Yes, you can find peace and quiet (and free babysitting) in Johannesburg – among the books at the city’s main library, writes Katy Bauer
AT 7.30am, parking beneath the Library Gardens is easy to find. A highly missable single wooden door at one end of the garage allows for super-safe, almost covert access to Johannesburg’s central library, but most users access the home of 1 780 553 books, unneurotically, from the street.
Inner-city students predominate. All day they queue, quiet, patient, outside the bulging reference library, desperate to access information that a strained education system still fails to offer them.
Occasional stragglers from the elderly community of Library Gardens homeless wander in for a warm-up, doze or toilet. At times, protesters or revellers throng the wide front steps and create a din as incongrous to that silent world of words as all-over suntans are to its dusty white staffers.
As I make my way up to Joan Bevan’s huge, glamorous, panelled office, nostalgia for an era I’m not old enough to remember engulfs me. Bevan is only the eighth city librarian in 107 years. (People don’t leave the post so much as retire in preparation for death.)
In her neat, navy blue pumps and tartan pleats, Bevan is not what you’d expect from someone heading up an institution with an annual budget of R14-million and 187 employees beneath her. Unpretentious, unprepossessing, non-autocratic – she is,however, what you’d would expect of the chief of Johannesburg’s best example of that oldest, internationally successful, quintessentially socialist institution – the public library. Unsurprisingly, the first name on Bevan’s list of day-trip guides is that of caretaker Justice Phakathi.
Against a backdrop of 1440 rolls of toilet paper (the monthly toll for the 40 serviced branch libraries) Justice Phakathi chats merrily while simultaneously co-ordinating a quiet trickle of pick-ups, drop-offs and questions. (A man who has come to fill a container with mineral turpentine inhales the fumes greedily as he pours. Phakathi doesn’t notice.)
“I am a Zulu,” he says, “but most of the cleaning staff are Xhosa. But that is not a problem.” (Exit solvent sniffer.) Not much seems to be a problem for Phakathi, and it is in this lofty, windowless office that I first catch the thread of calm and mutual respect that trails through the institution.
Most of Phakathi’s staff are South African Municipal Workers Union members, but apart from a recent battle over unsavoury nepotism, traditional among cleaning staff, no other calamity in his 12-year experience comes to light. The public can be more problematic than staff, though considering location and volume of users, even this seems negligible.
“One time a man shouted about hating white people and then smashed a couple of computers to the floor,” says Phakathi. “Of course, we had to restrain him.”
But tramps and muttering eccentrics are dealt with in a manner one thought had been auctioned off for sixpence at the church bazaar 40 years ago, and doorway defecators, pornography salivators and encyclopedia-cutting collectors are usually just given a good talking to.
“Unless there is damage being done or a lot of noise, we don’t like to interfere with people.” Most of the staff have tales of gentle madness to tell, and a picture of the library as haven of tolerance pulls better into focus the more I meander.
Down in Kathy Barrow’s newsroom the silence is punctured only by the barking of a woman, whittled by almost a century of living to the size of a 10-year-old child. Each time someone enters the room: “CLOSE THE DOOR,” she goes, loud as she can.
The mostly black, middle-aged, male news browsers don’t flinch, and offending arrivals simply do as they’re told. “She always says that,” says Barrow kindly.
For a woman who has spent the last 13 of her 27 years with the library in that room, Kathy’s enthusiasm is notable. She still raves about the satisfaction of a conquered query, and volunteers glowing reports of her two staffers unprompted.
Apart from the neat stacks of back-issue newspapers, ready for binding, there is also a selection of popular periodicals, and a curious picture library.
“See this,” she says, pulling out a bizarre cutting of two sinister looking scarecrows, propped against a jolly, primary coloured backdrop. “If someone needs a picture of a scarecrow, then they can make a photocopy of this!”
This conscientious catering for the unusual, the eccentric, the unpredictable, even the downright ridiculous, is possibly the most extraordinary aspect of librarian philosophy, and in Head of Information Services James Winter’s office, it is poignantly entrenched.
The beautiful little room is reassuringly book-lined and natural light floods through a giant arched window at one end. The neat, bespectacled occupant tunes into my own biblio-enthusiasm, and at once begins to treat me.
“I house the Private Press Collection here,” he says, beaming. (I am suddenly the housekeeper in Elias Cannetti’s Auto da Fe and wonder if Winter is about to propose marriage.) He tugs an enormous, taffeta- boxed book away from four identical looking volumes. The rare, five-piece set, Biblica Sacra, is the Bible as originally illustrated with full-colour lithographs by Salvador Dali.
“I don’t know that you should write about these books,” says Winter, suddenly nervous. Purchased, as they were, in the bad old days of no-cash-for-black- education-but-plenty-of-dosh-for-priceless-
books-for-the-whites-only-public-library,
Winter fears that they may either be stolen or become a political hot potato. But some of the Private Press Collection were gifts. Nicholas Monssarat for example, who wrote much of The Cruel Sea at the library, donated an extremely valuable copy of Kelmscott Chaucer, as designed by William Morris.
As far as buying obscure books goes, James is emphatic: “If a subject is obscure enough, there may only be one book written about it in forty years, and there will probably only be one printing of the book. But we must have a copy the day someone needs to access it, otherwise you block the flow of knowledge.”
Now Winter leads the way through a labyrinth of back passageways, down a “one- man-only” lift-shaft and into the basement where 500 000 volumes wait patiently in the “stacks” to be summoned by some or other reference user above. The place smells of leather. It’s cool and not too brightly lit.
“Light and heat are the enemies of paper,” says Winter protectively. “There is a library in Vienna which keeps its books at freezing temperature. If you order a book it takes three days for them to thaw it safely.”
