99% Invisible - 354- Weeding is Fundamental

Episode Date: May 15, 2019

Libraries get rid of books all the time. There are so many new books coming in every day and only a finite amount of library space. The practice of freeing up library space is called weeding. When the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library was damaged by an earthquake 1989, the argument over which books need to be weeded, and how they were chosen for removal, reached fever pitch. Weeding is Fundamental This episode also features “The Pack Horse Librarians Of Eastern Kentucky” produced by the Kitchen Sisters and mixed by Jim McKee. Subscribe the The Kitchen Sisters Present on Apple Podcasts and RadioPublic

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There's a common complaint that people don't read books anymore. But the truth is print book sales are up these days. Since 2013, sales of physical books have increased every year. At first people attributed this to the rise of adult coloring books, but even as their popularity has dwindled, book sales have risen. I'm talking about physical, old-fashioned books with paper pages full of words. We love them. The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges once said,

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books. And I kind of agree. That's reporter Pierce Gully, although he's not normally a reporter. I'm a graduate student in creative writing, and for the past two years, I've taught fiction writing to undergrads at the University of Virginia. I assign a lot of reading, but mostly it's in the form of photocopied pages. Don't worry, the print shop pays for the rights. I don't want to force my students to buy too much, but I always make sure I assign at least one physical book.

And I always try to pick something that's beautiful, one with a nice font, a lovely page design, a pleasing paper grain, and an intriguing cover. Don't get me wrong, the words inside matter too. But I think it's important for my students to have an object that accentuates the pleasure of the physical act of reading, and something they would hold on to after the class had ended. I personally toss hundreds of pages of radio scripts in the recycling bin every month, but I would have a really hard time throwing away a book. Once the pages have a spine, it's like they have a soul. It would feel wrong, like you're spitting on knowledge itself.

It's so hard to get rid of books. This is a story about books, and brace yourself how to get rid of them. And in the words of REM, it starts with an earthquake. It was the most Bay Area sporting event imaginable. The Oakland A's were playing the San Francisco Giants in the 1989 World Series. Coming into the third game on October 17th, 1989, the A's were in the lead. They had won the first two games.

Allowing Jose con Seiko to score, and he fails to get Dave Parker. But just as the third game was about to kick off, take it. Take it. I'll tell you what, we have it in the room. The TV broadcast cut out. The third game was about to kick off. The TV broadcast cut out. When the signal came back, it was no longer a baseball game.

These were the early minutes of the Loma Prieta earthquake, which struck near Santa Cruz. This was the first major earthquake ever to be broadcast live on National TV. We have a report of a person trapped in an elevator in Shelter Bay. Part of the Bay Bridge had been destroyed. There were fires, fallen buildings, widespread power outages. In all, there were 63 deaths and almost 4,000 injuries. But this is a story about what happened to the San Francisco Public Library after this earthquake and because of this earthquake.

The library suffered a lot of damage, especially on the higher floors. So one of the things about an earthquake is the effect of it is intensify the higher floors. On the upper levels of the library, floors had caved in. Jason Gibbs was a new librarian there, but he couldn't go to work for two months after the quake. It was too dangerous. He says bookshelves had collapsed sideways or fallen on their faces, and books lay in piles everywhere. Like the books had been tossed around by some angry force.

No one was injured at the San Francisco Public Library, but the earthquake dumped half a million books on the floor. Even after two months of repairs, the post-earthquake situation in the San Francisco Public Library was still pretty bad, library management determined that the stacks weren't safe and designated a new room for public browsing. Librarians curated a selection of books that they thought the public would most like to

read, and those books went in that room. But they realized along the way that not every book was going to fit. In other words, even this windowed down selection of books was too large for the available space. They needed to window it down even more. The earthquake should happen. We don't have this shelving anymore. We need to make space. That's a reasonable thing to do if you approach it in a thoughtful way. Because libraries do get rid of books. All the time, earthquake or not. Put simply, there are so many new books coming in every day, and only a finite amount of library space.

