99% Invisible
Hosted by Roman Mars
Original podcast
The fight over weeding books from the library.
7,544 words · 20 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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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 Kelly, 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. And 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 R.E.M., 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.
But just as 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.
This is Cheryl Jennings in the Channel 7 newsroom. As you may have noticed, our power was knocked out.
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.
That's one of the things about an earthquake is the effect of it is intensified the higher up you go.
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 winnowed-down selection of books was too large for the available space. They needed to winnow it down even more.
The earthquake just happened. 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's, it sounds ugly, but it is a really good description.
That's Sharon McKeller. She supervises teen services at the Oakland Public Library. Avery Trupman 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.
There's really, really specific guidelines. We're not just randomly grabbing books off the shelf and putting them in the trash.
McKeller and many other librarians at libraries all over the world weed their shelves using the same set of guidelines. And it has an excellent acronym, MUSTY.
M is for misleading.
Or factually inaccurate.
U is for ugly.
This one's a little ugly. It's like the cover is a little broken.
Isn't the fact that it's so beat up an 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 superseded.
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.
Although some 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 occult are probably the biggest ones I can think of.
But for the sections that do have to get weeded, 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, you know, 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 gonna 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-keeled 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.
We're going to hear it too. You could be visiting the public library without leaving your home.
In the years leading up to the 1989 earthquake, the San Francisco Public Library was starting to rethink its whole approach to books in 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 Dowling must make sure that 2 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, collapses distance, and is collapsing cost.
If this sounds unremarkable, not to mention a bit quaint, keep in mind that Dowlin 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 flip side to Dowlin's visionary concept of digitally networked libraries. Some people felt that Dowlin had a distressing lack of concern for books.
There was this sense that when it came to the physical collections, he didn't, 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 Dowlin wasn't going to let a good crisis go to waste. The earthquake was a perfect excuse to do what he wanted to do anyway: shrink the physical collection before the move to the new space.
Dowlin's administration started sending books to landfills. In the days after the quake, books were being sent out by the truckload several times a week. This is not normal library practice.
Twenty-seven librarians signed a petition, asking Kenneth Dowlin 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 to not 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 Gorilla 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 Gorilla 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 Dowlin decided to get rid of the physical card catalog, those files full of index cards chronicling each book.
The card catalog is an artifact. But I will not support the view that the card catalog is a working technology to help people find books anymore. It is not, and most of the libraries in the world know that and have moved on.
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 the disaster relief money they were granted, the library was able to get electronic catalog software. So now, logically, Dowlin 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 and 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. There's all sorts of 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 are the only one who can save it now."
Part of me thought, "Oh, God, this is gonna 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 Dowlin 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 Impossible 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 guerrillas stockpiled hundreds and hundreds of library discards in their homes, in their cars, in their offices, in lockers, in boxes, all in the hope that they would someday be returned to the library.
Nicholson 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 de-selection room.
Baker ignored the "staff-only" signs and walked right into the de-selection 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, including 17th century, very valuable books and stuff was down there.
Baker, along with a 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 Panache.
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 Dowlin 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 guerrilla 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 error. 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 lobbing insults at each other as the local and national press piled on. One paper compared Baker to the Unabomber. It was basically an analog 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 librarian Jason Gibbs's 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 streamed through the doors of the new library, an indication that some book lovers welcome the change.
Some of those books saved by the guerrilla librarians in boxes and lockers were transferred back into the collection. All the books in Jason Gibbs' department, Art 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 reshelving them.
But at the end of 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 Dowlin's 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 that 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 Dowlin 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 hold the book.
Some libraries spell musty with an I 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 McKellar 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 Dowlin 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 to 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 in by all kinds of other supplies, but I'll go down and visit it every now and then.
Just to say hi?
Yeah, well, just to know it's there.
After this weeding debacle, Nicholson Baker became even more vested in philosophies and practices of archiving and went on 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 weed and how we should weed and what could be done, 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.
That story originally aired in 2019. It was reported by Pierce Gelli and edited by Avery Trufelman. Original tech production by Sharif Youssef, remixed by Martine Gonzalez. Ken Dowlin did not respond to our interview requests, but a huge thanks to the librarians who helped us with context and background, especially Shelley Cocking and Mindy Lenetsky, both from the San Francisco Public Library. Thanks as well to Orin Rodolfsky. After the break, the dictionary in reverse. Stay with us.
