|
Web Exclusives:
Under the Ivy April 7, 2004: The
Baths of Firestone Several weeks ago I wrote about the plans for Firestone Library announced in 1942 and the small skirmish set off, of course, by the library’s architectural style. (One deplored its Gothicness, another its modernity; you just can’t win.) I was entertained, then, when I came across “20 Years of Firestone Library” in the April 29, 1969, PAW issue. This retrospective is less about the exterior of the library – limited to a single photo with a bike rack prominently in the foreground – than about its inner workings. Indeed, the story begins with a quote from then Librarian of Princeton University (written exactly that way, on a par with Prince of Wales) William Dix, who said that before World War II, university libraries “were designed as symbols, located in the center of campus and built to look like the Baths of Caracalla, which is all well and good; but little attention was given to the interior function.” In 1969 the interior function of Firestone, according to the story, was marvelous. The rare open-stack system, filled with two million volumes, made it “a self-service supermarket of books where scholars roam freely,” and its annual budget was almost $4.9 million, up from $317,000 in 1947. But the library faced its problems, chief among them, space. “Literature, like the population, grows in geometric progression,” wrote Arvid Peterson in the article. “The volume of literature in the humanities seems to be doubling every 16 years while that of the physical sciences probably doubles every ten.” Compounding the space problem was the increase in audio-visual materials: films, slides, and records (as in LPs). Dix sought to solve the space problem in a number of creative ways. As the article was written, Firestone was planning an underground expansion. A storage library at the Forrestal Campus held less popular titles. And Princeton participated in the Farmington Plan, in which 50 libraries across the country divided up responsibility for collecting works in particular fields; Princeton carried mathematics, classics, and the Arab Near East. The drawback to this scheme was access; it was difficult and slow for a scholar at Princeton to access the physics library at Purdue. But the librarian (sorry, Librarian) was already looking ahead. He and University press director Herbert Bailey had noted an increase in the use of the telephone among young scholars, mostly scientists who kept in contact with colleagues on an almost daily basis. Other technology might also change the way research was done; as Peterson wrote, “Facsimile transmission, computerized information instantly available at the press of a button, and microform storage will reduce the space requirement and make sharing feasible.” But as Dix said, “the root of scholarship is the written word,” and he was adamant that there would always be a place for a place like Firestone: in Peterson’s words, “an open access library where the student can make his own discoveries – a laboratory of the humanities.” Still, he might be pleased that in about 10 seconds on the Web
I was able to find this quote by G.E. Kidder Smith from his 1990
book, Looking at Architecture: “The complex must have been
staggering both in size and opulence: it originally accommodated
some 1,600 bathers as well as other activities such as sports and
theatricals. The underground vaulted facilities for servicing the
calidarium (hot baths) and tepidarium (lukewarm baths) were incredibly
complex. In semiruins today, the bath remains impressive, especially
on summer evenings, when it is used for staging opera.” Smith’s
topic? The Roman Baths of Caracalla.
Jane Martin ’89 is PAW's former editor-in-chief. You can reach her at paw@princeton.edu
|
