Overdue books: creative leniency

Boxes of food items used to pay fines for overdue books were moved from the library in Conneaut, Ohio, to a food pantry van. 

Since the beginning of the economic downturn, librarians across the country have speculated that fines for overdue items are keeping people from using the library — particularly large families whose children take out (and forget to return) many books at a time. Some libraries learned that the fines, which are often as low as 25 cents an item per day, quickly multiplied for many people and were becoming an added hardship.

“We can’t push the cost to consumers because they’re also struggling,” said Richard Sosa, the finance director of the Denver system, which has $9 million worth of books in circulation through 23 libraries and two bookmobiles. “The library philosophy is: We do not want to restrict access to information. The use of fines or harsh collection tactics — and we could potentially do that — could essentially restrict people’s access to the library.”

And another thing: They need their books back.

 At the Denver Public Library, librarians can negotiate a fee structure that feels fair to them based on individual cases.

The Monterey County Free Library system in Monterey, Calif., has reclaimed more than 1,000 books since offering end-of-the-year amnesty to patrons in November and December.

“We thought, People are suffering, having a hard time, so let’s give them a break and get our books back,” said Jayanti Addleman, the county librarian.


In Pelham, N.H., the public library director, Robert Rice, offered a food-for-fines program during November.

“We will probably continue that policy once the new year starts,” Mr. Rice said. “The loss in terms of money was maybe $20 a day. We well made up for it with the amount of food that came in.”

He continued: “We got our materials back and did something positive for the community. Use is up greatly, and budgets are being cut. But we’re not going anywhere. We’re keeping the doors open.”

That is how libraries should work, as community resources, and not as businesses.

Author Without Borders

The writer William T. Vollmann at the Terrace Park Cemetery in Holtville, Calif., a burial place for illegal immigrants who have died crossing the border.






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William T. Vollmann, legendarily prolific, writes in a studio that used to be a restaurant in Sacramento. The place is surrounded by a big parking lot where he encourages homeless people to camp out. Inside he runs a one-man assembly line. His bibliography so far includes nine novels, including “Europe Central,” which won the National Book Award in 2005; three collections of stories; a seven-volume, 3,000-page history of violence; a book-length essay on poverty; and a travel book about hopping freight trains, a hobby of his even though his balance is so bad that he has to use a plastic bucket as a stepstool.

Mr. Vollmann’s newest book, “Imperial,” which comes out from the Viking Press on Thursday, costs $55 and is 1,300 pages long — so heavy, he observed recently, that if you dropped it, you’d break a toe. A companion volume, to be published next month by powerHouse Books, contains some 200 photographs he took while working on “Imperial,” for which he also wore a spy camera while trying to infiltrate a Mexican factory, and paddled in an inflatable raft down the New River in California, a rancid trench that is probably the most polluted stream in America. The water, he writes, tasted like the Salk polio vaccine.

Mr. Vollmann, who just turned 50, is a loner, a bit of a recluse, despite being married and the father of a daughter, and a throwback: a wandering, try-anything writer-journalist in the tradition of Steinbeck or Jack London. Some people think he’s a little nuts.

A little?

To research “The Rifles,” a novel partly about the 1845 Franklin expedition to the Arctic, Mr. Vollmann spent two weeks alone at the magnetic North Pole, where he suffered frostbite and permanently burned off his eyebrows when he accidentally set his sleeping bag on fire. But being eyebrowless has its advantages, he discovered more recently, while experimenting with cross-dressing to research a novel he’s now writing about the transgendered. He didn’t have to pluck his brows when getting made up.

Well, that's an advantage.

Slide Show

A Drive Through ‘Imperial’

“Imperial,” which is about Imperial County in California, the vast, flat and arid region in the southeastern part of the state, bordering Mexico, is an extreme Vollmann production: brilliant in places, practically unreadable in others. There are lyrical passages, and others edging over into magenta (“And change came; just as the urine of dehydrated people is turbid and dark, failing in transparency, so the evening sunlight, as if heated to exhaustion by and with itself, now lost the glaring whiteness which had characterized it since early morning, and it oozed down upon the pavement to stain it with gold”), along with scientific chapters, complete with graphs, on salinization and agricultural productivity, and 175 pages of notes. A page early on has a title warning of “Impending Aridity.”

