Library Card Revisited

Last March I posted an entry about some old library book cards that I'd purchased on Etsy. The books were all from the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library at Phillips Academy, a prep school in Andover, Mass.

Now reader El Jefe has pointed out something I'd missed: One of the cards, for the book Eight Famous Plays by August Strindberg (shown above), was checked out April 20, 1973, by one P. Sellars and again on Sept. 23, 1974, by Peter Sellars — clearly the same person, judging by the handwriting.

That would appear to be the contemporary theater director Peter Sellars, who, sure enough, graduated from Phillips Academy in 1975. Fascinating to see that he twice took out a book of plays by Strindberg, an experimental Swedish playwright. "Heady reading for a 16- or 17-year-old," says El Jefe, "and quite possibly a formative experience for his future career." Indeed.

This also means I now have an object with Peter Sellars's signature — a celebrity autograph, so to speak (assuming one considers Sellars to be a celebrity, which he is in certain circles). I'm still sorting out how I feel about that. On the one hand, I admit that it's fun to suddenly realize that I have a document with a semi-famous person's signature. On the other hand, one of the underlying points of Permanent Record is that "normal" people have their own stories to tell, no fame or notoriety required. Sellars is interesting, but all the other students who checked out the Strindberg book, and whose names are listed on the card along with Sellars's, are in some ways more interesting because of their relative anonymity. Who were they? What have they ended up doing with their lives? Did this book affect them in any way? All questions worth pondering.

Old Library Book Cards

For all images, click to enlarge

When I was growing up in the 1970s, my Mom volunteered at our local library, and I'd sometimes go there when she was on duty. I remember thinking how cool it looked when she (or, really, anyone) used the rubber stampers to stamp the date onto the card for each book being loaned out.

I thought of that when I recently acquired some old library book cards, including the three shown above (those are the fronts on top, and the corresponding backs beneath them). The Etsy seller from whom I purchased them said they were from the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., so the people who checked these books out the library were probably spoiled rich kids.

It's fun to see these old cards, from the days before bar codes and electronic book-tracking systems. I love seeing how long the gaps were between the books being borrowed, the cumulative span of the books being on the shelves, the Dewey decimal numbers, the handwriting of the borrowers. I also love the title Further Adventures in Essay Reading (which begs the question of whether there was a previous volume simply titled Adventures in Essay Reading).

Here are two more:

Lots to like here, like the way Steven Anderson crossed the "t" in his first name. I also like how the date for April 11, 1973, was initially stamped upside-down and then re-stamped in the correct orientation. Did my Mom ever do that? Also, it's interesting to see that borrowers signed their names in pencil in the 1940s and ’50s, with pens becoming more common in the 1960s. I'm pretty sure this reflected the increasing nationwide use of ballpoint pens.

Where are these students today? And where are these books?

I no longer have these cards in my possession (I recently gave them to my friend Gilmore as a gift but scanned them first), but I have more of them. Perhaps I'll share them in future entry.