The practice of freeing up library space is called Weeding. If you think about it, it sounds ugly, but it is a really good description. That's Sharon McKellor, she supervises teen services at the Oakland Public Library. A bridge up and went down the street to visit her and see how she weeds. You have to weed your garden for like the flowers to grow. I'm not a gardener. And weeding is not just about holding the book in your hands and asking yourself if that book sparks joy.

But there's really, really specific guidelines. We're not just random like grabbing books off the shelf and putting them in the trash. The color and many other librarians that libraries all over the world weed their shelves using the same set of guidelines. And it has an excellent acronym. Musty. M-U-S-T-Y. M is for misleading.

Or factually inaccurate. You is for ugly. This one's a little ugly. It's like the cover is a little broken. It isn't the fact that it's so beat up and indication that it was loved. For sure. So if it's been checked out in the last three years, I'd probably actually buy a new copy of it.

If it hasn't been checked out in the last three years, I would probably consider it for withdrawal. S for Super Seated. Buy a new edition or a much better book. This would be like an old manual for Windows 98 or an outdated travel guide. These are the kinds of books that get shredded. And the last two letters are T for trivial and Y for your collection has no use for this book,

because they really want that musty acronym to work. Those last two, the T and the Y, trivial and your library has no need for this book, these are the tricky ones. They're not necessarily statements of fact, they're judgments of value. What's trivial to me might be very important to you and vice versa. But even here, these judgment calls are made by librarians who specialize in the relevant section based on circulation statistics. You just have to trust that your librarians are doing their best for the public. We want to be able to keep bringing you the most relevant, most current information,

and the only way to do that is by having room to do it. So the only way we can do that is by sometimes withdrawing the things that are not as useful anymore. All the sum sections according to the library guidelines are generally self-weeding. In other words, they disappear. Oh, people steal them. Yeah, certain sections of the library tend to disappear more than others. Books about marijuana, the Bible, and the calls are probably the biggest ones I can think of. But for the sections that do have to get weated, weeding is generally a touchy subject. The reason why is probably already clear to you.

People don't like the idea of books being thrown away. We like books a lot, and perhaps no one loves books more than librarians. There's a part of you that just winces every time you have to remove a book. I mean, your books are dear to us. Part of my maturing as a librarian is to get over that a little bit. Yes, weeding is normal and necessary. But after the 1989 earthquake, the San Francisco Public Library started weeding an unusual amount of books.

The librarians were told to move quickly, and they didn't use musty, or any sort of comparable system. The librarians were ordered to go through each collection book by book, and insert a slip of paper into each. Green, yellow, and red. Green meant the book had been checked out that year. Yellow meant the book had been checked out in the last two years, and red meant that it had been over two years since somebody had checked out that book. And the red books were the ones that were in potential danger. Danger because management had decided that the red books had to go. Compared to the careful consideration of musty, the system of the green, yellow,

and red cards is a rather blunt instrument. It's certainly not the only measure whether somebody has borrowed it within the last period of time. It felt rather arbitrary. And it wasn't really clear where the red card books were going to go, or if they would ever be used again. In Jason Gibbs's department, for example, the art and music collection, the discarded books got sent to an abandoned hospital owned by the city, because there was nowhere else to put them. Even battle-hardened librarians, like Gibbs, felt that the weeding was happening too

fast. You had librarians in different sections weeding furiously and not really communicating with each other. As a consequence, lots and lots of books were removed from the library. And no one quite knew how many, because no one was keeping track. It was ultimately, I think, a weakness of management from the top. Jason Gibbs is a pretty even-killed guy, but that's his diplomatic way of saying that the problems began with the head librarian at that time. A man named Kenneth Dowlin.

