CONNECTICUT LIBRARIES
June 2002, Vol. 44, No. 6
It is time for beach reading! And, this book is for us, a mystery that begins "with a library call slip and the gracious query of an elegant man."The library is New York Public Library. The book requested is Secret Compartments in Eighteenth-Century Furniture. The elegant man is Henry James Jesson III, elderly, wealthy, and an eccentric bibliophile. The reference librarian is Alexander Short. A collector of call slips, Alexander notices that Jesson's handwriting is "a gorgeous old-fashioned script executed with confident ascenders and tapering exit strokes."
We begin this novel of suspense in a contemporary research library where the computers work, but the vacuum tubes break down, and the characters are people we have known.
A possible exception is Nic, Alexander's lusty, artistic, French wife, who he did meet in the library. She makes pop-up books and other three-dimensional volumes, including a "girdle" that Alexander wears and uses for taking notes--something he does obsessively. "I want to compose lists," Alexander says to Nic. "Parfait," responds Nic. "You make the lists and I will bind them."
The result, Slips of Love, is a hand-bound volume of the call slips of their courtship, which they donate to the Library's Center for Material Culture, a special collection of pornography presided over by Alexander's friend and colleague, George Speaight, (known as the librarian of Sexual Congress).
Alexander's friends are familiar to librarians. Norton, the computer genius, puts his talent to work in the search for a missing watch. Mr. Singh, the vigilant guard with a heart of gold, can break a rule to help a friend. Mr. Paradis, the maintainer who helps the reference librarian gain access to the stacks, is a serious contender in Class Struggle, a Jeopardy-type contest which annually tests the staff's knowledge of the Dewey Decimal system.
However, as Alexander says, "the world of books has no shortage of prigs." There is Finster Dapples, head of Genealogy, who helps Alexander decipher Jesson's coat of arms. Fin acts like "he grew up on a twelfth century Lincolnshire leasehold instead of a Brooklyn housing project." We also meet the boss, Emil Dinthofer, and the equally irritating Irving Grote, Head of Conservation. When asked what to do with a homeless man obsessed with ancient Rome, 'Dinty' declares, "He's a horrid nuisance. The staff is to employ all necessary expedients, as spelled out in my 'Memorandum on Loitering, Lewdness, and Larceny,' to keep the fellow in check." When Alexander protests that, "The reading room and the collected works of Gibbon are all he has," Grote supports Dinty, exclaiming, "The Gibbon man defiled The American Spectator!" Abromowitz, head of Judaica, and a well known lefty, chimes in, "Defacing that rag should be a cause for celebration." And on it goes.
The scenes and characters will cheer anyone who has ever been a young librarian in his first job at a research library run by eccentrics. In Alexander's words, as he begins a tightly-scripted tour with the less-than-enthusiastic South Bend High School football team, "To be fair, the script that Dinty forced tour guides to recite wasn't intended for younger visitors."
The mystery begins with Jesson's after-hours research project. In his Manhattan mansion, Jesson shows Alexander an eighteenth century, glass-fronted box holding a collage of ten objects that tell the life of an inventor. One of the compartments is empty, and Jesson hires Alexander to find the missing object. This "grand complication" is a 200-year-old pocket watch commissioned for Marie Antoinette and stolen from a Jerusalem museum in 1983. Alexander quickly becomes obsessed with Jesson and the search, to the chagrin of Nic. Never get between a reference librarian and his search for information, even if you are lusty and French!
Publishers Weekly said, "Kurzweil delivers a remarkable novel, a flawless blend of adventure, intellect, suspense, humor and antiquity." That would all be enough for beach reading, but how can we resist Alexander Short when he asks the aforementioned South Bend varsity,
"Can any of you tell me the reason librarians get such a bad rap? I once had to give a brown-bag presentation about our profession and dipped into Bartlett's for a quotation. What do you suppose I found? I'll tell you. Nothing. Not one damn cite. There were quotes about libertines and quotes about ice, but librarians didn't make the cut." "So why do you do it?" one of the linebackers asked. "Why? Because of readers like that one down there. I learned as much from him as he did from me, probably more. That's what keeps me going. That's what gives me the energy to talk to alienated high school kids."
Doris Lessing declared, "I admire this ingenious, erudite book, which will enthrall all lovers of books and of libraries," and, I add, librarians!
Return to Looking at Books Online