This article was originally published as: "Librarians in Fiction; a Discussion." Education Libraries. v.21. no. 1, 1997. Copyright, the Authors, 1997.
 

Some Portrayals of Librarians in Fiction - A Discussion

Introduction:

What sorts of roles do librarians play in works of fiction? In what sorts of dramatic situations do contemporary writers involve them? How are the personalities and the working situations of these fictitious librarians described? Can we construct a tentative "literary image" of the profession, based upon scrutiny of a few recent novels involving librarians?

This article explores portrayals of librarians in selected works of fiction, notably those involving mystery or detection. It begins with a summary of information derived from descriptions of about one hundred and twenty contemporary or recent works, then discusses particular stories involving detection or mystery, with occasional references to other genres. Librarians frequently appear in these works as protagonists or as major supporting characters - detectives or villains, suspects or nuisances. In a substantial number of them, librarians figure as supporting characters - as partners or foils for the protagonists.

The professional literature of librarianship, while not replete with studies of the phenomenon, has by no means ingored its importance. For example, American Libraries, through its regular feature "Image", has regularly provided summaries of media portrayals of librarians, and occasionally, made reference to novels written by librarians or about them. A sidebar to a 1995 article in Public Libraries devoted to romance lists a dozen novels in the genre which feature librarian heroines (Linz, et al., 1995:149). The Indexer has published several accounts of indexers in fiction. (Anon. 1991 and 1984).

Lengthier treatments of the subject have included Gregg Sapp's discussion of about fifty novels involving librarians as main characters. (Sapp, 1987). Sapp provides brief characterisations of these protagonists, culled from the sources themselves, but does not attempt to synthesise the material in this sampler, or to draw inferences about the portrayals of librarians in various genres. Alison Hall, writing in Canadian Library Journal, discusses the image of librarians in Eco's The Name of the Rose, Bowes' Between the Stacks, PD James' A Taste for Death, Mortimer's Rumpole and The Age of Miracles, Goodrum's Carnage of the Realm, and other works of fiction. Reminding her readers that "Batgirl was a librarian", Hall suggests librarians learn to laugh at the profession's negative image, and that they act individually to improve it. (Hall, 1992).

The task of identifying all the works featuring librarian protagonists, much less of analyzing them, exceeds the scope of the current article. However, we can make an attempt to categorise a sample of the material available and to draw some tentative inferences about the ways in which librarians are characterised in them.

This article grew from an attempt to compile a bibliography of fiction involving librarians, which was intended to to accompany a graduate course introducing the profession (Sands, 1996).The bibliography itself was obtained through searches of online catalogues and databases, as well as through queries posted over Internet LISTSERVs, notably JESSE and DOCDIS. About 120 individual works, and about a dozen bibliographies were obtained through these means.

While several works are discussed herein, this article makes particular reference to images of the profession both negative and positive, which appear in the works of Umberto Eco, L.R. Wright, and Charlotte McLeod. It also makes reference to science fiction, historical fiction, espionage, and romance. In many instances, librarians and their places of work are presented as intrinsically interesting and appealing. However, even in works which present less desirable images of the profession, accurate details of its techniques and working realities are sometimes discernible. As well, we can say that an author's use of a despicable and villainous librarian in a plot, or a library as a setting of intrigue, implies that the writer considers librarians and their workplaces sufficiently interesting to arouse and hold a reader's interest. Consider these examples:

In contemporary New England, a professor of agriculture returns home from his Christmas break to find a dead librarian behind the sofa. She was an officious busybody, with no professional credentials, and thoroughly disliked on campus. The professor is not saddened by her demise, merely inconvenienced by her choice of venue.

On British Columbia's Sunshine Coast, a small town librarian disappears. She has been kidnapped by a man on a quest for the ideal mate - a serial killer who stalks his prey at library association meetings, and uses his position to research their backgrounds. He is a Professor of Library Science in the University of British Columbia.

Imagine a book too valuable to destroy, but so dangerous that anyone caught reading it must die. Imagine a librarian so zealous that he would easily murder, and even take his own life to protect it. The librarian is a medieval monk, obsessed with concealing Aristotle's treatise on comedy, which today, scholars believe lost. Perhaps somewhere, a librarian knows better.

The plots obtain respectively from Rest You Merry, the first in Charlotte McLeod's Professor Peter Shandy books, from A Touch of Panic by L.R. Wright, and from Umberto Eco's modern classic, The Name of the Rose. These novels will serve to highlight various aspects of the popular portrayal of librarianship evident elsewhere in the literature.