Within a year or two, you could be visiting the public library. Without leaving your home since this is now. In the years leading up to the 1989 earthquake, the San Francisco Public Library was starting to rethink its whole approach to books, and light of a new little thing called the Internet. Imagine plugging a computer like this one into any telephone in the world and being able to search any library in the world. And a big part of this pivot was when, in 1987, San Francisco hired Kenneth Dowlin as its new city librarian.

As San Francisco's city librarian, Ken Dowlin must make sure that two million people have access to 18 million books and other information on a limited budget. Dowlin was all about the internet. He had recently published a book called The Electronic Library, in which he argued that technology was changing the way people used information, and therefore changing the role of librarians. This is a clip of it. The internet web world, if you will, collapses time collapse this distance, and is collapsing cost.

If this sounds unremarkable, not to mention, a bit quaint, keep in mind that Dalin was saying all this stuff as early as 1984. He certainly understood at an early stage what the internet was going to do for communication. But there was a flipside to Dalin's visionary concept of digitally networked libraries. Some people felt that Dowlin had a distressing lack of concern for books. There was a sense that when it came to the physical collections, he just didn't have any interest. Dowlin was also overseeing the design of a new main library for the city of San Francisco,

which would complete his vision of the library of the future. The city is building a new $100 million library that is wired for computers as well as television. This new library would have twice as much space as the old one, but a big chunk of that space wasn't going to be for shelving books. Instead, much of the library's interior was devoted to an atrium in the middle of the building, which would rise 86 feet to a conical glass roof. Lots of librarians worried that this big empty atrium wouldn't leave a lot of space

for books. The atrium was evidence that books were not the sole priority of this building, and Dallin wasn't going to let a good crisis go to waste. Earthquake was a perfect excuse to do what he wanted to do anyway. Shrink the physical collection before the move to the new space. Dowlands administration started sending books to landfills. In the days after the quake, books are being sent out by the truckload, several times a week.

This is not normal library practice. 27 librarians signed a petition asking Kenneth Dowallin for the weeding to stop but that didn't work so Jason Gibbs and his colleagues decided to do something. In any institution you have a variety of people there are some people who will just kind of do whatever they're told and then there are other people who feel like they have a higher calling to the profession. Gibbs and librarians from several other departments felt that higher calling. They banded together and called themselves

the Gorilla librarians. Gorilla like the freedom fighter. Fighting for the Freedom 2.0 put little slips of red paper on books against the orders of management. Let's just say that we did not withdraw books because they hadn't circulated. We generally held on to the collection. Jason says that other guerrilla librarians snuck into the stacks and replaced red slips

with green ones, thereby designating the book as a circulating book and keeping it in the collection. The guerrilla librarians wanted to determine exactly how many books had been weeded and how many had been dumped, but nobody had any idea how many books were being taken away. And there was a risk that they'd never be able to find out the magnitude of this massive clearing. Because Kenneth Dallin decided to get rid of the physical card catalog, those files full of index cards chronically in each book.

The card catalog is an artifact, an artifact, but I will not support the views of the card index cards, chronically in each book. He was right about this. Already at that point, more than 90% of the nation's libraries had computerized their card catalogs. The earthquake itself allowed the San Francisco Public Library to modernize their catalog. With a disaster relief money they were granted, the library was able to get electronic catalog software. So now, logically, Dalin wanted to get rid of the physical card catalog,

which the library had stopped updating in 1991. San Francisco's old card catalog was not moved to the new library. It is locked up and inaccessible to the public. But this move to get rid of the old card catalog caused a surprisingly intense outcry from the guerrilla librarians, and it wasn't just a matter of nostalgia or personal preference. The physical card catalog said exactly what was in the library before all the arbitrary weeding. If a book was red tagged and weeded, it wouldn't be registered in the New Digital System. There would be no record it had ever existed at all.

