It’S Back To Basics, Stamping The Books

In Stephen King’s “The Langoliers,” the characters fly into an airport in the past to discover that the sandwiches are stale and the beer flat because time and the people have moved on. They barely escape the langoliers, the creatures that eat the scenery of the past. Eventually, the humans fly safely into an airport in the future, where the scenery is all finished, waiting for the people.

The book’s underlying premise is interesting. It says that the scenery we enact our human drama upon appears before we do. Then, we do the drama and the props are dismantled as we move from the present to the future. Timing is everything. Stay too long in the past and the langoliers will eat you and the scenery. Arrive in the future too early and the stage isn’t ready yet.

“The Langoliers” came to mind this week, in the wake of a recent Spokane Public Library decision. The library has returned to the old way of reminding patrons when their books are due. Library workers will once again stamp due dates directly onto the books. They had tried a modern, more efficient way, a way used by many big libraries. They gave patrons a computer-printed receipt listing their books and due dates. Their intentions were logical. The receipts saved time by shortening the wait in line. They also saved wear and tear on the arms and hands of some library workers who complained of repetitive-motion injuries.

But customers hated it. Receipts were lost amid stacks of books. While reading, customers would come across slips from patrons past, due dates from weeks and months before, receipts not yet eaten by the langoliers. And maybe something else was going on. Maybe patrons missed that sound of hand-stamping. Libraries can sometimes feel like sacred places. The rituals are important. The librarian gently takes the books from your hands and then stamps the due dates. The sound is familiar, comforting. It’s a ritual worth waiting in line for.

The library made a wise decision, returning to the old way, because unless a technology works for most of the people most of the time, it won’t catch on. Timing is everything. More than a decade ago, a company tried placing early fax-type machines in building lobbies. No one used them. The machines disappeared, to reappear a few years later, smaller and in the offices.

Library workers frustrated by the decision should be patient. Soon, someone will come up with a better way to remind patrons, superior to hand-stamping and more convenient than computer receipts. The solution lies in the future; the set just isn’t built yet. But it will be.