BEFORE OUR DAY

Behind the scenes at the National Library

That May, when Bo fell in love with me – I had been half in love with him for years – I had spent three hundred days working in a big, dreary, untidy room at the back of the National Library on Kildare Street. This office could not have been more different from the library’s splendid domed reading room where uniformed attendants, like waiters in an exclusive hotel or gentlemen’s club, glided about as if on slippered wheels delivering books to the readers with a polite nod of the head, the merest hint of a bow. The readers thus honoured – a motley assortment of genuine scholars, harmless (and not so harmless) eccentrics, and people sheltering from the rain – sat comfortably at polished tables, their books and faces illuminated by reading lamps with sweet green shades.

The room where I worked had big, steel Anglepoise lamps on the desks, and one bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. It had once been the Ladies’ Reading Room. Although it had probably been tidier in the days when it was open to the female public, it looked as if it had been designed purposely to put the Lady Readers off books for life. It was never properly heated, never got the sun, and the grey air that always hung between the drab walls felt damp and discouraging. Two dirty windows with peeling painted frames faced north on to a grubby back lane, at the end of which was Nassau Street, one of Dublin’s more stiff and forbidding streets, and the high wall and dark spiked railings that enclosed Trinity College.

It was the kind of room that made your heart sink when you walked into it. This is where I am to work? After all my hard studying?

In those days graduates had a sense of entitlement, and believed that study and good results should lead swiftly to good jobs. And in fact a good degree usually did lead to a job that was well paid and permanent, the sort of job that is almost impossible to get in the twenty-first century in Ireland. It was 1976. Free university education had started at the end of the 1960s but the take-up was still small. Hardly anyone in the country had a degree, still less the class of degree you needed to get a job in the National Library.

Oh, such a lovely place to work! Aren’t you lucky?

I spent the year cataloguing new books and seventeenth-century pamphlets.

The pamphlets were the good news – although their titles usually included the words ‘Bad News from Ireland’. They were dusty, yellowed, lacking illustrations. The contents were long-winded rants about political events in the seventeenth century. But you were not supposed to read the contents anyway, a rule that was a blessing in the case of the pamphlets. Did anyone ever read them? Even in the seventeenth century? As a librarian you were supposed to count the pages, measure the dimensions of the pamphlet, and read the title page, noting all the details of publication. The pamphlet titles were almost as long as the contents in some instances. The art of the snappy hook was not known in the seventeenth century:

The latest and truest nevves from Ireland; or, A true relation of the happy victory obtained against the rebels before Droheda: and how the Earle of Ormond Sir Charles Coote, and Sir Simon Harecourt sallying out of Dublin to Donshoglen with two thousand souldiers; slew two hundred rebels, and but 5. of them slain: related in a letter from a privy councellor in Dublin, to Master Fenton Parsons of Lincolns-Inne, Feb 26. 1641. Whereunto is added another relation of an overthrow given them by Sir Henry Tichbourne, being related in a letter to Sir Robert King Knight, Feb 27. 1641 …/

or

A discoverie of the hellish plot against divers particular of the nobility of the kingdome of England: Also the papists gunpowder-plot, brought to light. With the copie of a letter sent from a noble-man in Ireland, to Colonel Lunsford. Jan. 11. 1642. Shewing, in a most true and reall relation, the manner how this hellish plot was laid, and how these noble pillars of Protestant-religion, the Earl of Cork, the Earl of Kildare, and the valourous Lord Iones, should have been blown up. As also, hovv they intended to burn dovvn the citie of Dublin with wild-fire, and how they were beaten back by the lord chief-justices in the castles.

The contemporary publications were less challenging to catalogue but much easier to read. Even though you weren’t supposed to read books at work, a perk was that you could borrow them for reading at home. Which I did. Novels by John McGahern, Terence de Vere White, Benedict Kiely, Iris Murdoch. Or the new women writers who were just starting their careers and getting published in slim paperbacks: Maeve Kelly or Ita Daly or Emma Cooke.

