Enduring institution: from the dark netherworld of musty stacks to the plump comfort of new reading rooms, Orr's paean to Perkins takes in the old and the new

Jon Gardiner

Although I have never before disparaged the monster, the Perkins of 1968 was cramped, chaotic, cock-eyed and discombobulated, and, worse, not disability-friendly. The pamphlet recording The Dedication of the William R. Perkins Library heralded it as a great new research library, just as we are now heralding the design of Bostock. This sentence from the pamphlet measures the distance: "The idea that the application of the computer for library purposes will save enormous sums of money--although wholly unrealistic--dies hard at the budget table." An aspect of Bostock and our new Perkins will be similarly outmoded before we know it.

There were good times in the Perkins of 1968 to 2005. The main glass doors opened onto Circulation and Reference. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, we would consult the card catalogue, scribble down the call number, and go searching in the upstairs stacks. After 1990, we began heading to the online catalogue and databases. The card catalogue, which, hippopotamic, took up the back of the lobby, was already a throwback to a primitive age. During its former reign as the beehive of the library, we'd say, "Excuse me," as we tried to heave a long narrow drawer from under someone who was standing in place consulting cards.

The catalogue rose to its heights from humble beginnings. In 1913 at Trinity College, the librarian, then always a faculty member, brought his typewriter from home and balanced it on a chair to bring it to the right height for a student (of course) to start the humble revolution: Cards would no longer be written out by hand. Recently, Ashley Jackson, librarian and Perkins' building manager, broke the sad news to me: "The old card catalogues are gone--the cards recycled and the wooden cases to surplus."

Fortunately, Perkins' floors two through four have survived and will supposedly continue as they have been, from 1968 on. I like strolling down the straight corridors under the yellowish fluorescent lights in this island of reprieve among so much commotion. I run my hands over Balzac, rows of him. My fingers play across the hard bindings and smooth edges of paper as if across piano keys. Balzac seems to go on forever.

From the 1968 stacks, I climb up a half-floor and cross over into the 1948 stacks. An orderly and lit library gives way to a dark netherworld with angles, inner stairwells, and what appear to be useless air vents poking out from the low ceiling. The 1968 Perkins was ridiculed because it didn't line up with 1948 (a lesson in the discontinuity of time?), but the "levels" have always induced the desire for exploration.

Sometimes my search for a book led me, with the help of an arrow drawn on a plain sheet of white paper, to a small, secret room attached to the level (all levels but F) behind a gray door. Now these rooms provide storage for rare books and are locked. I peek into the narrow, vertical window, covered with wire mesh, like an opening through which inmates might exchange glances with a visitor. The lugubrious metal desks that line the sides of the levels are the equivalent of the open carrels at Yale's Sterling Memorial Library, where I hunkered down for hours as a graduate student. Duke's wood and metal chairs are as hard and cold as Yale's. Threading my way past Perkins' carrels, I penetrate back to the juvenile books (level D, accessible from inside only through level C). The space closes in on me until I feel nervous and alone.

The bright lights and lovely reading rooms of Bostock are revising our idea of a library, making it uplifting, dazzling, and cozy--all good. Students are flocking back in droves. There were never so many amenities in which to read and research data comfortably. But the old Perkins! What it lacked in dazzle and plush, it made up for with things ancient, exotic, magical, disturbing, even spooky. During the ice storm of December 2002, off-campus students without electricity in their apartments found refuge in Perkins, sleeping wherever they could. Most likely they had an eerie sense that what our juvenile books told us is true: Like toys, books come alive at night, converse, argue, and party.

What I'll miss most about the 1948 levels is the smell of book perfume. I breathe in that combination of dust, mustiness, mold, and old leather and imagine the great private European, Arabic, or Chinese libraries. A bearded scholar in a saffron robe reads from a collection of scrolls to students who sit on plush pillows and inhale the incense. I can't stay long: I've developed a scholar's allergy to dust. Where will future students be overcome by this whiff of centuries of libraries?

Rooting around in the levels, I realize that they are my youth, my undergraduate career at Duke. Once I had a report due for Professor Anne Scott's history class the next morning and discovered, to my horror, nothing in the place where my call number told me the book should be. Its neighbors had collapsed in on the void of the missing volume.