Such works are of special interest to librarians because they feature our fictitious colleagues in prominent roles - as suspects, as amateur detectives, or as partners, mentors, or foils for non librarian protagonists. For good or for ill, they present librarians as interesting characters.

Are Real Librarians and Libraries Interesting?

Hall (1992), suggests that librarians are ultimately responsible for their own media images. But are librarians, archivists, indexers, and records managers intrinsically interesting people? If so, are they interesting in a dramatic sense, because of the jobs they perform, or because of their work situations, or because of their individual inclinations and pursuits?

It would be unreasonable to expect authors to populate their works with inherently dull people, or to set them in uninteresting locations. Our work has hitherto been mainly cerebral - and thinking does not lend itself easily to dramatic representation.

Scholars and philosophers, archivists and librarians, do not capture the popular imagination as readily as doctors, lawyers, or spies. The library and the scholarly carrel lack the immediate dramatic appeal of the hospital or police station. Nevertheless, various"real world" librarians have achieved notoriety, have found themselves caught up in the tides of historical movements, and have occasionally fallen victim to revolutionary zeal.

Hypatia, the neo-Platonist head of the Great Library of Alexandria, killed by a band of fanatical anti-Platonists, or the Soviet librarian, Yurii Vladimirovich Got'e will serve as ready examples. Got'e was the head of the Lenin Library, chronicled the Russian revolution, was exiled as a reactionary, then reinstated (Gates, 1990; Got'e, 1988). Nor can we fail to note that more famous educator/librarian and revolutionary, Nadezhda Konstantinova Krupskaya - spouse of V. I. Lenin. (McNeal, 1972; Raymond, 1979).

After the Soviet revolution, Krupskaya set about reforming adult education and libraries (along Bolshevik lines), and penning many works herself. She permitted herself only one personal luxury - a private library of about twenty thousand volumes (McNeal, 1972:188). She also earned the emnity of Stalin, but managed to retain her influence over Soviet librarianship until her death in 1939. Krupskaya's last public words: "We'll pull the libraries through." (Raymond,1979:12).

It is unlikely that stodgy, frumpy, reticent, intellectually dull and routinised, socially inept, uninteresting individuals would be seen as "dangerous" enough to become political targets. For instance, we know that Hypatia was both an attractive and sociable individual and a technically competent philosopher. One poet went so far as to dub her "adorable".

As Hall, Gregg, and others point out, counterexamples can be found readily in mystery, romance, and in other genres, such as science fiction. In one of the original Star Trek episodes, "All Our Yesterdays", a computer-generated male librarian named "Atoz", controls the fate of a planet's population. In his 1971 utopian novel, Knowledge Park, Stephen Franklin envisaged a global resource library situated near Cochrane, Ontario, founded by a visionary male intellectual known as "The Originator", but planned by a librarian and renaissance woman named Alex.

While he did not dwell upon the role of the librarian, Edward Bellamy stressed the need for public access to libraries, (featuring "luxurious leather chairs" and "book-lined alcoves"), in that classic utopian novel, Looking Backward (Bellamy, 1889:160). Isaac Asimov's librarians are among the social engineers who build a galactic civilization in the "Foundation" stories.

Perhaps the social value of an information profession is apparent to writers in this genre, with its frequent allusions to robotics, cybernetics, and computing. Library educator Charles Seavey has noted that the Canadian SF writer Spider Robinson exemplifies the positive trend. (Seavey, private communication, 1996). Robinson, ever the iconoclast, pays the profession high tribute in this passage from The Callahan Touch: "Mary Kay, is one of the hidden masters of the world - a librarian. They control information. Don't ever piss one off."

Fiction, especially detective fiction, demands action. However, we tend to imagine real or fictional librarians as quiet, demure, and reticent book lovers, rather than as men and women of action. This does not hold true equally of all scholarly occupations. We can readily imagine the laboratory, the ancient tumulus, or the deep sea research station as dramatic locations, and the biochemist, the astronomer, or the archaeologist as adventurers. Perhaps too, this is because the tools of these trades are visually exciting - the robot submarine, the radio telescope, the chemical apparatus. Historians, literary scholars, and mathematicians are thought of as lonely denizens of musty carrels, working with pen, ink, and brain. Neither their workplaces nor the tools of their professions seem overtly dramatic.