Phew! Exhausting just reading this paragraph.

The book is a little like the Imperial Valley itself: pathless, fascinating, exhausting. Its two great themes are illegal immigration — the struggle of countless thousands of Mexicans to sneak into the United States through the Imperial Valley — and water, which has transformed the valley, or parts of it, from desert to seeming paradise but at great environmental cost.

Mr. Vollmann’s editors urged him to cut, he said, and he resisted: “We always go round and round. They want me to cut, and I argue, so they cut my royalties, and I agree never to write a long book again.” He acknowledged that the length of “Imperial” might cost him readers but said: “I don’t care. It seems like the important thing in life is pleasing ourselves. The world doesn’t owe me a living, and if the world doesn’t want to buy my books, that’s my problem.”

Good point.

On a cloudless, sun-baked day last week Mr. Vollmann, with a characteristically bad haircut, toured some of the landscapes that had inspired him, traveling from San Diego across the border to the Mexican town of Tecate, down the mountainous, hairpin road to Mexicali and then back across the border into California, through the Imperial Valley to the Salton Sea, an enormous inland lake that is the region’s agricultural sink, so hyper-saline from irrigation runoff that it is almost toxic.

Along the way, some of the secrets of Mr. Vollmann’s method began to reveal themselves. Mr. Vollmann doesn’t drive, and his Spanish is only so-so, so he was driven, as he was for most of the 12 years it took him to write the book, by Terrie Petree, who also served as an interpreter. She learned her Spanish as a Mormon missionary in northern Spain, which also prepared her, she said, for having doors shut in her face. Mr. Vollmann sat in the passenger seat, taking in everything and peppering Ms. Petree with questions. Far from manic, he was preternaturally calm and patient, dosing himself with nothing stronger than bottled water.

Being a passenger certainly allows him to observe everything. I remember that feeling when we rode the bus from Guadalajara to Melaque: I could see everything at my leisure.

Mr. Vollmann is almost excessively polite, and in conversation has a salesman’s habit of using your first name in every other sentence. He seems more innocent than worldly, driven by insatiable curiosity. In Mexicali he turned an annoying and time-consuming visit to a police station, occasioned by what appeared to be a traffic-fine shakedown, into an interview with the station’s chief of information. He also charmed a blushing secretary there and learned the name of the best taco joint in town.

And he speak Spanish poorly.

A Literary Legend Fights for a Library

Ray Bradbury, the author, loves libraries and is helping to save them.










When you are pushing 90, have written scores of famous novels, short stories and screenplays, and have fulfilled the goal of taking a simulated ride to Mars, what’s left?

“Bo Derek is a really good friend of mine and I’d like to spend more time with her,” said Ray Bradbury, peering up from behind an old television tray in his living room.

An unlikely answer, but Mr. Bradbury, the science fiction writer, is very specific in his eccentric list of interests, and his pursuit of them in his advancing age and state of relative immobility.

This is a lucky thing for the Ventura County Public Libraries. Because among Mr. Bradbury’s passions, none burn quite as hot as his life-long passion for halls of books. His most famous novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” which concerns book burning, was written on a pay typewriter in the basement of the University of California, Los Angeles, library; his novel “Something Wicked This Way Comes” contains a seminal library scene.

Mr. Bradbury frequently speaks at libraries across the state, and on Saturday he will make his way here for a benefit for the H. P. Wright Library, which like many in the state’s public system is in danger of shutting its doors because of budget cuts.

One of the great ironies is that during the economic downturn more people than usually have turned to libraries for resources, for a haven, and for direction, and because of the same economic downturn, libraries are suffering budget cuts. and more.

“Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury said. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

When he is not raising money for libraries, Mr. Bradbury still writes for a few hours every morning (“I can’t tell you,” is the answer to any questions on his latest book), reads Bernard Shaw, receives visitors including reporters, filmmakers, friends and children of friends, and watches films on his giant flat-screen television.

He can still be found regularly at the Los Angeles Public Library branch in Koreatown, which he visited often as a teenager. “The children ask me, How can I live forever too?” he said. “I tell them do what you love and love what you do. That’s the story on my life.”