Some aspects of the job, however, were very enjoyable. The young Assistant Keepers were on duty for one day a week, and one night. When on duty you sat behind a big desk in the Librarian’s Office, or LO. Originally the LO had been the Director’s Office, and as such is the setting for the scene in Ulysses in which Stephen talks to the Librarian.

This famous room was just off the Reading Room, but readers had little or no access to it – the Library Assistants, mostly men, who manned the big counter, and some of whom had worked in the library for decades, could handle almost every enquiry themselves. And even when they couldn’t, it was a matter of pride with them to keep readers well away from the Assistant Keepers, young people, increasingly young women like me, whom they regarded with friendly contempt. So while on duty we were left in relative peace. Our job was to answer telephone queries and letters of enquiry, and take orders for photocopying – a new technology for the library, with which it was very very slowly coming to terms, and a service that was so expensive and cumbersome that not many readers could avail of it. The Assistant Keepers were enjoined to do minimal research on behalf of enquirers, who should be pointed in the right direction and encouraged to find things out for themselves. Our guideline was the mantra, coined by the Director, ‘A helpful librarian is a bad librarian.’ The queries could relate to anything. Can you advise me on books about the Battle of Clontarf? I am researching the Cork writer, Margaret O’Leary. Any help you can give me will be appreciated. Have you got a photograph of the Famine? Have you got a photograph of St Patrick/St Bridget/Niall of the Nine Hostages?

But most of the queries related to genealogy. The hunt for roots was relentless. My great-great-grandfather left Cork in 1847. Can you help me find information about him? My great-grandmother, Catherine Ann Doherty, came from Donegal in 1856. I would like to research her ancestry. Can you please send me information about her parents and grandparents?

Although the instruction was to give general rather than specific information to enquirers, in practice how one dealt with these queries as Librarian on Duty was entirely up to oneself. I was a ‘bad librarian’ in more ways than one. For entirely selfish reasons I tried to answer the readers’ questions, doing whatever research was necessary, and resisting the temptation to remind the innumerable enquirers in search of photographs of medieval kings or early Christian saints that photography was not invented until the 1840s and so photographs of fifth-century saints were unlikely to be in stock. I contented myself with mild bureaucratic diplomacy, always most satisfactory to the bureaucrat who composes it: ‘I regret to inform you that we do not have a photograph of Brian Boru in our holdings. However, a pen and ink illustration is reproduced in An Leabharlann, Vol. XII, p. 46. We can supply a photocopy of this, at a cost of fifty pence plus postage and packing.’

The genealogical queries were glanced at, sighed over or laughed at, and then despatched in fat bundles to the Genealogical Office, the busiest section of the Library, located in a tower in Dublin Castle.

When on duty you communicated with readers on the telephone or by letter, or more rarely in person. You carried out research on a multitude of topics, you learnt how to find sources in the Library, and got a sense of its depth and usefulness. You got the odd laugh, and an occasional invitation to go on a date. Usually these approaches were made when you were on night duty, the green-shaded lamps glowing in the dimness like candles, the only sounds the whisper of pages being turned, a soft voice murmuring goodbye as a reader slipped gently into the night. At night, the Library felt exactly as it must have at the start of the century. It was easy to imagine that Joyce was reading by the gaslight, or that bureaucrats with vivid faces were slipping down to the steps to have a smoke and to exchange polite meaningless words, or discuss their dreams of an armed rebellion.

I had limited access to the duty desk – as a new recruit, I was considered too inexperienced to deal with its challenges, except in cases of emergency, such as, for instance, when the real Librarian On Duty was on her tea break, or out to lunch.

‘It gets easier as you get used to it,’ Maurice, the Assistant Keeper Grade One, who supervised the Assistant Keepers Grade Two, said. ‘The first two years are the hardest.’

It’s what they say about widowhood.

