent. Some people were originally a little bit leery of the pack horse librarians because reading was seen as sort of a leisure activity. When you're trying to get this corn hoad and work done on a small farm, somebody can't be sitting with their feet up reading. This was just frivolous.
SPEAKER_10: There was a lot of illiteracy there. The pack horse librarians would sit and read to people at the houses and then mount back up and get going. They were really hoofing it to get done before dark.
SPEAKER_21: The ice was out on a winter day and it started to sleet ice falling out of the sky. Normally she might have stopped at one of the households along the way and spent the night, but the last house on her circuit was a family that she knew if she stayed there that they would feed her and likely that would mean nothing for the kids. So she just pushed on. Before she could get home, she had to cross a creek. The water was high enough it covered her stirrups. By the time she got home, her feet were encased in ice.
SPEAKER_19: Grace would ride that horse and he would swim through the creeks. She had mountains to climb and valleys to go through.
SPEAKER_22: The program ended in 1943. We're in the war. We're pulling out of this depression. The library program was no longer funded by the federal government, the salaries for carriers. But 1954, the state of Kentucky starts a bookmobile program.
SPEAKER_21: In Alaska, there are bush plane librarians. In Africa, there's camel librarians. In Louisiana, there were floating librarians, pulling flat boats in the bayous.
SPEAKER_08: In Thailand, they were using elephants. In Zimbabwe, they were using donkeys. In Mongolia, they were using horse-drawn wagons.
SPEAKER_22: In our mind, we think of librarians as the quintessential Marion the librarian, somebody who puts the books back on the shelves, dust and makes sure that everything's tidy. Librarians are a determined bunch. They're far more subversive than that.
SPEAKER_05: The packhorse librarians of Eastern Kentucky was produced by the Kitchin Sisters and mixed by Jim McKee. You can hear more from the Keeper series on their podcast, The Kitchin Sisters Present from Radio-Topia. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Pierce Gelly and edited by Avery Truffleman. Mixed in tech production by Sharif Yousif. Music by Sean Rial. Katie Mingle is the Senior Producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the Digital Director. The rest of the team includes Senior Editor Delaney Hall, Joe Rosenberg, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taryn Maaza, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. Ken Dowland did not respond to our various requests for an interview on the San Francisco Public Library story, but a very special thanks to all the librarians who helped on context and background, especially Shelley Cocking and Mindy Linetsky, both from the San Francisco Public Library. Thanks as well to Oren Rudofsky. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at Radio-Topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook, you can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But the full archive of all things 99% Invisible is at 99pi.org. Radio-Topia from PRX.
SPEAKER_17: We're on the same page every day to do it the right way, even if it's the hard way. Because if it's not right for us, it's not right for you. Deaton Watson. It's a family thing since 1939.
SPEAKER_19: When the weather app says rain, the McDonald's app says McDelivery. Order McDelivery in the McDonald's app. I participate in McDonald's. Delivery prices may be higher than in restaurants. Delivery fees may apply.