Books From the Great Depression

Peter Conn selects unsurpassed novels about the Depression

1. Now in November
By Josephine Winslow Johnson
Simon & Schuster, 1934
A fictional account of one family's experience on the land, Josephine Winslow Johnson's best-selling novel won the Pulitzer Prize before sinking into undeserved obscurity. The Haldmarnes leave an unnamed city for the countryside when Father loses a good job in a lumber mill and with it any hope of financial security for his wife and their three daughters. The mortgaged farm to which the family moves yields little: The novel's central section is a day-by-day reckoning of the land's collapse into baked and cracking clay during the killing drought in the Great Plains of the 1930s. "Now in November" is one of the most convincing and hair-raising depictions of the Dust Bowl in the literature of the Depression. Unfortunately, history would find room for only one Dust Bowl novel, John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."
2. The Big Money
By John Dos Passos
Harcourt, Brace, 1936
Norman Mailer often said that John Dos Passos had written the great American novel in the three volumes of the "U.S.A." trilogy. "The Big Money" was the final volume in the series, and its success put Dos Passos on the cover of Time magazine. The novel deploys several narrative techniques in an effort to tell the whole story of America's march toward the Crash. Long conventional storylines alternate with stream-of-consciousness monologues, brief biographies of famous and infamous Americans, and "newsreels" made up of newspaper headlines, popular songs and advertising slogans. "The Big Money" opens at the end of World War I and concludes in the early years of the Depression. The final scene presents a vagrant trying to hitch a ride: The open road to American opportunity has become a dead end. Dos Passos's sustained, bitter and often funny exposé of Roaring Twenties excess is the best fictional explanation ever written of how Americans got themselves in the biggest economic mess in their history.
3. Appointment in Samarra
By John O'Hara
Harcourt, Brace, 1934
John O'Hara's first and best novel tracks the final three days in the life of a young man named Julian English. He is 30 years old, charming and good-looking, married to an attractive woman, and successful as the manager of a Cadillac franchise in a town called Gibbsville. Julian is also a dangerous drunk and a moral trifler, filled with envy and insecurity, a man with no discernible convictions. His rapid decline in the course of the novel is an emblem of moral exhaustion. "Appointment in Samarra" is set in 1930, after the Crash but before the advent of the New Deal. O'Hara always insisted on the precision of that date: His failed hero registers the sense of impending and general collapse.
4. The Good Earth
By Pearl S. Buck
John Day, 1931
A Pulitzer Prize winner, Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth" was also the best-selling novel in the U.S. for both 1931 and 1932. The book would shape American perceptions of China for two generations. The main characters, a poor farmer named Wang Lung and his wife, O-lan, are recognizable human beings, not mere Oriental stereotypes, who do their best to survive in a punishing world of famine, bandits, war and plague. Why did a book about an obscure rural family in a distant land sell so well in the early Depression years? To begin with, Buck was a fine storyteller, and her images of the Chinese countryside are memorably vivid. Beyond that, the novel resonated with the realities of Depression America: The portraits of suffering but resilient Chinese farmers spoke eloquently to Americans trying to make sense of their own diminished circumstances.
5. The Day of the Locust
By Nathanael West
Random House, 1939
The best novel ever written about Hollywood appeared in the last years of the Depression. A young artist, Todd Hackett, has come to the West Coast to paint the legions of bored and lonely men and women who migrate to California in pursuit of a dream they never find. The studios' celluloid fantasies mock the deprivation of the country throughout the 1930s, providing escapist entertainment in the midst of despair. The novel is punctuated with scenes of violence -- drunken brawls, bloody cockfights, sexual assault -- that unfold in the glow of Southern California's legendary warmth and sunshine. In the climactic scene, a murderous riot provoked by a movie premiere provides a "real" counterpart to Todd's painting, "The Burning of Los Angeles."
Mr. Conn's "The American 1930s: A Literary History" has just been published by Cambridge University Press.

What's that link?

Looking for the Nassau County Library Association, typed in ncla.org, and got Netherlands Consulate-General - Los Angeles, California. Oops.

From Gym Rat to Alpinist

If a climber gets overconfident or is hounded by weather, scaling the Northeast Ridge of Bugaboo Spire, a massive pyramid of rock towering over a glacier, can be more hazardous than its modest 5.7 rating on the Yosemite Decimal System might indicate.



Northeast Ridge of Bugaboo Spire