Help an Orphan Book Today

Every so often, a bag or a box of books is left outside the doors of Firestone Library, an act of deaccession by some anonymous would-be benefactor. What is it in us that makes it hard to throw away a book?—so much harder than discarding disused electronics or old clothes or the Christmas tree in January. And so it becomes the librarians’ problem, what to do with books that very rarely complement Firestone’s eleven-million-volume collection—what to do with these abandoned children, or orphans, as they are called by the people who mostly send them on to free book distribution programs, or to recycling.

The project below is a modest program for adopting these orphans by pairing them with a patron of reputation. The images  document a plague-time installation in the Hagan Gallery of the Lewis Center. We invite visitors to this site to participate imaginatively in this adoption project, and if they recognize a book in the pile of discards here, to propose a patron that might be willing to yield an inch of shelf space to a fellow traveler fallen on hard times.

• Choose a book from the pile of orphans next to the shelf, a book you believe deserves a place in the library’s collection.
• If it is to return to circulation, the orphan book requires a patron. That patron should be a book that you know to be actively read, in your discipline or another, and that has some potentuial, vital relation to the orphan. The patron, for example, might usefully cite the orphan; the orphan might correct a blind spot, even confute the patron. Or perhaps they would just have a good conversation.
• Take a card from the card cabinet drawer on the pedestal and write down as much bibliographic information as you know about the patron book. If you can look up the Princeton call number of the patron, transcribe it there as well, and beneath it, a new call number that would locate the orphan next to the patron.
• Slip the card between the pages of the orphan, with its edge peeking out, and elevate the orphan to the shelf.

If you have suggestions for patrons who might adopt a book you see here, please email pudaccession@gmail.com.

Utku Cansu and Jeff Dolven