When I first heard of ‘the stacks’, I imagined a cavernous room, crammed to the ceiling with books in precarious piles.
Old novels languishing in obscurity, rare editions too delicate for public browsing, tedious tomes of non-fiction superseded by the internet - all lying dormant in this secret stash that seemed to exist in a liminal space somewhere beyond the Staff Only doors of the library.
So when I recently saw a public invitation to come along to a once-a-year stacks visit, I signed up straight away. I knew the stacks were somewhere out of town, and had a vague idea of a warehouse full of endless roller-shelves, but I was super curious to see this hidden place where most of my library book requests lived out their days. Would it be like the basement labyrinth of the National Library, sprawling under a whole city block and humming with a mini monorail network ferrying books from floor to floor? Would it be like the quiet back rooms of the small library I’d volunteered at as a teenager, with benches covered in ripped and broken volumes waiting to be restored? Would it be a sort of bookish supermarket, librarians pushing trolleys down the aisles to pick out peoples’ orders?
Funnily enough, I found that the mysterious stacks are hidden in plain sight - a modern, unassuming building tucked away between a rug shop and a real estate agent on a main road I’d been down dozens of times. I even went right past it on my way there, and ended up walking to the wrong branch.
“Ooh, you’re visiting the distribution centre? Exciting - they don’t let people go in there very often!” said the person at the desk who I asked for directions, who promptly pointed me back the way I’d come.
But after arriving in a wind-blown rush, worried I’d be late for my visiting slot, I was soon subsumed by the peace of the stacks. In the door two friendly librarians gave me a brief intro to the building - nonfiction downstairs, fiction upstairs - and left me to it.
The stacks wasn’t the giant cave of ye olde artefacts, of course, but a large well-lit room full of metal shelves and carpeted floor, like any other library. Only this was a library that didn’t usually see the public, meaning it was meticulously organised, not a book out of place. Graphic novels took up the wall by the greenery-filled windows, next to rows of manga, zines, YA, adult fiction. Hand-drawn maps were taped up to help you navigate the maze of shelves. I went into the children’s section and didn’t emerge for a whole hour - delighted to see old favourites I’d forgotten about, wowed by the quaint art and colourful covers of the 20th-century collection, and occasionally passing another thoughtful browser or excited kid.
They had everything, and I hadn’t even ventured downstairs to see the non-fiction.
Soon I was lugging about ten books around, despite already having ten at home. My hands full, I did a loop round just to see the whole place. At the back was shelves of book bags addressed to rest homes, and to the sides were quirkily-decorated desks and a snazzy lunchroom full of board games for the lucky people who worked there.
The stacks may seem like any other library, but it’s definitely where I’ll be headed to hunker down in the event of a zombie apocalypse.
It got me thinking what a shame it is that a lot of these books don’t go out into the world unless they’re specially requested. Sure, hundreds get sent out every day, but that’s not much out of the hundreds of thousands kept there (a treasure trove compared to the twenty thousand in my local branch). There’s only so much shelf space in the world, and it’s inevitable that books will be moved into the stacks to make way for the constant stream of new material. Still, it’s strange to think of how many stories there are that you’ve never read just because you never stumbled across them in person.
So I’ve set up this blog to share some books from the stacks and bring them back, if only briefly, to the spotlight. I’ll be rereading old favourites, taking a fresh look at classics, checking out new discoveries, and giving them all a decent review to see how they hold up these days.
I generally like to wait at least five years before reading a brand-new book; my logic is that if you still hear about it five years after the hype, then it must have some kind of staying power. For this blog, I’ll only be reviewing books that are at least 20 years old - so some of them will be from my early childhood, but none of them from a time when I could remember them being published or have been aware of any marketing or literary fanfare.
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