Remarks on the Legacy of Joseph Cali
For Joe
I've known Joe for about twelve years, which makes me a relative newcomer to the world of the Olive Kettering Library and the cult of Joe Cali. I first met Joe in the early summer of 1994. I was a graduate student at Ohio State, specializing in Victorian literature and culture when I got a surprise phone call informing me that there was an opportunity to teach at Antioch College for a year. Not having any clothes appropriate to a job interview, I borrowed what I hoped was a professional-ish (but not too schoolmarmish) dress from my friend the Unitarian minister and drove down from Columbus for an on-campus visit which turned out to include a tour of the library.
I distinctly remember entering the Olive Kettering for the first time, and the strong feeling of walking into a time warp. I was at that time well-acquainted with two major research libraries: the Ohio State University main library, with its cavernous, deserted stacks, and the brusque, aggressively impersonal British Library (and I mean aggressive--not only are all users subjected to a search each time they exit the library for a cup of tea, but in those years, we also received a thorough pat-down on the way in, due to the fear of bomb-plantings by the Irish Republican Army.) But in 1994 the Olive Kettering looked, I suppose, pretty much as it had in the 50's. The first floor was light and open--no barriers, no guards, no bomb-sniffing dogs. More surprisingly, there were no visible computers, nothing was on-line and one checked out books with the same kind of trusting write-your-name and stamp-the-card system used by my public library branch when I was ten. (This low-tech-approach turned out to have its advantages--the following summer, in the wake of violent storms that knocked out electricity all over Yellow Springs, the library continued to function as if nothing had happened. It was just a bit darker than usual). Books were not hidden away to be ordered through some kind of arcane procedure but were readily available for all to borrow—and, of course, to steal—which I suspect happened quite a bit. The periodicals section struck me as remarkably inclusive for an undergraduate library. I appreciated its eclecticism, noting the feminist art journals from the Seventies alongside the most staid, old-school literary and historical reviews. Newspapers and publications such as The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement lived in giant, casual, semi-chronological piles at the rear of the first floor. Down in the literature stacks, I noticed that musty collections of nineteenth-century essays in their original binding rubbed elbows with the latest literary criticism. I was astonished by the many valuable old books shelved in plain sight. By the time I learned that the Olive Kettering Library has an almost full run of Blackwood's Edinburgh Review back to the 1840's, and the Penny Magazine from the 1830's, I was in a Victorianist's heaven. I couldn't believe that a library like this could exist in these post-modern times. As I was browsing about, a crotchety librarian with a quick step and a proprietary air came up to show me the library--his library. By the end of our first conversation I felt that I had found a kindred spirit.
Over the years I came to realize that the Olive Kettering is Joe Cali's achieved vision of what an academic library should be. The holdings of the Olive far exceed those of most comparable liberal arts colleges, and the quirky, unpredictable nature of these holdings make the place an absolute treasure trove. I’ve always thought that the size, continuity, and variety of the Olive’s collections are much more impressive than we have a right to expect given our tumultuous history and chronic lack of resources. The remarkably high quality of the Antioch Library is entirely due to Joe's bulldog determination to maintain a research-level academic facility despite tremendous odds. Just since I've been at Antioch, we've had six College Presidents, seven or so Deans of Faculty, and at least ten major budget crises. There have been three curricular overhauls and we’ve moved from quarters to trimesters to now some semblance of semesters. But no matter how chaotic the campus, no matter what earthquakes rocked the foundations beneath us, the library--Joe's library—remained steady. Solid as the Rock of Gibraltar. Open seven days a week, weekdays nine AM to eleven PM. This facility has survived, and survived intact, thanks to the underpaid and at times even unpaid work of a supremely dedicated library faculty and staff—and especially by Joe himself. The relative stability of the Olive Kettering for so many years is in fact one of Joe Cali’s greatest gifts to the College.
To state that Joe was a professional completely committed to his calling is only to state the obvious. He lived quite simply, and was unusual in that he had no interest in the pursuit of wealth or luxury or recognition. Passionate about every aspect of librarianship, he was never narrow, and would regale anyone who would listen with stories of Toscanini’s accomplishments and the latest in men’s (and women’s) basketball, not to mention his opinions on such topics as the inflated salaries in higher education, Italian food, General Motor’s cars, the TV show Perry Mason, and of course the state of the College. Joe was a very private person, and so I can only guess, but I felt that he was, fundamentally, a happy one. He truly believed in the librarian's mission of the preservation and circulation of human knowledge. I never detected a trace of doubt about the relevance of his work, as, for example, scholars always have--but he knew his work was worthwhile. I think this supreme confidence that he was on the side of the angels was an important part of what made him so irresistible. He set his own high, nearly superhuman standards, and he actually lived up to them. He performed his labors of love every day because he genuinely wanted to serve future Antioch students and researchers, but also, I suspect, because he had a Platonic ideal in his head of what an academic library should be, and he was driven--it was his nature--to fulfill that ideal. Not only did Joe have the quintessential academic library in his sights, he also envisioned the quintessential library user; as he wrote in a letter to a fellow OPAL librarian: "I believe any library has an obligation to serve genius types, even if these books are used only by them. It is more important for an Einstein to have available a book which may be used only once, even though we also have an obligation to serve the average library patron."