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Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know that it was 99% invisible. It's the best way to support the show. Finding books in the library is now pretty simple. You can go up to a computer, you type in the name of the book or the author, the computer will tell you where you can find it in the stacks, if it's checked out or not, how many holds there are, whether branches might have copies. But before computers, there were card catalogs, massive filing cabinets of index cards. For every book, librarians would have to make a card for the drawers that were sorted
by title, and then another card for the drawers that were sorted by author. And for nonfiction books, a couple more cards for the drawers that were sorted by subject. Every time you wanted to sort the information in a new way, you needed to create an entirely new index. Our senior editor, Jelani Hall, has a story about a particularly niche sorting method. Why don't you start with who you are, actually?
Okay, yeah, so I am Delaney Hall and I am a producer and senior editor on staff.
All right, so what is your story today?
Well, first, I'm gonna introduce you to Peter Sekulowski.
My levels are okay. Okay, so I'm not too loud, I'm not pop. I try to not pop my peas, but I get excited. I'll try not to talk too fast.
And the stuff that Peter gets really excited about, the stuff that makes him pop his peas and talk really fast, is language, because he's the editor-at-large at Merriam-Webster, and he's a lexicographer.
Lexicographer is a person who compiles and edits dictionaries. That's the old definition. The great Samuel Johnson, the lexicographer in London in the mid-18th century, very famously defined a lexicographer as "a harmless drudge."
And Peter, he actually said that they use that term affectionately now, as like a kind of badge of honor. They like to be called harmless drudges, so don't worry about insulting them if you want to use that term.
So what is a harmless drudge like Peter do all day at Merriam-Webster?
Well, from his description, it sounds like they work in an office that is very, very quiet, silent, basically, and it's filled with these massive steel filing cabinets. And I've kind of been imagining it like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark at the end where the man is pushing that crate through a huge warehouse. But instead of stacks of enormous crates, it's filled with metal filing cabinets. And those metal filing cabinets are filled with index cards.
As far as I know, it's the largest body of collected evidence of any language in the world. It's 15 or 16 million index cards with a word in use, that is to say, in context, with its full bibliography, so we know who wrote it and where it was published and when it was published.
And so that is the work of lexicographers. They're the keepers of that word history. And for a long time, before computers came along, this is how they did it, with these massive systems of filing cabinets.
There's the file for the phonetician, for the pronunciation editor. There's the file for our dating editors, who do the etymological dating. So it's a place full of file cabinets.
But this isn't actually a story about how the Merriam-Webster offices are filled with filing cabinets.
It's not, okay.
No, it's not. It's a story about one special filing cabinet in their office. Okay, so here's where it gets really interesting. So one day, Peter was wandering through these endless rows of filing cabinets, and he came across this one.
And one of them simply said "backward index" on it.
And so he opens up the cabinet that says "backward index"?
And I realize what it was, which was, you know, all of the headwords of the unabridged dictionary, some 315,000 separate index cards with only one word on them, and it was a headword typed backwards.
And so the headword is the entry in the dictionary? That's the first word, that's the word in question?
Right, yeah, exactly. So this index is like, imagine all the words in the dictionary, but typed backwards, and then organized alphabetically.
Okay, okay. So why would you do that?
Yeah, that is the question. Because the utility of it is not immediately obvious, at least not to non-lexicographers like you and me. But Peter, the harmless drudge, he kind of got it.
Lexicography is an extreme sport. This is a kind of a radical practice of collection and of archiving. And so, to a certain degree, this is maybe the weirdest example of that kind of archiving. But it made a kind of sense to me.
And to really understand why it makes any kind of sense, you have to think back to when lexicographers first started compiling the backward index, which was in the 1930s, it turns out, which was a time before computers and all of the search possibilities that they allow.
In the pre-digital era, how else could we have known that there are, for example, 500 words in the dictionary that end in "ology"?
And, yeah, yeah, you're getting it.
That's because with a regular dictionary, just organized in a regular alphabetical way, a word like ecology would not appear next to a word like technology, because one starts with E and one starts with T.
I got it. Okay, so with a backward index, all the words that end in ology, for example, would be grouped together.
