Kamkin: a reality check

[Mark Yoffe]

I have to wholeheartedly concur with Jared. For libraries that were Kamkin's
customers for years there is really little need rushing to Rockville in an
attempt to load up with their leftover books. Among 2 million items there
certainly can be treasures that some of our collections can benefit from, but
finding them can become a full-time job, a luxury not many of us can afford.
Jared's observation, that much of Kamkin's inventory is
"the stuff that they simply couldn't sell for so many decades, even at very low

prices" seems to be a very sober assessment of the situation.
Besides Kamkin is not the only source of standard Soviet era publications. I am

sure that many of us are approached on regular bases by retired or retiring
faculty who offer to donate their private collections, that were mostly build
through the years of purchases from Kamkin. It is unfortunate fact that in the
end many of the items from such donations eventually end up it the way Kamkin's

books are destined to end up at this point. It is a pity to see libraries
playing role of Goodwill Industries wasting time and money on sifting
through the items that we mostly already have and then sending people's
discards off for pulping.
As to contemporary Russian literature Kamkin's approach to it even after 1991
just slightly deviated from the puritanism of the Soviet era. And in comparison

to alive and vibrant "virtual" and real bookstores in Brooklyn their offerings
were offensively unimpressive and lacking imagination.
Mark

Jared Ingersoll wrote:

> 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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--
Mark Yoffe, Ph.D.
Curator, International Counterculture Archive
Slavic Librarian
Gelman Library, George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052
Phone: 202 994-6303
Fax: 202 994-1340
HTTP: gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~yoffe

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