Because many librarians and archivists have come to their fields by way of the humanities and liberal arts, we imagine them to be, in the words of one archivist, "dusty, tweedy, bespectacled nuisances" best forgotten or ignored. In an 1887 letter, the young Krupskaya responded to an appeal by Tolstoy for editors to correct the many badly published books of the time, saying "I know history and literature better than other subjects" (McNeal, 1972:20). Nor have these traditional sources of new blood in the profession have lost ground, if recent enrollment figures at one contemporary US Library and Information Science programme are typical.

A sample of the self reported undergraduate specialties of about 200 Wayne State LIS students, obtained between the autumn term of 1994, and that of 1995, shows a preponderance of candidates from the traditional areas: English and History. In this particular in stance, a great many teachers seeking library credentials were also represented. This is due in part to a State requirement that school media specialists receive formal training in librarianship.

The actual rankings were: English (20.3%), History (18.8%), Education (15.3%), the Life Sciences (11.4%), Modern Languages (10.9%), Business (9.9%), other Social Sciences (7.4%), Earth Sciences (2.48%), Fine Arts (1.98%), Physical Sciences (1.49%), and Mathematics and Computing (0.49%). It should be stressed that these data were not obtained scientifically. They were merely transcribed from introduction forms submitted by students at the beginning of Term, and students may have omitted degrees or listed them inconsistently.

Many of these individuals had unusual backgrounds, and no at- tempt was made to record them consistently. For example, current and recent LIS students have included a former police constable, a federal income tax agent, two monks, a nun, a few stock traders, as well as military personnel, who had chosen second careers in librarianship or archival science. As well, examples of exciting avocations and hobbies abound among recent and current LIS students. They range from mountain climbing, to scuba and sky diving, to field work with inter national aid projects.

Furthermore, the tools of the librarian's trade are themselves becoming more visible and tactile, and hence, more immediately interesting. With the advent of electronic computers and databases, librarians can achieve results at blinding speed - thereby enhancing their dramatic potential (Beaty, 1996). With the physical setting of the library itself changing, and with more of our colleagues working with confreres in academic departments or in corporate settings, the dramatic opportunity increases. By featuring computers as props, creators of films, television shows, and novels, can increasingly portray researchers at work with physical tools and achieving immediate, visualisable results, rather than working at entirely cerebral and inherently undramatic tasks.

Depictions of Librarians In Fiction

We have come to think of the librarians of fiction as possibly clever, but probably officious, obsessively methodical, pedantic, stodgy, old maid-ish and lacking in professional or academic qualifications. Whether or not this is the profession's predominant media image, we ourselves have come to expect it to be. (Sapp, 1987; Hall, 1992).

However, counterexamples exist, and perhaps even abound. McLeod's Professor Peter Shandy becomes involved with an erudite female librarian who holds a PhD in LIS. Wright's Cassandra, pens articles for Library Quarterly, and as we shall see, finds her middle-aged attractiveness occasionally detrimental.

At this point, we will examine and attempt to categorize portrayals of the librarians and their roles and situations evident in some of these works, and to determine their relationships the plots and protagonists.

During the summer of 1996, we examined an initial list of 121 such works. Since that time, librarians and LIS students have continued to add works to the list. When we categorized the roles of librarians in this initial sample, we found that in the genres represented - mainly mystery or detective fiction, librarians figured as protagonists a refreshing 37.2% of the time. The rankings were:

Libraries and Librarians' Roles in 121 Works of Fiction
 

The "other/setting" category includes works whose action is set in libraries, rather than books whose main or major supporting characters are librarians. It should be stressed that these data were obtained in the main from plot descriptions given in the selection or reviewing sources, rather than from a reading of all 121 texts. This informal and no doubt statistically questionable sampling method was intended merely to confirm the supposition that a substantial number of mystery writers do indeed cast librarians in leading roles, and view libraries as fit dramatic settings.

Libraries themselves offer natural settings for crimes and mysteries, ranging from the ones involving the theft of rare materials, to murder, to supernatural hauntings and poltergeist phenomena. The immensely popular film Ghostbusters is a classic instance of the latter. The 1970s cult picture Flick (a.k.a. Frankenstein on Campus), was shot at the University of Toronto's library, although that institution is not mentioned in the credits. When a mad scientist must dispose of the evidence of his failed experiments, he stows bodies in the library's dumb waiters. Many will remember Goldie Hawn's performance in Foul Play, shot at the Passadena-Glendale public library, though set elsewhere. The Canadian film, Party Girl, a remake of Breakfast at Tiffany's, and its 1996 spin-off television series are set in the New York Public Library. Our major concern here is to investigate the ways in which librarians, rather than their workplaces, are portrayed in fiction, especially in mysteries.