We trek up and down some of the 40km of shelving, stopping at intervals to handle a red leather-bound British Army List that pre-dates the French Revolution, or a copy of Debates in the House of Lords 1621. The only complete record of South African newspaper back issues is also kept here, as are several fine early drama collections.
Much library stock has been built up through the purchase or inheritance of private collections. The Harold Strange Library of African Studies began with Strange’s 2 300-volume hoard, secured from his widow in 1913 at a cost of 1 300. This smallish room now boasts one of the finest selections of Boer War and Johannesburg history, African vernacular, ethnology, cartography and South African botany in the world.
The Strange Library books are the only ones not automatically accessible to the public, and on average just 200 users a month at present are accommodated, plus any queries from abroad. But librarian Carol Leigh’s expertise is available at no cost: “Only photocopies have to be paid for,” is her almost woeful addendum.
Still reeling from the thrill of ogling an only copy, Simon van der Stel South African expedition, original watercolour illustrated volume – Icones Plantarum et Animalium (circa 1680) – Winter and I traverse the awesome interior once more to reach the main reference library.
A young, black woman with up-tight bun, neat outfit and thick, black-rimmed spectacles, crosses our path. She glares back at my half-smile like some feline bad luck omen and I heave a sigh of satisfaction at this vision of aloof bookishness. Alas, the image shatters as we are greeted warmly by smiling chief reference librarian Marianne Ribeiro.
Ribeiro holds up a slim hardcover book titled Male Menopause: “We’ve had so many copies of this pinched,” she says lightly, “and now one lands up here. Strange.”
Her unexpected opening line leads us straight to the grave matter of book theft and damage. Ribeiro’s response is calm: “If the security buzzer goes off when someone is leaving, our main objective is to retrieve the book. Then if the thief hangs around long enough to tell us their name, we ban them for a while.” And damage? “We usually discover that when it’s too late, but it doesn’t happen much.”
So, apart from the odd menopausal man, or perhaps desperate wife thereof, it seems there is scant abuse of the gracious trust on offer. No graffiti (not even in the toilets), no litter, no shouting, or even chatting, in the study rooms, which overflow with people of an age expected to quibble.
Ribeiro’s reference section is the busiest in the library. All of its 123 seats are full throughout the day. Mostly it provides information and assistance to tertiary students, many of whom need to be taught from scratch how to use a library. About 25 staff deal with up to 440 enquiries a day and frustrated queuers sometimes cause a scene. Then there are the obsessives: the guy with the girlie magazines who hogs a seat for hours on end; the one who pours endlessly over the United Transvaal Directories, nobody knows why.
Winter, who had left us a moment, bursts back into Ribeiro’s office. “Somebody wants to know the graphic symbol for `life’,” he declares as though he’s just struck gold.
Stumped rather than irritated, Ribeiro offers: “Isn’t it in any of our `symbol’ books?” No. And so we step out of her office and join in the hunt. Winter is like a bloodhound, and one of his colleagues’ descriptions of “librarian as detective” is suddenly borne out.
While the inspectors skim for an answer, Ribeiro pulls up a couple of queries files to show me: what 500 000 books can’t tell you is probably in one of these constantly added to cuttings files.
“Difficult enquiries are investigated and we usually find an answer somewhere,”she says, flicking excitedly through articles headlined “Gas Barbecues”, “How to build a Gazebo”, “Beer Drinking Goats”, and so on.
The music section is much quieter. A 30- something librarian, who refers to herself as “Miss” Immelman, shows me around. She is voluntarily wearing one of the previously compulsory baby blue overalls, and her thick, sweet scent permeates the pastel- painted interior.
A piano waits for volunteers to perform free lunch-time recitals and the largest collection of sheet music in the country is shelved at the back. Music library users are generally a refined lot and compulsive humming is practically the only sort of disturbance.
The music room along with the Michaelis Art Library was banished two blocks away from the main building for 30 years. They only came home to roost in 1995, when MuseumAfrika made space by relocating downtown.
Art librarian Jonathan Frost is as dry as toast. He glides about the vast floor space, talking incessently – excited but dead-pan. Apart from the impressive lending section, there are stores crammed with reference material.
“Every South African exhibition which we receive information on we index under the artist’s name,” he says, pulling out box files in the South African Resource Room.”You see these African Art magazines? We started subscribing to them in the Sixties, when `African’ and `art’ were considered a contradiction in terms to most. Now the collection is a precious resource.”
The art section also boasts the building’s first two public-access Internet screens. More are intended for the recently opened Multi-Media Library shortly.
Running out of time, I rush through the uneventful lending section (no sleepers, flashers or fighters busy there today), and make my way to the children’s library. Eight primary school girls are jumping about at one end of the room, doing a poor job of suppressing yelps of glee. A brother and sister, both about seven years old, sit at tables away from the rest -books open in front of them, but staring into space.
Young librarian Nelly Thahane doesn’t reprimand the jumping girls; instead she brings out a pack of photographs which shows these and other children at a library party. Dressed up, laughing, waving balloons, eating cake.
“Their mothers leave them here all afternoon,” she says, “so we have activities for them. Storytime, parties, beauty competitions. Their parents don’t really know what a library is for, and so they treat it like a free day-care centre. When we tell them it’s not, they just get cross. Their mother,” she says, pointing to the subdued siblings, “even phones and asks me to go and buy them Chicken Licken.”
It’s almost 5pm. It’s freezing outside and the light is fading. No mothers have arrived to collect as yet.
“The children have to leave at five,” says Thahane, “but I’ve seen some of them still sitting on the front steps at seven. Of course I worry about them, but at least they’ve been kept safe here for the afternoon.”