Day 1 - Fourth floor of library must be cleared

According to one of the library employees, the plan is to clear the entire fourth floor of the library. The fourth floor consists of the stacks containing law books, history books, art books, music books, text books, language books, biographies etc.

By 4:00 p.m. today, polite and friendly immigrant labor was being used to take the law collection to the dumpsters out back. In addition, one young man was tearing the backs off of books dating back to before 1900. Presumably, the plan is to shred the paper in the books, but not the boards, which might jam the machine. The library employee we spoke to said she had nothing to do with it. For 17 years, so she said, no one had "weeded" the collection, and they had plenty of books downstairs. As far as she was concerned, she was just doing her job.

Among the finds were the memoirs of Napoleon, collections of Stephen Foster songs and southern spirituals, as well as a translation of Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelungen" with turn-of-the-century pictures (backs had already been ripped off of the music collections), lots of histories of America dating back to the first half of this century, as well as biographies, letters of Robert Frost, a 1961 hardback first-edition Emma Goldman biography, history of the Civil Rights movement, history of the Declaration of Independence, language books, a dictionary of homeric Greek and one of 17th century French, histories of Alabama and its citizens and much, much more...solid hardbacks with gilt lettering and illustrations.

A few professors who had been alerted seemed quite upset and were collecting a few volumes for their own professional and personal use in advance of the shredder. According to one report a Professor of English picked a volume of lost and forgotten African-American literature out of a dumpster.