And so the old card catalog was more than just a card catalog. The card catalog is evidence. Evidence of a purge. To get to the card catalog, the librarians pulled out their secret weapon, Nicholson Baker. I'm Nicholson Baker and I am a writer of books, fiction, nonfiction, and I became for a brief period of time a library activist. Baker is a writer of novels and essays that celebrate the minutia of daily life. And in 1994, Baker had gotten national attention for a New Yorker article about the disposal

of physical card catalogs. A practice that had become increasingly common, in which upset Baker a lot. The San Francisco Public Library had a very ornate, beautiful card catalog. That feeling that you have when your fingers would dance over the little cardboard pieces and you could tell a subject that was popular because the tops were darker and there's all sorts of you know tricks that were just fun. The Guerrilla librarians reached out to Baker for help. By now it was 1996 and the new library was nearing completion. The lost books, evidenced only by their locked-away card catalog, were teetering on the edge of disregard.

In their email to Nicholson Baker, the librarians wrote, you're the only one who can save it now. Part of me thought, oh God, this is going to get complicated. Oh, it would. At the time, Baker was living just across the Bay in Berkeley, so he made a formal request to inspect the card catalog. Kenneth Dallin denied that request. So Baker sued the library for access to the card catalog.

Never sue anything if you can avoid it and don't sue a library. This lawsuit took a while, and it was a bit of a mess, but it automatically classified the card catalog as a public document. Now the library had to keep it. And then Baker and the guerrilla librarians got to work in secret. And you know, you can imagine this with kind of mission and possible music going.

Yes, please. The guerrilla librarians snuck into off limits areas in the library. They took away books that were going to be destroyed. In other words, they stole them. The Gorilla's stockpiled hundreds and hundreds of library discards in their homes, in their cars, in their offices, and lockers, and boxes all in the hope that they would someday be returned to the library.

Nichols and Baker stole books, too. I was driving back and forth across the bay bridge with my car full of books that I had actually found in this place that was the deselection room. Baker ignored the staff only signs and walked right into the deselection room, the basement storage, all the places where the SFPL were storing books.

He picked up a bunch of books that had no match in the online catalog and found some real treasures. They had stored all these, you know, including 17th century, very valuable books and stuff was down there. Baker, along with the historian, began comparing the online catalog to the physical card catalog. As they cross-referenced the two lists, it turned out that a lot of books were missing. Way more than anyone had expected. Let me tell you what an opening day celebration today. At last, in April of 1996, the new main library opened its doors with Penache.

Talk about fanfare. Nothing less than a parachute jump into Civic Center with the man holding the symbolic key to the new library. And in May of 1996, about a month after the library opened, the guerrilla librarians organized an event in the library auditorium, where Baker delivered a speech stating what he had found. Baker contended that Dallin was responsible for a massive destruction of books, The systematic removal to a landfill of at least 200,000 volumes. And I just said it right there in the library itself. In a talk, and I think it really startled people. The phrase that got Baker the most attention

was when he called this mass disposal, a quote, hate crime directed at the past. This really upset library management. And it became this kind of minor dust up in San Francisco. Word had begun to spread that Baker was writing another story for The New Yorker, one specifically about this whole weeding debacle. So the president of the Library Commission

wrote to The New Yorker's editor at that time and attempted to kill the piece by discrediting Baker. It didn't work and Baker's article came out in October of 1996. It was called The Author Versus the Library. A current New Yorker article called it the Great Book Purge, claiming more than 100,000 rare and one of a kind books were hauled to the dump. And then things got a little out of hand. The library hit back, condemning Baker for accusing them of a hate crime, and saying that he misunderstood the problem. They also tried to discredit him because of some bad math he had reported.

It turns out one of the grill librarians had messed up the measurements of the old library shelves. In fact, the new library had much more space for books than the old one. It was a very bad era. It was very embarrassing. Although it didn't change the fact that the library had taken so many books to the dump, then both sides started lobbying insults at each other as the local and national press piled on. One paper compared Baker to the Unibummer, it was basically an in-log Twitter feud.

