The Fate of Books
by Dashka Slater
Last spring, Gray Brechin went to the School of Journalism's
library at UC Berkeley looking for a 1948 volume called Selections
from the Writings and Speeches of William Randolph Hearst. Brechin,
a postdoctoral fellow in the geography department, had used the
book several years before, but now, when he wanted to check the
citation for his dissertation, he found that both the book and
the library he remembered had vanished. What had once been a collection
of roughly 4,500 volumes had been reduced by a good third to accommodate
an airy conference center and reading room. All that remained
of the library that Brechin had visited a few years before were
the thirty drawers of the old card catalog.
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