Librarians feature as detective protagonists in Charlaine Harris' Aurora Teagarden series, in Martha Grimes Old Contemptibles (1991), as they do in over a third of the works in this list. No mention of librarians as detectives would be complete without reference to Charles Goodrum's mysteries, featuring chief librarian Betty Crighton Jones and the crime teams she assembles from among the staff of her academic library. Goodrum's classic Dewey Decimated (1977), is complemented by titles like Best Cellar, The Subject Was Murder, and A Slip of the Tong (1992).

In other novels, librarians who have turned to other professions, say book selling or authorship, become embroiled various investigations. For instance, in Elizabeth Peters "Jacqueline Kirby" series, (e.g. Naked Once More), the librarian has become a romance writer. The film Ice Storm involves a librarian turned detective, while in Kate Morgan's Home Sweet Homicide (1991), a librarian working as a bookseller becomes involved in a murder.

Still others feature practicing librarians. A public librarian helps British schoolgirls interpret local history in Theresa Tomlinson's Summer Witches (1991). The "Laura Principal" series by Michelle Spring features a female private investigator, assisted by a female librarian sidekick. A female librarian averts international disaster by conducting a database search in the 1991 spy thriller MacKinnon's Machine.

Of course, working librarians conduct literature searches every day, with no thought of drama. The fact that such techniques could be efficacious, however, is novel enough to figure in a dramatic plot. While we may lament the public's lack of awareness of our acumen and apparatus, we ought rather to rejoice when these figure in fictional works, even if they are presented as singular or unusual.

A few general observations seem appropriate at this point. First, despite the growing real-world trend toward "non-traditional" employment, the majority of information professionals represented in these stories work in public or academic libraries. Special librarians are rarer in this selection. This trend may tend to bias the discussion.

Second, we if we are searching for positive portrayals of librarians, we ought to define what we mean by "positive". We might adopt Bruce Shuman's suggestion, and define a positive image as one which portrayed librarians as "exciting and extremely clever people." (Shuman, 1992). Jesse Shera believed that the profession relied upon the acquisition of "cognitive and normative knowledge, skill, and experience ... [all] resulting in professional action." (Shera, 1976;151). A positive image, after Shera, would involve public recognition of the theoretical and practical foundations of the field. With the advent of electronic means, the number of specific skills and capabilities have proliferated, but it would be difficult to come up with more philosophically satisfying criteria. These positions of Shera and Shuman, taken together, fall in line nicely with the Kuhnian notion that science must not only be done, but must be seen to be done.

For convenience, then, let us merely say that a "positive" portrayal of librarians ought to present our fictitious colleagues as we would like others to view us in the real world. There are heroes and villains in every profession. What is essential is that writers acknowledge the skills, credentials, and diverse personalities of information professionals, and view them as dramatically engaging.

On the other hand, we might say that a "negative" portrayal would be one which over emphasized traits or practices which we believe undesirable to stress. There is a caveat here, however, which librarians acknowledge implicitly by using phrases like: "The days of the severe librarian... are gone". (Shuman, 1992:29). If the officious librarian is to disappear from fiction, she must also be gone in fact.

For example, many Canadians enjoy drinking beer, and in rural areas, many wear lumberjack shirts. The "hoser" stereotype however stressed these characteristics to the exclusion of others. On a positive note, the "hoser" was instantly recognizable to an international audience, and most Canadians considered the stereotype amusing, even if they themselves were city-dwellers who wore three-piece suits. Robyn Davidson makes a similar point about the "Crocodile Dundee" character popularized by Australian actor Paul Hogan. The fact that a stereotype is being invoked may not necessarily render a work "negative", so long as other dimensions of character emerge (Davidson, 1987).

In a large number of instances, librarians who figure either as principal or supporting characters in various genres of literature exhibit strong and positive traits. These include quickness of intellect, leadership, pleasantness of personality, resourcefulness, good problem solving abilities, and so forth. When librarians figure prominently in detective stories, their "cleverness" is often key.