I wasn't prepared to be part of it. I didn't know that I was getting into that, kind of a battle. It was really ugly. And even from Guerrilla Library and Jason Gibbs' standpoint, the whole weeding controversy got a little blown out of proportion. It probably was not as horrible as Nicholson Baker made it out, but it was horrible enough. Meanwhile, the new library itself had already been built, and it was, judging from the influx of visitors, a success. As charges and countercharges fly, three times as many visitors stream through the

doors of the new library, an indication that some book lovers welcome the change. and indication that some book lovers welcome the change. Some of those books saved by the guerrilla librarians and boxes and lockers were transferred back into the collection. All the books in Jason Gibbs' department, Heart and Music, made it back. But he says that many of the other books didn't. They stayed gone, and many of them probably got discarded. Nicholson Baker says he still has some of the books he stockpiled. Given the painful experience of the controversy, the library wasn't really interested in reshelfing

them. But I think to the day, the controversy wasn't only about what to do with old books. It was a debate about what books are. Are they beautiful objects that we can smell and touch and collect? Or are they eternal sources of knowledge accessible to everyone in the ether? Well, and it's both. In a given research quest, you and I might want to find out what is in a book in the fastest possible way. Well, nowadays it's miraculous. Sometimes you want the words. Sometimes you want more than the words you want. The words laid out on the page.

Clearly, Nicholson Baker can see Dowlands' perspective. But Baker maintains that we shouldn't give up on the printed page. His argument, and the public battle around it in the 90s, was a big reason why the San Francisco Public Library totally overhauled their collections policies. They made it a policy, but if a library branch is considering weeding a last copy of some book, they must send that copy to a subject specialist who will decide if it can be weeded or not. And for the books that do have to go, the San Francisco Public Library developed a community redistribution program to make sure the extra copies of popular books can live on somewhere else. We distribute them to schools and city colleges and prisons.

And strangely enough, one of the biggest changes to the modern practice of weeding is something that Kenneth Dalin himself helped establish. Online communication between libraries. You know, in an ideal world, you might want to have every book, but we just don't have the shelf space for every book, so you rely on somebody else's shelves to have every book, but we just don't have the shelf space for every book, so you rely on somebody else's shelves to hold the book. Some libraries spell musty with an eye and an e at the end, instead of a y, for misleading, ugly, superseded, trivial, irrelevant, or elsewhere, like if a copy of the book is at another

library nearby. Jason Gibbs at the SFPL and Sharon McHeller across the Bay at the Oakland Public Library can now communicate with each other instantly so they can share book space and make different volumes available to readers in both cities. And this has huge implications

for what gets weeded and why. In this respect, Kenneth Dallin was very right. He certainly failed in terms of managing the collection, but he succeeded to the extent of bringing us into the wider network of libraries online. And yet still, because of Baker's 1996 lawsuit, the San Francisco Public Library has kept the old card catalog. They are legally required to. The card catalog was a way of holding on onto the memory of a quarter of a million books

that they'd gotten rid of. Those cabinets full of cards are still there in storage. Practically barricaded by all kinds of other supplies, but I'll go down and visit every now and then. Just to say hi? Yeah, we'll just just to know what's there. After this weeding debacle, Nicholson Baker became even more vested in philosophies and practices of archiving, and went along to publish a book that touched on all this, called Double Fold. It looks at these events in the much broader context of the digitization of libraries, and this book is now commonly assigned in master's programs in library science. We read the Nicholson Baker book in library school.

That's Sharon McKellar again from the Oakland Public Library. She says that the debacle at the San Francisco Public Library has become a case study about weeding. Why we do weeding and how we should weed and what could be done, you know, how to do it well and what to avoid and all that kind of stuff. And when it's done well with care and consideration, weeding isn't so bad at all. For me weeding is fun. It's a chance to really touch the books and see how they're doing and see what people

are interested in. That's what all this comes down to. It's what people are interested in. Weeding isn't just about what to cut. It's also about what to keep. It's about what the public wants to read. Your voice does matter and we're maintaining a collection for the public and for the people who use it.

