By Dave Lowry
Illustration by Danny Elchert
Edward Hicks. American painter. Peaceable Kingdom? Wolf lying down with the lamb? Only Isaiah didn’t say that, just that the wolf and lamb would dwell together and Hicks was a literalist and never painted them lying, not in any of the more than 100 versions he did of the Kingdom.
So it’s not everyone’s thing. But symbolism in early American painting happens to be one of ours. We wanted to check on something about Hicks and knew we could find it in Alice Ford’s biography of the artist, and it was one of those last warm days of late autumn, sun shining, fallen leaves rustling, and that was reason enough, so we were off to the art library at Washington University.
It was meant to be a quick trip. In to find the book, look up what we wanted, then back out and off. And since Wash. U., struggling to make the payroll as it is, charges visitors a quarter for every 15 minutes of parking on the three or four metered spaces on the entire lot where you can park without a sticker, we couldn’t afford much more than that anyway.
The university’s art library is in the new Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts. If you haven’t been, go. Enormous open spaces, towering windows and steel and glass; soaring ceilings. Architecture of the sort that will be hopelessly dated in about a decade but that looks just ever so moderne right now. The building houses its own art museum, with a gift shop. The library? It seems more an afterthought. We found it, a couple of floors below ground level, in one corner of the basement where, in the old days, the library janitor would’ve had his office and some storage space. Like the rest of the building, though, it is state of the art. No worn, dog-eared card catalog in sight. Instead, a bank of computer screens hums, ready to do the educational bidding of the user. Right after you enter your student ID and password, that is.
Students on either side of us had managed that step, and once entered, one was checking her email, the other browsing the electronic aisles of an online store. Our needs were more immediate. We just wanted to find a book’s catalog number. Fortunately, we spotted a single terminal that offered “Library catalog only.” Quaint, we thought. And actually useful for the purposes of anyone in a library who wanted to, you know, find a book and read it. It was fast, too. We found the number for the Hicks biography immediately and were off to the stacks.
“Stacks” might be misleading here. The stacks at the art library are more like the ribs of a giant accordion. They move on tracks and stay pressed together when not being used. Go to the row that contains the book you want, press a button, and with a gentle whir, the stacks separate like the secret passageway to the Batcave. Or they would have, had we been able to use them. A student had activated a stack a couple of rows past where we needed to be. OK, we were thinking, so if we push this button, our stack slides open. Which means the stacks where she is will compress. Is she going to be fast enough, Indiana Jones–style, to get out before she’s squashed? Even if she is, it would be a cruel and thoughtless thing to do, but we were already poking the button to see just how fast she was when a library worker came by, pushing a tray of books.
“Won’t activate,” he said. “There are sensors that detect there’s a person in another section, and it won’t work until she leaves.” He sounded almost as disappointed as we were.
We wanted to ask about the kind of technology that can detect a person just standing there looking at books. But we were distracted.
“Wait a minute,” we said. “There are about a dozen stacks here, all pushed together. You mean only one of them will open at a time?” He nodded. “Wait a minute,” we said. We tend to repeat ourselves when we’re really incredulous. “A dozen stacks with books on both sides, so that’s 24 stacks of books, probably several thousand titles. And one person at a time has access?” He nodded again, a little sheepishly. The expression on his face was about the same as if I’d just explained to him that I and the whole campus knew he’d kept wetting the bed until he was 13 or so.
“It saves space,” he said. It took a while for that to sink in for us. We were reflecting that maybe if the gift shop upstairs could have been a bit more compact … Let’s see: Gift shop. Library. Gift shop. Library. Must’ve been a tough call for the university to make.
“Think about me,” he said, with some resignation in his voice, interrupting our rumination. “I have to reshelve all day. I spend most of my time waiting to be able to get to the stacks.”
The girl left pretty quickly. She’d overheard our conversation, and we were, after all, standing there, staring at her. We noticed she was looking at books on Georges Braque, so how important could it have been anyway? Got Alice Ford’s biography of Edward Hicks, found what we needed, and we were back out into the warm sunshine of late autumn. A couple of students were sitting on the patio outside, sunning themselves, we thought. Or maybe they were just waiting for their turn to use the library.
