NERD YOUR ENTHUSIASM (19)

By: Kio Stark
December 2, 2021

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of (one of) their nerdy obsessions.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CLASSIFICATION CODES
Three Epiphanies.

Imagine it is 1821. Instead of a person in soft pants reading the internet, you are a man wearing a frock-coat looking for a particular book in the Jeffersonian Library of Congress. You will wander among thousands in three broad categories: Memory, Reason, or Imagination. Good luck with that.

At the turn of the 20th century, Herbert Putnam, a librarian of Congress, created the Library of Congress Classification to bring some reason to this imaginative system. It consists of letters and letter pairs corresponding to subjects, further broken down by the numbers that follow. Ostensibly, it can expand to infinity.

TR653.C34
I am 17, settled between the library stacks, paging through an anthology of Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work. A few hops down from Stieglitz’s empty slot are books by other photographers, Dorothea Lange is near, so is Edward Weston. Incongruously, so are books like A Guide to Winning Photography Contests and textbooks on composition. I wander down the alley into TS, which turns out to be Manufacturing, and double back to TP, Chemical Technology. I will later understand this as a quirk of history. When the LCC was created, long before Stieglitz, photography was mere technology.

HN80.L7 D38
In grad school, an intriguing sentence in a now-forgotten journal article references Mike Davis’s City of Quartz. I find it next to a book on urban activism in LA, but also very near LA’s 1941 land use plan and a book called The Social Areas of Los Angeles, Analysis and Typology. I discover that the LCC is the best and weirdest recommendation engine,^* long before such things. I will lose—or spend—many hours here.

PR9199.3.S55127 A6
I work as a shelver in the closed stacks of a university library. Our supervisor Vera is tiny and old, with a thick accent I place as not-quite-Russian. On my third day, Vera comes to me in the P-PZs (languages and literature). She looks me over. “Darling,” she says, and reaches up to move my chin first left, then right. “So regal. Like a princess. Beautiful.” I blush, delighted, embarrassed. She taps the book sorting cart. “This,” she tells me, “takes exactly one half-hour. You, you are too fast. So, here will be our secret. Work fast, and then, you read.” The book I find in the remaining minutes of that first half hour will take all the spare minutes of a week’s worth of days. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by a Canadian writer called Elizabeth Smart (mysteriously filed in PR, British literature, not in the PS8000s with Canadians) is a lyrical, dizzy gut-punch story of fucked-up love that I will one day read aloud to a lover while taking a bath, and that I sometimes catch cadences of in my own prose. I loved it beyond all memory, reason, or imagination. It blinded me to all the books on either side.

^* Try it yourself! Use the dropdown menu to browse by “CALL NUMBERS (LC Class No.)” and search the call number of a favorite book. Use the back and forward arrows to see what’s on the shelf with it.⏎

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NERD YOUR ENTHUSIASM (19)

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