THE DISCARDED

In Hamilton’s metafictional work, an unnamed librarian reflects on books pulled from the library’s shelves and relegated to obscurity—and, by extension, the purposes of libraries in general.

The narrator is working at in a library in Vermont and notices that a room in the basement, once pristinely uncluttered, has become the disorganized dumping ground of books essentially abandoned as “discards” from the library above it. The sad reality is that libraries are perpetually adding to their collections, but not to their available space, which makes the elimination of some, even many, from circulation inevitable: “The chaos of this room was disorienting…although it retained a particularly bookish variety of chaos—silent and undisturbed. What unified these books was that they had all been stripped from the library’s permanent collection and were now waiting to be sold at quarterly sales for fifty cents or a dollar….” He becomes enchanted with these works, many of them “dreadful” and unworthy of mourning. Others, though, are more notable, such as Sylvia Armentrout’s Six-legged Stars, an offbeat book on entomology written by a woman who’s not an entomologist; the narrator calls it a “lost treasure.” The author’s own reflection is, similarly, delightfully quirky; it’s one that captures the expansiveness of books, with some possessing timeless appeal while others “read as though they’ve been written as rough drafts of made-for-TV movies.” But even these works seem to have real value, if only as a “concise record of our cliches.” Each chapter concludes with a brief description of some unusual but literary reimagining of the library, including conceptions that draw from the likes of Jorge Luis Borges and Jonathan Swift; it’s an erudite tour communicated in meditative, lapidary prose.

Hamilton’s clear devotion to “the morgue” of discarded books is oddly inspiring; there’s something mesmerizing about the collective encyclopedia of knowledge they comprise as a whole, even if many of the parts seem less than alluring. He makes a powerful case for the library as “both a source of continual rebirth and civic pride”—a place that a genuine community will revere and patronize. This larger argument comes to the fore during the narrator’s reflection on Lynn Pearson’s A History of Book Burning, which addresses the fragility of books, which are always vulnerable to the assaults of those who, for whatever reason, think them subversive. Pondering the demise of the ancient Library of Alexandria, the narrator melancholically muses: “I’ve often found myself reflecting on this past, sometimes enthralled by its grandiosity when I’m on our upper floors and at other times, up to my knees in discarded books, shaking my head at the predictability of its end.” Most readers are likely to tire of reading accounts of fictitious works—nearly two dozen in total are considered here, and not all of them are especially enticing. However, this work’s power ultimately transcends these titles, as it is a paean to the book as such, and to the buildings that house them. Overall, it’s a moving celebration of even those works that arguably warrant being consigned to oblivion.

An enchanting discussion of the many books that inevitably vanish.