And so every time you check out a book from the library, you are casting a vote to your local librarian, Roving the Stacks, to keep this title in circulation for everyone to read. Coming up, more radical librarians doing good in the world. This time, on Horseback, after this. The kitchen sisters are Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, two audio documentary pine ears who are like the godmothers of the radio topia collective. You can hear their stories regularly on NPR and we're lucky to have their podcast called the Kitchen Sisters Presents on radio topia. The current series they're working on is called The Keepers.

It's all about the guardians of history, the eccentric individuals who take it upon themselves to protect the free flow of information and preserve some part of our cultural heritage. And when we were producing our story this week about the preservation of the SFPL's book collections, I thought a lot about the Kitchen Sisters Keeper series and this story in particular, and I wanted to share it with you. This episode is called The Pack Horse Librarians of Eastern Kentucky. My name is Mary Ruth Schuder, leader, I'm 97 years old. We travel on the horses riding down in the mountains of Kentucky, very poor country. I was delivering books to the children. They were stubborn. It was one of the works of Post-It Rose.

That's Ruth, one of the last of the Pack Horse librarians. Today, episode two in the Keepers series, stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors, and historians, the kitchen sisters present the pack-horse librarians of Eastern Kentucky. Our problem is to put to work three and one half million and probably the first men and women,

one now on the relief road. In the depression, those horrible years after 1929, the Appalachians were hit so hard, coal mines were being shut down, lots of people in dire poverty. Eleanor Roosevelt decided to help create projects that would specifically benefit women and children. My name is Heather Henson, author of that book, Women, Eleanor Roosevelt, felt very strongly about the Pack Horse Library Project. If the women are willing to do this, of course it's going to help them, neighbor. I think we'll win out. The Pack Horse Librarians, mostly women, rode circuits. Round 18 to 20 miles, they followed animal paths, fence lines. I'm Kathy Appell. I co-wrote downcouching creek, the Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky. They would stuff their saddlebags or a pillowcase with books and strike out by horsebacker

mule to provide library service to the remote areas of the Kentucky mountains going into the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky was going back in time. No running water, no electricity, very few schools. Families live way up in the mountains. A creek bed, that would be the road. We forwarded crazy creek, take the torches across, got ready with, way up to your. You don't get afraid. You do your job and that was it. You had to be hearty. Being able to clamber up the side of a mountain on a horse, you had to know the roads and creek beds. My name is Eliza McGraw. I wrote a story about the Pack Horse Librarians for the Smithsonian. One county would start a

Pack Horse Library. Another county would hear about it. They would want one. Then that community would ask the WPA to let them hire carriers. Many of them were women between 25 and 35. There weren't people coming in from outside to take jobs from people who were in the community. They were local women familiar with and the people who wanted to read and what they might want to read. My grandmother, she was a horseback librarian.

She was involved with the WPA because that was the workforce of the time. Because Eastern Kentucky you either worked or you starved a death. I'm Rick Overby, grandson of Grace Cautill Lucas. She would ride that horse, carriage trails, mudholes, or going back up into these haulers. She didn't own the horse. She rented it for 50 cents a week. She would arrange the books and a pack that would ride behind her on the saddle She would haul around up to a hundred and not only books but magazines of the time and newspaper Grace was a young mother with two small children her husband Left in the depression a lot of men did that

I finally left home when I was two and my sister was about to my old name's Richard over me and on the son of Grace Carl Lucas, my mother, where she'd get up every morning about 430. Feed me and my sister and take us to my grandma grandma until she got home at night. Then she would feed us and put us to bed and start all over the next day. Dollar a day. She was glad to have it. She bought groceries and things that we'd never had before.