This approach to librarianship speaks volumes (pun intended) about Joe. He was a bit of an elitist, and a lot of curmudgeon. He put no stock in the notion of college education as customer-service--education at a private liberal arts college was a privilege, and students ought to prove themselves worthy. What happened to be popular with students or administrators at the moment was irrelevant to the maintainance of a liberal arts curriculum. He distrusted gimmicks and gadgets, cant and quick-fixes. And, a consummate professional himself, Joe often had little patience with those whose work ethic was lacking or who he perceived to be incompetent. His skeptical gaze was frequently directed at college and university administration, on whoever was behind the latest fads and trends in higher education, and on his gleeful all-purpose target, 'the idea boys.'
In many respects Joe was waging a one-man war against short-term thinking. He therefore wisely remained skeptical of many so-called recent 'improvements' in the management of libraries. I here refer you to Nicholson Baker's eye-opening book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, for a discussion of the ostensibly space-saving trend of destroying newspapers and old books, a trend which Joe always resisted. As a result, Antioch has a remarkably lightly-weeded--many would say overgrown--collection. The Olive Kettering finally went on-line in 1998, but that did not mean, as it did for so many academic libraries, that this was an opportunity to clean house. Joe understood the qualitative difference between an original artifact and a decontextualized excerpt reproduced on a computer screen, microfilm, or microfiche. Similarly, he preferred to retain the whole article over predigested summaries or abstracts. He was committed to the Sisyphean task of conserving the past as completely as possible, and in its original forms, whether this past was embodied in the (still extant) card catalog or in the entire run of a particular newspaper or in every published edition of a particular textbook. In letters of advice Joe wrote to OPAL colleagues on the subject of culling reference materials, he invariably recommends the most conservative approach possible. He refers to the process of weeding as "dangerous" and "not infallible," and, characteristically, insists that "the historical value of these older reference volumes cannot be overestimated."
I’m not implying that Joe amassed historical materials for the sake of collecting itself, because this was not his perspective at all. He thought like a librarian, and sought to ensure the accessibility of the past for the widest range of questioners and researchers and potential Einsteins. This presumes a projection into futurity, a confidence in the intelligence and curiosity of future generations which belies a mere antiquarianism. Nor did he live in the past in the sense of dwelling in any prolonged way on Antioch's past glories: frequent grousing about Antioch's post-60's decline never meant that he flagged in his efforts on behalf of present and future Antiochians, just as his gruff, irascible bookside manner was always undercut by his frequent acts of kindness.
I can speak to many of those acts personally--Joe and the library staff were from the first incredibly welcoming to me, then a young and not-always-too-organized visiting one-year faculty member. They always knew exactly what I was teaching, approved, and appreciated it, in a place where the other faculty and the administration are generally so busy that they remain largely unaware of such matters. Joe was happy to order just about any book or film that caught my eye, no matter how obscure. The staff went out of their way to find (at that time) hard to get novels from the Caribbean for my courses in Postcolonial Studies and rare Victorian self-help stories for my dissertation. And the staff of the O.K. literally got me through the research and writing of my doctoral dissertation in too many ways to enumerate here. These abundant kindnesses were not just professional, but personal. I knew that if my truck would not start that I could call the library and Joe or Duffy would come pick me up so I'd make it to class on time (Duffy listens to gospel music in the car, while Joe blasted his beloved Beethoven or Brahms at high volumes). Joe lent me books on classical music. In a recent conversation, he expressed his concern about the effects of upcoming budget cuts on the staff and their families. One of Joe's final acts on the night of his death was to wrap up four copies of Studies in the Literary Imagination and leave them for Duffy to deliver to me the next day (post mortem, as it turned out).
I feel Joe's absence acutely. I wish we could be enlivened by the spark of his presence for Antioch’s next one hundred and fifty years. I take some comfort, however, in the fact that he died working at what he loved, at what gave him real satisfaction, until his last moments. Joe lived a very full life which directly touched and bettered the lives and educational experience of thousands of people. His influence on innumerable scholars and artists will continue to be felt in a myriad of fields. Perhaps most astounding is the love and loyalty and respect he inspired across generations of Antiochians. Honestly, I don't think any of us could hope for a more meaningful legacy than that. Yet Joe Cali also bequeathed us his life work--the Olive Kettering's marvelously unweeded one hundred-and-fifty-year-old collection. What we do with this priceless inheritance is now up to us. I sincerely hope we will value it as he did, that we will continue to maintain it and learn from it and pass it on entire to future generations. For my part, I say: Long Live Weeds.