I was extremely pleased to find today that the 1939 LaFollette committee hearings on free speech and the rights of labor, all seventy-something volumes, were printed, bound, and on the shelf in my library, and I could check out every single volume and take it home until June 2011. Which got me thinking about public universities, public libraries, and their accessibility to the public, even the Unabomber.
Everyone in Davis knows the Unabomber allegedly used our university library to, um, write his 1995 manifesto.* The manifesto liberally borrowed from a book by a San Francisco stevedore-cum-philosopher named Eric Hoffer – and I mean “borrowed” in the sense of “if a student did this, she would be referred to Student Judicial Affairs.” When newspapers published the Unabomber’s manifesto, a UC Davis student noticed that several sections matched underlined passages in the Shields Library copy of Hoffer’s True Believer.
In other words, it looked like the Unabomber had used our library to do his research. The student notified the librarians, the librarians notified the FBI, the FBI notified the local press, and everyone in Davis began to imagine that they had seen Theodore Kaczynski hunched in a neighboring carrel.
Of course, just because someone underlined the relevant passages in the UCD copy of Hoffer does not mean that Kaczynski underlined those words. But this scenario always made a certain amount of sense to me. If one were a hermit in Montana, and one wanted to take a bus to the nearest big library that was completely open to the public, one might indeed think of UCD. The university library has no barriers to the use of its stacks. No one has to show identification; there is no visible security. Anyone can walk in off the street, past the wonderful Arneson egghead sculpture, and read, say, part 66 of the LaFollette committee hearings, or Eric Hoffer’s True Believer, or any other of the 3.5 million volumes in the stacks here, without having to identify or justify himself.
I looked at the three copies of True Believer in the stacks today, and one of them was indeed marked up, with underlining and mysterious notations. As creepy as it is to think that the Unabomber might have held this book in his hands, I must admit I have a populist pride in the very public nature of my public university’s library.
*See Sacramento Bee, “Unabomber Used Library at UC Davis?” April 10, 1996.
The Edge of the American West 
8 comments
May 28, 2010 at 8:58 pm
andrew
Are all the UC campus main libraries open except Berkeley’s (where they make you show a card to get to the stacks)? I know anyone can walk into the UCLA stacks, but haven’t been to the other campus libraries.
May 28, 2010 at 9:00 pm
eric
I’d handle that copy of True Believer with care. You never know what the FBI left on it.
May 29, 2010 at 5:45 am
Matt McKeon
Libraries, FUCK YEAH!
May 29, 2010 at 6:13 am
silbey
UC Davis: Unabomber-endorsed.
May 29, 2010 at 7:19 am
Student
It’s great that UCD Library is open to the public even though it has more “titles” than a royal court.
Honestly, the citizens of the central valley are lucky. UCD Library could be like the Prague public library whose books are all “czech”ed out.
You would think that UC Davis… being an agricultural school would have a problem with the following…
A chicken walks into the UC Davis Library. It goes up to the circulation desk and says: “book, bok, bok, boook”. The librarian hands the chicken a book. It tucks it under his wing and runs out.
A while later, the chicken runs back in, throws the first book into the return bin and goes back to the librarian saying: “book, bok, bok, bok, boook”. Again the librarian gives it a book, and the chicken runs out. The librarian shakes her head.
Within a few minutes, the chicken is back, returns the book and starts all over again: “boook, book, bok bok boook”. The librarian gives him yet a third book, but this time as the chicken is running out the door, she follows it.
The chicken runs down the street, through the park and down to the riverbank. There, sitting on a lily pad is a big, green frog. The chicken holds up the book and shows it to the frog, saying: “Book, bok, bok, boook”. The frog blinks, and croaks: “read-it, read-it, read-it”.
May 29, 2010 at 7:23 am
dana
Probably not something they’ll put in the brochures for prospective freshmen.
May 29, 2010 at 2:24 pm
Erik Lund
And then there’s days when the 2009 imprint you desperately need (yes, I know that I shouldn’t have left my review copy lying around at work, I know) has been stolen already.
When the complete run of _The Engineer_ between 1904 and 1950 has been lugged off 20 miles from campus, and the library refuses to even consider opening it, as though it were the tomb of the last god king of some archaic state, instead of a warehouse in an industrial park, far too close to the river.
When the complete run of British sessional papers that used to be sitting on open shelves has disappeared into the robot-stacks, recorded only by volume number.
When the library work stations where you correlate the volume numbers with contents to find the prewar Army Estimates are running an old XP installation that wobbles along like a great-grandmother in the baking aisle.
When the conveniently provided furnishings for said stations consist of stools, and your back slowly seizes as you track down hard copies from which you can make somewhat-less-expensive photocopies that will be obsolete even to an “independent scholar” in 5 years time.
Of course, this is the University of British Columbia, where the day when libraries cease to have “books” seems to have been instaurated in the very architecture of the brand new “Learning Centre” that replaced the old Main Library stacks. I’m sure that UCD is much less frustrating.
May 31, 2010 at 10:11 am
TF Smith
But is the UCD library open Memorial Day weekend?
Suburban Liberal Hotbed State is closed Saturday through Monday, and the summer session started last week…