The abuse of books depresses me almost as much as the mistreatment of humans; humans, after all, have an astounding capacity for resiliency and regeneration, whereas a book once beaten, broken and torn is dependent on a human for restoration.
In Nairobi's MacMillan library, the once grand interior is stained with dirt, water and - probably - mold. The card catalog (something I haven't used for twenty years) is a jumble of worn rectangles of oak tag, occasionally misfiled, imparting unintelligible numbers - some of which correspond to the Dewey decimal system, others of which do not. Housed in a cabinet that is itself beaten, broken and torn, the card catalog is also surprisingly inaccessible: many of the drawers don't open - or only with minutes-worth of cajoling - and arrange themselves in an order than cannot be described as alphabetical.
Once in the stacks, the story is even sadder. The relationship between the books listed in the card catalog and those on the shelves is analogous to that of a child with a pretend friend: only one of the four books I'd found in the card catalog was on the shelves, though the other three had not been checked out - they'd been stolen or hopelessly mislaid, since the library doesn't have a computer system.
The one book I found, Elspeth Huxley's Forks and Hope: An African Notebook, was dirty and held together with clear plastic tape. Its jacket was long gone, the edges of the cover frayed, and the binding was broken in multiple places. It was missing pages 49 and 50.
I love the look and feel of a book well read by many hands, but in my trek through Nairobi's National Archives, Museum Archives, and University of Nairobi Library, I've found circumstances to be as dismal as in MacMillan. Books (and records), not burnished by good service to myriad voracious readers, but cracked, split, lost and neglected.
Moreover, among these books are those that are out-of-print, unavailable for purchase, or which retail for prohibitive prices (e.g., $250). Once these books are destroyed, humanity will permanently lose their irreplaceable contents.
The heartbreak of the situation is compounded by the obvious need for MacMillan and the other libraries and record repositories in Nairobi. On the Saturday I visited MacMillan, I found that place packed - and silent - with busy readers. (The same knowledge-hunger was evident when Huxley was writing 47 years earlier: "In Kitwe I saw a young miner who was reading right through the Encyclopaedia Britannica from start to finish: he had reached CROCODILE." p. 259.)
Throughout the course of my research in Nairobi thus far, I've wished for online or e-access to the contents of the books I'm seeking. Such access would phenomenally speed and simplify my research, which is crawling along because of inaccessibility and graft.
In all the wrangling over Google Books, e-readers and libraries lending e-books, I have yet to hear the interests of the developing world represented. Certainly with the ease of lending e-books, no reason exists why international patrons, including those in the developing world, should not be able to borrow e-books from libraries anywhere on the planet; nor, indeed, why institutions in the developed world could not or should not support the digitization of Nairobi's collections and make them available electronically to all.
For the sake of all the under-served readers in the MacMillan library - and all the book-starved people in the developing world - I can only hope that Nairobi's extinction-threatened collections find a conservation area online to which access will be provided on a fair, affordable and convenient basis.
The abuse of books depresses me almost as much as the mistreatment of humans; humans, after all, have an astounding capacity for resiliency and regeneration, whereas a book once beaten, broken and torn is dependent on a human for restoration.
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