Crisis in Crates

At home in Virginia, stocky Luther Harris Evans has 3,000 books; down at the office, in Washington, he has more than 8,000,000.

Last week, Luther Evans, the 44-year-old Librarian of Congress, looked up from his books long enough to rehearse a request, in a tone bolder than librarians habitually use. Though the House Appropriations Committee is slashing almost every Government agency in sight, Evans will ask for $11,346,000--nearly twice last year's alltime high. There is a crisis in his library's crates: millions of new and wartime acquisitions (among them the Booker T. Washington and George W. Norris papers) are still unsorted and uncatalogued. The library needs double its present staff (1,910) to handle this backlog. Warns Evans: "Merely by standing still, [the library may] subside into a sterility from which it could never quite recover."

Posterity Is Here. Whether the U.S. intended it or not, it now has the world's largest library. And so long as it receives by law two copies of every book copyrighted in the U.S., it will continue to swell. The library began (in 1789) with a Congressman's modest proposal that a committee draw up and price a "catalogue of books" for his colleagues' handy reference. A little more than a century later only the Librarian himself knew how to find the one million ill-catalogued books, and accounts were short $30,000 because a stack of uncashed money orders had been temporarily lost in the piles. That was when President McKinley picked a scholarly lawyer-librarian named Herbert Putnam to straighten things out. This week, eight Presidents later, Librarian Emeritus Putnam at 85 still showed up every day at the office, though first Archibald MacLeish (in 1939) and then Evans (in 1945) had taken over the main job.

Before Putnam, the library was not interested in lending books; it preserved them for posterity. Putnam had a different idea: "We are ourselves a posterity." He began a system of lending books to other libraries, made the public welcome. Last year 669,740 readers used the library's 20 reading rooms, and 764 scholars researched and wrote books in its cubicles. A "faculty" of 25 fellows and 22 consultants (among them: Poet Karl Shapiro) constantly survey and "interpret" the library collections, tell the Librarian what to get and what to throw away, help visiting scholars. The library's strong suits (after U.S. life & letters): China, Latin America, music, prints and photographs.

Indians, Triplets, Atoms. The Library of Congress has become a storehouse for such U.S. treasures as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address. It is also in the business of publishing books, recording folk music and putting on concerts, distributing documentary films and textbooks.

Knowing where its money comes from, the library has not neglected its original mission: in the first three months of this year, every Senator and all but 13 Representatives consulted its legislative reference service, on subjects ranging from American Indians to atom bombs. The service digs up material for speeches, drafts legislation, sends experts for last-minute, pre-debate cram sessions in congressional boudoirs, and even handles letters from constituents for the legislators. Last year's prize congressional request: to write a poem to celebrate the birth of a taxpayer's triplets.

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