The Future of Unwanted Books

In 1911 the Members of Parliament decided that the British Library must save a copy of everything published in the UK each year. The national collection is currently expanding at the rate of 12.5 kilometers of shelf space a year, and somewhere has to be found to put it all.

Enter the book warehouse, a state-of-the-art, low-oxygen, 262 linear kilometer (163 linear miles) storage facility being built at the library's Yorkshire complex near Leeds. It will house books, journals, and magazines (seven million items) that many readers have either forgotten about or never heard of in the first place. The items, categorized as “nil to low use,” will be accessible though. They will be kept in plastic totes that can be removed from the stacks when, for example, someone doing a PhD on late 20th century gossip needs a copy of the May 1997 Tatler for a citation.

You might think that digitization would solve the problem with less space. When asked about scanning the material, though, Rory McLeod, digital preservation manager at the British Library, said, “It's been estimated that €3bn are lost across Europe entirely due to bad management of digital files in libraries.” He then challenged, “Would we have enough confidence to throw everything away? Would you?”

So, what is this place? A morgue for books? Our era's equivalent of pharaonic tombs? A time capsule?

Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose comes to mind, especially the section in which the book's narrator, Adso of Elk, and his wise mentor, William of Baskerville, break into a labyrinthine library after dark:

“The library must, of course, have a ventilation system,” William said. “Otherwise the atmosphere would be stifling, especially in the summer. Moreover, those slits provide the right amount of humidity, so the parchments will not dry out. But the cleverness of the architects did not stop there. Placing the slits at certain angles, they made sure that on windy nights the gusts penetrating from these openings would encounter other gusts, and swirl inside the sequence of rooms, producing the sounds we have heard. Which, along with the mirrors and the herbs, increase the fear of the foolhardy who come in here, as we have, without knowing the place well. And we ourselves for a moment thought ghosts were breathing on our faces.”