Most of the time I catalogued the pamphlets and the books. That was not too bad. At least I was sitting down, and there were moments of brightness. Finding the appropriate subject heading demanded a certain ingenuity.

But there was much duller work going on. And for at least half the year, that year in the library, I did it. This work was called ‘Checking the Booksellers’ Catalogues’.

The National Library’s original acquisitions policy had been to collect books and publications and manuscripts of Irish interest, as well as literature of international importance. But from the early 1970s, it collected only books of Irish interest.

The books were acquired in the following way. Booksellers, who had become aware of the library’s policy, began to specialise in buying up books of Irish interest, old and new. Every week, sometimes more often, a bookseller’s catalogue would arrive on Maurice’s desk in the Cataloguing Room. These catalogues were amateurish publications, sometimes printed, sometimes typed lists that had been photocopied and bound with staples. Typically they would offer for sale five or six hundred books, of diverse nature, but all ‘of Irish interest’. Library staff would then identify which ones were not in the collection, and buy them.

Maurice would have a look at the bookseller’s catalogue when it arrived. Sitting at his desk by the window, he would hum and haw and tick off the books he suspected we did not have – quite a lot of them. His instinct, or knowledge, was good, but – quite sensibly – he erred on the side of caution and ticked many books which were, in fact, in the collection.

The catalogue was then ripped apart and sections given to the five or six Assistant Keepers. It was up to us to check the marked books against the two main catalogues: if a book was not listed in the library’s collection, it would be bought. By this means gaps were filled and the National Library’s collection of books of Irish interest up to the late 1970s is very comprehensive.

But the work of looking up title after title in the catalogue for days on end was tedious in the extreme. As the readers who adore the National Library know, it is great fun to search for three or four books in the catalogue of a great library – the Guard Books are especially engaging, because you often see names and titles that fascinate you as you check for a particular item. But standing at the Guard Book stand, looking up two hundred titles, one after the other, is not enjoyable. The only skill required was a knowledge of the alphabet and basic literacy. I had an MPhil in Medieval Studies. I was writing a doctoral thesis. I was a writer of short stories. Like many young people, I had quite a high opinion of my talents and abilities. The other Assistant Keepers had first-class honours in subjects like Latin or English or History.

‘It is a bit boring,’ Maurice admitted. As a Grade One, he didn’t have to check titles himself. ‘It’s the sort of work we should get temporary staff to do. Married women,’ he intoned, and laughed drily.

Everyone agreed. But of course! This was the kind of menial work married women could do in their spare time, for pin money, when their children had gone to school. The library didn’t employ temporary or part-time staff back then. Or married women, in any capacity except that of cleaning lady, although I didn’t notice this at the time – we always have our blind spots.

This was the kind of work that a computer could do in seconds – and did, when computers finally arrived in the National Library in the late 1980s.

And yet there were several positive aspects to working in the National Library in the 1970s, principally the interesting workmates and ‘the stacks’. The stacks were the old iron bookshelves that stretched from the ground floor over three or four storeys to the roof. On the shelves over a million books were lined up neatly, according to subject. Poetry, fiction, history, geography, ethnology, women. It was a vast, hushed, magical place unlike anything I have ever encountered, before or since. Walking through the stacks was inspiring and uplifting, as if the books, some dating back three or four centuries, were singing a gentle ancient incantation: Read me, read me, read me! For me, the stacks was a space as spiritual in atmosphere as a cathedral, a precious monument, not to the glory of God but for the glory of knowledge, literature and the human imagination. My religion, even then – perhaps especially back then.

But in many ways I was totally unsuited for much of the work, which seemed to me mechanical and repetitive. I was not neat and orderly; I had no talent for the kind of librarianship then practised. It was neither creative nor intellectually challenging. All this changed in later years and now the National Library has been transformed. But in 1978, the decision that many kind friends saw as rash was the right one for me. I had to get out of the library.