Some portrayals of librarians are intentionally negative. An officious head librarian censures professors for drinking coffee in their carrels while the bodies of murder victims stack up in his library's washrooms. Here, a despicable librarian is murdered. There a mean-spirited one interferes with an investigation. We must separate these portrayals of pedantic or officious librarians, or of professionals doing only menial work, from ones which involve librarians as interesting villains, or merely as "quirky" characters.

For instance, according to synopses gleaned from sources like Books In Print and AV Online, "a scholarly but sinister" librarian will be found in John Ballinger's 1989, Williamsburg Forgeries. John Bellairs' The Mansion in the Mist features a detective with a "klutzy" librarian sidekick. Other fictional librarians are merely quirky. A suspect librarian in The Bridled Groom (1994), claims to have "special knowledge from the stars and runes". Some have things to hide. The "reticent" librarian in Stalk (1992) turns out to have a hidden past. So too the "very proper" one in Linda Miller's historical romance Emma & the Outlaw, raised by the local lady of the evening.

In Shades of Gray (1987) an investigation of murder in the United States Military Academy at West Point is hindered by "crabby" librarian, while a "decidedly unpleasant" one is murdered in Hazel Holt's Cruellest Month (1991). By contrast, the male public librarian in A Flight of Angels (1989) is called "refreshingly non-stereotypical" by the Books In Print reviewer.

Such stories may have at least one positive side effect. By depicting librarians as particularly delicious villains or victims, authors pay our profession the compliment of literary recognition. Other stories are unintentionally negative. Zoe the Children's librarian in Library - No Murder Aloud, for instance, is a wall flower, but a competent investigator. Her stodgy public library is more typical of a private subscription library of the last century.

In some instances, librarians serve as temporary diversions. According to Books In Print summaries, Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis interview a "winsome female librarian" in Colin Dexter's The Wench Is Dead (1990), while the investigator in Rising (1987), "enjoys a tame romance with a wholesome librarian". Nor should we overlook the "flirtatious" librarian in Julie Smith's Huckleberry Fiend (1992). A subplot in Susan Steiner's 1993 tale, Library: No Murder Aloud, involves a romance between two suspects - the male CEO of a stodgy little public library and "Zoe", his beautiful and wealthy children's librarian. In Barrett Tillman's 1992 Dauntless: A Novel of Midway & Guadalcanal, a naval officer enjoys a "refreshing romance" with a librarian in Honolulu.

In the most positive portrayals, librarians presented as clever, admirable, attractive, and socially acceptable individuals. Prof Shandy's partner Helen is physically attractive, well travelled, and knowledgeable on several fronts. Newly arrived at Shandy's agricultural college, she astonishes the professor by wondering aloud about correct Latin case endings, and citing obscure works like "Life With the Burrowing Mammals". Hired to set a badly maintained rare books collection to rights, she uses her librarian's skills and perceptions to help Shandy solve crimes. We are told that she obtained these skills through studies for an MLS and a PhD, and through professional work at various illustrious institutions.

In a small Ohio town, a middle-aged academic librarian despairs of finding true love. She becomes involved with a mysterious architect, whose reading of Tarot cards suggests she is the "ideal woman". Rachael Locke, heroine of In the Cards, a 1990 Harlequin Super Romance, works as a university reference librarian, and is recovering from an involvement with a married professor. Concerned for her aging aunt's welfare, she takes a position at a small town library.

An attractive and spirited woman, Rachael had "read a million library books" as a child. Librarians love to quote, she says, sprinkling her conversation with passages from authors like Maxim Gorki: "When work is a pleasure, life's a joy." But while Rachael's lover "admires her naked perfection", his Gypsy relations deride her as "a Gaja who worships books". The details of librarianship interspersed throughout the narrative are accurate and positive. Rachael is evidently acquainted with collection development, classification, budgeting, reference work, and all the major elements of professional librarianship - details of which are presented swiftly but faithfully in the novel.

While the negative aspects of this tale will be apparent, we ought not to dismiss its positive features. Rachael is at once attractive and clever, possesses a Master's degree, behaves in a professional manner. However, her occupation is secondary - it merely provides the dramatic device required to place her in the situation.

In L.R. Wright's novels, Cassandra Mitchell's profession is more central to her role. A woman in her early 40s, she pens articles for professional journals, and attends library association conferences. Cassandra is the sole qualified librarian in the sleepy British Columbia town of Sechelt. Drawn there by filial piety, she chose the town because of its proximity to her mother's nursing home. Ten years later, Mitchell is still in Sechelt, and the library is no longer in a church basement, but in a building of its own, presumably as a result of her efforts. Having placed an advertisement in the Vancouver Sun personals, Cassandra meets the series' central figure, Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg, head of the local detachment of the RCM Police - the Mounties. Cassandra's add reads in part: "Books are my work, my comfort, my joy."

