By John Branston
Have you noticed that the escalators are not working at the celebrated Memphis Main Library on Poplar Avenue?
I have, because I am old and prefer to read my books in book form (numbered pages of print between covers) rather than on a computer or X Box or Zoom or Alexa or on MuskAI and like to get them “free” instead of buying them at the friendly, well-stocked Novel book store, or on Amazon, Alibris or Walmart. I have a “library card” that entitles me to do that.
But this is where the escalators come in. There are two of them on the first floor. You will notice they are marked off with barriers like a crime scene – which in a way, this is. The old-fashioned printed books are on the second, third or fourth floor. The stairway for fitness buffs starts on the second floor. The only way to get to the second floor is by one of the elevators on the first floor. There are two of them, unless one of them is not working. As if.
To find a book you go to a desk to ask a human librarian to help you or go it alone by using a computer that is not marked “out of order” or being used by a person who is sleeping or looking at porn. Just kidding, the computers don’t get porn, so I am told.
The computers replaced the “card catalog” — an ancient invention by Benjamin Franklin.
The card catalog employed the “Dewey Decimal System” invented by Dutchman Rubik Dewey in 1703, shortly after the invention of decimals by Euclid. If you are 65 or older you will remember learning this at your elementary school so that you could find biographies (921.123) with print this big to do book reports and get promoted to the next grade.
Dewey later invented the Rubik’s Cube and the Cracker Barrel wooden triangle with holes for golf tees to fill while waiting for your order.
(For younger readers, the decimal system was once drilled into young skulls like the multiplication tables. It assigned numbers from one to one-thousand plus decimals and more numbers and letters so that you could easily find, say, a book about England by Joe Blow by searching the “shelves” for 621.999885546.B in a corner of the second floor behind the city directories and down two aisles to the left to the 622.53111898J books – if they had not been “checked out.” You did not need a pesky password or log-on employing at least one number and a @@@$$%%% of your choice. To find a book at the library, you write down the Dewey number on a scrap of paper with a pencil, conveniently provided next to the computers, then set off on your search.)
The escalator, now out of order, was a vital link in what today would be called the “supply chain.” The old Main Library at McLean and Peabody had only two floors and a fraction of the vast collection on Poplar Avenue.
The escalators have been out of service since 2004. Not really. But a long time. One might think that they would be easier to fix than, say, potholes, poverty, stadiums, crime or sewer systems, but one would apparently be wrong.
Helpful Tip: Used books are for sale for a few dollars (paperbacks for one dollar) in a room to the right of the entrance on the first floor. They are easy to find and you do not have to return them. Your dollars could help fix an escalator.
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John Branston covered Memphis as a reporter and columnist for 35 years.
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To read more of John Branston’s posts, go to categories on the right side of this blog’s home page and select his name.
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