Stupid Green Books

While I worked toward my MSLS at Catholic University in DC, I held a job shelving books across town at Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Library. The Library was housed in the Georgetown mansion of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, who had donated their extensive collections about Byzantine, Columbian, and Garden history and their house to Harvard.

One summer, I was tasked to move the NUC to storage to clear shelf space--a common fate for it these days, it seems. My coworker, an undergraduate and the groundskeeper's daughter, and I moved all 754 volumes of it, a single book truck at a time. The building's ancient, rickety elevator was about four feet by four feet, just barely big enough for a wobbling loaded cart and the two of us. We tried not to think about its maximum weight capacity as it jerked down three floors. After slamming the grate shut one particularly hot afternoon, my coworker cracked one of the volumes open and exclaimed, "What is this, photocopies of index cards? What are these stupid green books for, anyway?" I tried to explain it, but she wasn't impressed.