Again, a librarian is being presented as a book lover and custodian of books rather than a proactive information professional. However, Cassandra is by no means unidimensional, reticent, nor humourless. "I use marijuana sometimes... not for a long time...", she admits, "And I have a few speeding tickets...." Nor is she a spinster. We are told of her previous lovers, and her current preference for a common law relationship over a wedding.

We meet Mitchell first in The Suspect, winner of the 1985 Edgar award for Best Novel. At first, Cassandra acts as a foil and a source of information. By virtue of her role as a public confidant, she has access to town gossip which might elude a policeman, and can supply the newly arrived Alberg with a wealth of town history gleaned from her professional research and from conversations with patrons. "It's very handy to know a librarian", admits the Staff Sergeant, who until the book began, had never held a library card.

This arrangement poses some ethical problems, which are not dealt with in the novel. As well, there remains the suggestion that a librarian is a harmless sort of a date. "So, who'd you have lunch with", ribs a colleague. "'A librarian', said Alberg, with dignity." Other vestiges of the curatorial stereotype are also evident. During their early courtship, Alberg drops in on Cassandra at work:

"He noticed that as she shelved the books, she pulledsome slightly farther out, and then, unthinking, ran her fingers along the spines as if playing a harp." (Wright, 1985).

Wright is at once a master of psychological suspense and of the Canadian equivalent of an English village mystery. If a librarian has only time for one of her offerings, A Touch of Panic (1994), is perhaps the best choice. This study in what Conan Doyle might have termed, "the grotesque", features librarians as villain and victim. The victim is Cassandra, the villain a millionaire professor of library science from the University of British Columbia. Having spotted Mitchell at a library association meeting, and having classified her as the "ideal woman", he has resolved to drug and kidnap her. If Mitchell declines the position, another place awaits her in the professor's garden, where a shallow grave already holds one rejected candidate. For his part, Murphy is attracted to Mitchell at once, though she is not quite the partner he had envisaged. Wright tells us:

"The look of her surprised him. She was in her forties, and adorably plump. He had expected her to be younger. He had expected her to be slender and lithe, like the others." (Wright, 1995).

Librarianship requires at least six years of tertiary education, and many LIS students have held prior jobs. Lithe or plump, chief librarians are likely to be over forty.

"Professors," quips one real-life education consultant, "are the people nobody would dance with in high-school". Far from musty, Gordon Murphy is obsessed with youth and vitality. He is middle aged, wealthy, attractive, "ostentatiously fit", and possessed of a remarkable set of gym equipment. Mitchell reminisces about their meeting:

"An attractive man of about her age, tall and big... dark-haired, greying, lithe and muscular. His grip had been warm and firm. And his smile was dazzling; she'd never seen such perfect teeth. Good God, she'd thought, staring at his mouth, maybe they aren't real."

Murphy drives a chocolate-brown BMW, very fast and skillfully, on winding mountain roads. He lives in a huge house which he remodels frequently, and dresses with impeccable taste. Murphy is by no means shy nor retiring. He is suave, wealthy, and smooth-talking, Wright endows him with a character larger than life, and with a chillingly warped personality.

Because Wright emphasizes the scholarly as well as the practical side of the profession, it becomes apparent that librarianship possesses a body of theoretical knowledge. This notion is reinforced by her making Gordon Murphy a professor of library science.

We can overlook Wright's describing books as Cassandra's "life and joy", because at bottom, libraries are enjoyable workplaces. Especially in smaller libraries, professionals like Cassandra must actually reshelve them. Such incidents are more than balanced as the series, and the character, evolve. Over its course, Mitchell emerges as an attractive, resourceful, and intelligent woman, an able partner and intelligent confidant for the series' protagonist, and a character with depth and definition.

The Ultimate Custodian of Knowledge?

As we noted earlier, Stephen Franklin's Knowledge Park (1972), is about an international effort to reconstruct the Great Library of Alexandria near Cochrane, Ontario. The scheme is at once utopian and custodial. In our final example, we are treated to Umberto Eco's vision of one of fiction's most insidious libraries and foulest librarians. If Eco's 1989 article in the Ontario Library Association's journal Focus is to taken at face value, the novelist based his these portrayals on his experiences doing research among the great "closed stacks" libraries of Europe. In that article, Eco sets out criteria for constructing the world's worst library. (Eco, 1989).