The only thing the federal government provided was the salary for the carriers. My name is Jean Schmitzer, co-author, down-cut Shin Creek, Path Course Library of Eastern Kentucky. Leighna Noff's here, one of the leaders in the Kentucky Library Association, really goes to bat for this project. She started something called the Penny Fund. It asked for all of the state parent-teacher associations to donate a penny. Children donated pennies, one little school collected enough pennies to make a dollar and they sent the dollar in.

This being the depression, it was hard for people to give up anything. I mean, even a penny drive was taxing. As people from all over the United States learned about this, they would donate cast-off magazines, used books, Swiss family Robinson, Heidi. Better Homes and Gardens, National Geographic, Popular Mechanics. By 1937, they'd gotten 60,000 books. The librarians would go through these ragged magazines and dilapidated books, and they would cannibalize them, deconstruct them, remix them, and create these new scrapbooks.

I'm Jason Vance, librarian, middle Tennessee State University. Library Manual for WPA Pack Horse Library Projects. The following scrapbooks have been found useful. Recipes, mountain ballads, Kentucky history, odd names, articles on a particular subject, dogs, spain, Nazis, model airplanes. Carriers would collect recipes and patterns for quilts from people on the round. Put them together into a scrapbook and share county to county. In 1940, there were 2,582 of these scrapbooks. They became part of the circulating collection.

The Pack Horse librarians were creating these cultural artifacts, snapshots of life and Eastern Kentucky during the Great Depression. We were so happy to get a book, kick of the death. We always sat under the big old chestnut tree. They didn't know how to read. So I read it again so we could understand this. Kentucky in 1930, a literacy in those southeastern counties was anywhere from 19 to 31%.

Some people were originally a little bit leery of the Pacthorse librarians because reading was seen as sort of a leisure activity. When you're trying to get this corn hood and work done on a small farm, somebody can't be sitting with their feet up reading. This was just frivolous. There was a lot of illiteracy there.

The pack-horse librarians would sit and read to people at the houses, then mount back up and get going. They were really houffing it to get done before dark. Grace was out on a winter day and it started to sleep ice falling out of the sky. Normally she might have stopped at one of the households along the way and spent the night, but the last house on her circuit was a family that she knew if she stayed there, that they would feed her, and likely that would mean nothing for the kids.

So, she just pushed on. Before she could get home, she had to cross a creek. The water was high enough, it covered her stirrups. By the time she got home, her feet were encased in ice. Grisha would ride that horse and he was going through the creeks. She had mountains to climb and feathers to go through. The program ended in 1943. We're in the war. We're pulling out of this depression. The library program was no longer funded by the federal government, the salaries for carriers.

But 1954, the state of Kentucky starts a bookmobile program. In Alaska, there are bush-plane librarians. In Africa, there's camel librarians. In Louisiana, there were floating librarians, pulling flatboats in the bios. In Thailand, they're using elephants. In Zimbabwe, they're using donkeys and Mongolia. They're using horse-drawn wagons.

In our mind, we think of librarians as the quintessential Marion, the librarian. Somebody who puts the books back on the shelves, does, and makes sure that everything's tidy. Librarians are a determined bunch. They're far more subversive than that. The pack-horse librarians of Eastern Kentucky was produced by the kitchen sisters and mixed

by Jim McKee. You can hear more from the Keepers series on their podcast, The Kitchen Sisters Present from Radio Topia. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Pierce Kelly and Edited by Avery Trophman, Mixing Tech Production by Sheree Fusef, Music by Sean Rial. Katie Mingle is the senior producer Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes senior editor Delaney Hall, Joe Rosenberg, Emmett Fitzgerald, Terran Mousso, Vivian Lee, Sophia Kletzger, and me Roman Mars.

Ken Dallin did not respond to our various requests for an interview on the San Francisco Public Library story, but a very special thanks to all the librarians who helped on context and background, especially Shelley Cocking and Mindy Linesky, both from the San Francisco Public Library. Thanks as well to Orrin Rudowsky. We are a project of 91.7KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at

Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org, or on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But the full archive of all things 99% invisible is at 99PI.org. Radio Tapio from PRX.