Yeah, so you couldn't actually look up ology words, you would look up Y-G-O-L-O words.
Okay.
But in doing that, you would find them.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
So cool.
Kind of ingenious. And there are actually a lot of other examples of why this is useful.
There was no way that they could know, for example, how many words in English are made with the compound like, like, you know, block-like, clock-like, rock-like, sock-like, chalk-like, or how many open compounds, that is to say, two-word phrases that use pony, so Highland pony, Shetland pony, Welsh pony, that kind of thing. And then it gets a little deeper, those words that are related morphologically, like ethological, lithological, ornithological, you know, things that end in that particular sequence of letters. And then just basic rhyming sequences, steepy, weepy, sweepy, forty, shorty, snorty.
And in fact, this backward index was instrumental in the creation of Merriam-Webster's first rhyming dictionary.
Oh, yeah. I have one of those.
Oh, yeah, yeah, they're still, they're very popular.
They're really, really good. So by reading words backwards, you can start to see new kinds of patterns, like the ology pattern, or the logical pattern, or just rhyming patterns.
Mm-hmm.
That's so cool.
The kind of lexical detail that we can get into by looking at the language backwards does sort of illuminate our knowledge of the language as we read it in a normal way.
So you said it came from the 1930s, before there were computers. But does Peter know anything about who actually made this mysterious filing cabinet?
Yeah, so after he discovered it, he started doing some research. And exactly who invented it is still a bit of a mystery. He figured out that it dates back to the 1930s, and there's some evidence that lexicographers worked on it up until the 1970s. So he knows how long it was actively being compiled. And he also found out that the project was a kind of favorite pet project of this one editor named Philip Gove. He edited Webster's third unabridged dictionary in the 1950s, and it sounds like he was very rigorous and rule-oriented.
Who was sort of famous for his organizational skills and for making the dictionary apparatus, that is to say, the things that we use as kind of code in the dictionary. Things like, you know, what does a bold-faced colon mean? What does a light-faced, you know, italic semicolon mean? When can we use commas? So there's a rule for everything.
And so it was really Gove who systematized all of that.
He made a rulebook for us, for the editors, that was followed to the T. It was really, really strict and very kind of innovative in its way, and also kind of proto-digital, because when we finally did digitize that dictionary, we recognized how very regular the apparatus was.
So Gove, from Peter's description, it seems like he thought about the dictionary with the logic of a computer programmer, but before computers were a thing.
And now that computers are a thing, I mean, you mentioned the backward index sort of fell out in the 1970s, which makes tons of sense. The computers must have really changed the way lexicographers or the dictionary really works.
Yeah, totally. I mean, for one thing, they have made the old-school backwards index totally obsolete. On the Merriam-Webster website, there's an advanced search function where you can type in "ology" or "phobia."
And you don't have to spell it backwards.
No, you don't have to spell it backwards. It pulls up all the words that end with "ology" or "phobia." So easy, we have it so easy.
We really do, we really do.
And then computers have also allowed lexicographers like Peter to see other kinds of interesting patterns.
For example?
Well, my favorite that we talked about in this interview is this function on Merriam-Webster's website, which is called Time Traveler.
By which you can reorder the dictionary in chronological order as opposed to alphabetical order, because ultimately alphabetical order is random. It's arbitrary. But chronological order isn't because English develops in a very particular way. All the words, for example, about, you know, train travel and train tracks and coal and engines, they all come at a certain time. All words that have to do with repeating firearms, they all come at a certain time. You know, the words that entered the language regarding the law that are derived from French, they all come in at a similar time. So reorganizing the dictionary in a digital way turns out to be a way to sort of turn the dictionary into a
three dimensional search. Rather than just simply a list, we can go in greater depth.
That's amazing.
Isn't that fascinating?
That is so cool.
I love the idea of the time traveler.
Yeah, it's such a good way to order knowledge in a certain way.
And it's sort of like the backwards index was an early pre-digital attempt at achieving that kind of three dimensional search.
Right, right. That's so cool. Well, thanks.
Yeah, thank you.
That was senior editor Delaney Hall from our 2018 mini stories. 99% Invisible was produced and remixed this week by Martin Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Laish Madon, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, including Blue Sky as well as our own Discord server.
There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.
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