Umberto Eco's librarian is a brilliant but demented zealot who believes it his duty to conceal dangerous works. Why not simply destroy vile works? We need falsehood so that we can come to know truth, and monsters exist so that we can appreciate beauty. Monsters exist so that we can appreciate truth and beauty - but only those with sufficient knowledge and maturity (in the librarian's judgment), should be allowed to view them. [Real medieval monastic libraries contained a surprising number of classical books, some of which might have been considered misleading - but lending records show that the monks were encouraged to read them].

The library of Eco's medieval Benedictine monastery exists to conceal such dangerous information. The exact contents of its books are known only to the librarian, and the key to its classification scheme, as well as the exact nature of its most harmful works, are revealed by the librarian only upon his retirement, and only to his immediate sub-librarian.

Eco's library defends itself by means of a labyrinthine layout, by subtle architectural features, and by ingenious traps set for interlopers. These devices include burning pots of hashish, ventilation slits which sigh like lost souls and mirrors which terrify intruders with their own distorted images. Although constructed on the basis of sacred numerology, it is a perverse edifice.

The work's protagonist, a Friar named William, schooled in the logical and scientific methods of English Franciscans like William of Ockham, Robert Grosseteste, and Roger Bacon, stands in opposition to the ‘retired’ librarian, Jorge, who fosters ignorance and darkness by restricting access the collection. (Grosseteste and Bacon, incidentally, were fascinated with the physical phenomenon of light). William, played magnificently by Sean Connery in the 1986 film version, links a series of bizarre murders to Jorge's campaign to conceal the only extant copy of the second book of Aristotle's Poetics - the book presumably devoted to comedy and the healing power of laughter. Aristotle argued in the Poetics that tragedy was a high form of drama, and applied properly only to great and noble people, brought low by fate. Comedy, on the other hand, showed us nobility by negation - by depicting ridiculous, low, or base people, whose silly exploits taught us wisdom. (Butcher, 1929).

The novel concludes with a diabolical gloss on the Apocalypse. This most zealous of custodians devours the poisoned pages of the Poetics, becoming himself a type of the "low and base persons" of Aristotelian comedy, and an antitype of the sacred figure of the Apostle John who also devours a good book in the Revelations .The novel culminates in a classic confrontation of master detective and master criminal. "What an excellent librarian you would have made, William", croaks the villain.

While Eco presents a nightmarish library and a devilish custos librorum, he injects various details which contribute to a positive professional image, evident in quotes like this one:

"The librarian must have a list of all books, carefully ordered by subjects and authors, and they must be classified on the shelves with numerical indications."

Such details are of course secondary. Eco's actual experience of libraries (cf Eco, 1989), seems to have given him the impression that, aside from a few exemplary institutions, they are populated by arrogant and officious functionaries, who exhibit some of the characteristics of the Venerable Jorge, but without, one presumes, enough true villainy to make them interesting.

While Eco seems less than taken with librarians, he is clearly a champion of their overall enterprise. The real enemy in The Name of the Rose is ignorance and illiteracy. The book's numerous subplots involve attempts to stifle knowledge, to quash intellectual and personal freedom. There are minor villains in this book too - heretics whose grammar is perverted, whose logic is warped, and whose language is the confusion of tongues.

The goodly library would stand in stark opposition to Eco's fictitious construct. One is left with the impression that for Eco, heaven itself would be a library - one with open stacks, eternal hours of opening, infinite learning, and ministering echelons of librarians who understood the needs of scholars like himself. By contrast, Jorge is a "figure" of the devil himself - by destroying the treatise on laughter, he robs the world of a path to wisdom. The enemies of humour are the enemies of wisdom, and Jorge is not only humourless, but also given to censure it in others. This librarian "shushes" his patrons by stifling them permanently. Perhaps in casting a librarian as one of literature's most fiendish villains, Eco has paid our profession the ultimate compliment. This is the negative stereotype at its purest.

In summary, this brief examination of some of detective fiction's depictions of librarians will serve to show how a simple interpretation of the profession's literary image cannot suffice. We began by asking whether a tentative "literary image" of the profession could be constructed, based upon scrutiny of a few recent novels involving librarians. While we have adopted, for convenience, notions of "positive" and "negative" portrayals, such categories inevitably overlap. There are many more novels about librarians than the few we have examined herein, and it is readily acknowledged that the few instances we have described may be quite atypical of the main body of the literature.

