Kamkin: a reality check

[Jared Ingersoll]

Dear Seelangs,

When Kamkin closed up shop in New York in the spring of 2000, I spent
several days combing through their basement store room. While I did find a
little interesting material for Columbia's libraries, it is not an effort I
think would be worthwhile to repeat, nor would I recommend other librarians
steering established collections go out of their way to do so. Except where
a library is interested in starting from scratch, the materials I saw are
either exceptionally common or of exceptionally little potential interest
to scholarly researchers.

To begin with, the stock was in a stunning state of disarray. The basement
warehouse in New York contained miles of shelves filled two and three
volumes deep with standard Soviet and classic Russian literature in many
fields, mostly covered with up to an inch of dust. There was no order to
the arrangement: for instance, botany and chemistry might be interfiled
with architecture and philosophy. There were often hundreds of copies of a
single edition; hundreds of unopened cartons of books; in one place a wall
of books about thirty feet long, eight to ten feet high and at least six
feet deep. Volumes were bent, warped, broken in every imaginable way. This
was a nightmare of uncontrolled inventory. A considerable amount of the
material was contaminated with mold, and therefore actually dangerous to
handle.

After my gleaning, I believe that Kamkin cherry-picked some of the
remainder, but about 150,000 volumes ultimately were sent to landfill. It
was a shame, but it was not a tremendous loss to scholarship, to the
preservation of recorded knowledge, or to Russian culture. This is not
stuff that most libraries should be interested in. It is a very large
quantity of very low value material that has accumulated almost
accidentally over decades due to remarkably inept inventory management.

Many in our field have a tendency to regard a book, any book, as a sacred
object. I am a librarian, and could not have become one unless I shared
this fetish to some degree. But, this fetish may tempt many into the
impression that the destruction of so many books is something akin to a
genocide. I urge you to resist this impression and remember that this is
the stuff that they simply couldn't sell for so many decades, even at very
low prices. While this destruction is a shame, it is not a tragedy. The
burgeoning dumpsters outside the Montgomery County incinerators do not
really present a great opportunity to our libraries.

Jared Ingersoll
Slavic Librarian
Columbia University Libraries

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