Rather than asking whether a fictitious librarian is likable or despicable, further research could continue the work of categorising novels on the basis of the librarian's prominence and relationship to the plot. Nevertheless, even in works which feature librarians as supporting characters - as partners or foils for protagonists - we can see opportunities for acquainting the reading public with librarians' depth of character, professionalism, and personality. We may also ask whether a work which features librarians describes the apparatus and methods of librarianship faithfully. This second criterion is perhaps equally important, if we wish the public both to take notice of us, and to understand the nature of modern information work.

Nor should we dismiss a work simply because it depicts librarians using some of the traditional the tools of their trade, or exhibiting personality traits which are demonstrably common - having backgrounds in the humanities, for example or using classification systems. However, there is much more to the art or science of librarianship than a casual observation of these activities would suggest. If authors always depict librarians performing only these tasks, they lose the chance of exploring far more interesting dimensions.

An aspect of a literary character's behaviour can become recognizably "typical" only if it has some basis in fact. Many librarians, for example, do love books. Many must reshelve them. Many perform literature searches. However, character and personality are not constrained by time clocks and office walls. In this selection of stories, we can see how some authors have chosen to explore other dimensions of librarians' personalities, and how some of these fictitious librarians can be nearly as interesting as their real-world counterparts.

REFERENCES

Anon., "Image," American Libraries, vol. December, p. 1097, 1995.

Anon. "One Dozen Romances With Librarian Heroines," Public Libraries, vol. May/June, p. 149, 1995.

Beaty, Mary. "Bright Lights, Big Computer". Quill & Quire, Nov, p. 11, 1996.

Butcher, S.H. The Poetics of Aristotle; edited with critical notes and a translation by S.H. Butcher, Macmillan, London, c1907.

Davidson, Robyn. "The Mythological Crucible," Australia: Beyond the Dreamtime, p. 238, BBC Books, London, 1987.

Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose, Picador, London, 1984.

Eco, Umberto. "What is the Name of the Rose? Umberto Eco on libraries," Focus, vol. 14, pp. 10-15, 1989.

Franklin, Stephen. Knowledge Park, McClelland & Stewart, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1972.

Gates, Jean Key. Introduction to Librarianship. New York: Neal Schuman, 1990.

Got'e, Iurii, Vladimirovich. Time of Troubles; the Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e, Moscow, July 8 1917 to July 23, 1927, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1988.

Hall, Alison. "Batgirl was a Librarian," Canadian Library Journal, vol. 49, pp. 345-7, Oct 92.

Gates, Jean Key. Introduction to Librarianship, Neal-Shuman Publishers, New York, 1990.

Linz, Cathie, et al. "Exploring the World of Romance Novels," Public Libraries, vol. May/June, pp. 144-151, 1995.

Linz, Cathie, et al. "One Dozen Romances With Librarian Heroines" Public Libraries, vol. May/June, p. 149, 1995.

McCormick, Edith. "The Librarian as novel heroine," American Libraries, vol. 27, p. 17, Aug 96.

McLeod, Charlotte. Rest You Merry. New York: Doubleday, 1978.

McNeal, Robert Hatch, Bride of the Revolution; Krupskaya and Lenin, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1972.

Meyers, Julie. In the Cards, Harlequin Enterprises, Toronto, 1990 .

Raymond, Boris, Krupskaia and Soviet Russian Librarianship,1917-1939, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1979.

Robinson, Spider, The Callahan Touch, ACE Books, New York, 1993.

Sands, Charles Barnard, and C. Brown-Syed. "Some works of fiction involving librarians". [Unpublished Manuscript]. Wayne State University Library and Information Science Program, 1996.

Sapp, Gregg, "The librarian as a main character: a professional sampler," Wilson Library Bulletin, vol. 62, pp. 29-33, Jan 87.

Shera, Jesse Hauk. Introduction to Library Science. Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited Inc., 1976.

Shuman, Bruce. Foundations and Issues in Library and Information Science. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited Inc., 1992.

Wright, Laurali R., A Touch of Panic, Seal Books, Toronto, 1995.

Listserv® is a registered trademark of L-Soft. Copyright © Christopher Brown-Syed 1995-2001. Disclaimers.