I am getting ready to spend two weeks working on my book!
To be clear, I’ve been working on it for about a year now—the first conversations with my fabulous agent, Maggie Cooper, were in October 2020—and since July I’ve been spending what feels like every waking moment (when I’m not doing my extremely time-consuming day job) researching, reading, and making notes. But other than these newsletters, I really haven’t written anything. For the next two weeks, though, I am on vacation from Slate, and I’ll be taking all those notes and turning them into pages, paragraphs, and at least one chapter. That’s the plan, anyway.
But having spent several months trying to find information in long-dead underground papers, books, and—ugh, the absolute worst—academic journals, I was gripped by a topic in the news: browsing v. searching.
In recent weeks, I’d heard that some artists and designers were protesting the New York Public Library’s decision to archive its Picture Collection. The New York Times described the NYPL Picture Collection thusly: “Founded in 1915, the collection lends images to library users who are seeking visual information of a mind-boggling range: Praying, Fairies, Expositions, Rear Views—more than 12,000 rubrics from Abacus to Zoology, a history of taste that is still expanding.” For more than 100 years, the collection was on open shelves, available for browsing—and touching! But that was going to change.
The Picture Collection was moved to the big “lions” library, aka the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building—primarily a research institution—in 2017, when the nearby circulating branch (now confusingly known as the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library) was undergoing reservations. This summer, the NYPL announced that it would stay there—and instead of being accessible as part of the circulating collection, it would move to the research department. That meant the images would still be available, but instead of browsing through the folders and being able to take things home for further study, users would have to search the catalog and request what they wanted to see, and none of it would be leaving the building.
This week, the library changed its mind—the collection will stay in the Schwarzman, but, “following patron feedback that the Collection’s continued circulation and browsability are critical, the Library decided to maintain the current service model.”
Austin Kleon rounded up some of that “patron feedback,” highlighting a quote from Leanne Shapton’s “In Defense of Browsing”:
The feeling of fortuitous gratitude at coming across unexpected information is something most of us who’ve done any research, have experienced—that kismet of finding the perfect book, one spine away from the one that was sought. In the field of art and image research, this sparking of transmission, of sequence and connection, happens on a subconscious level…. If the library’s plan succeeds, people looking for pictures they have never seen will have to spell out what they think they want, and wait, possibly for hours, while that one thing—but nothing alongside it or related to it—is retrieved by someone else. There will be no time or quiet space to look, sift, think.
Sure, I’m persuaded! The serendipity of browsing can be thrilling. I have to admit, though, that I worry that the images in the collection will be trashed by all that serendipity. The Times piece said “[u]sage has declined in the age of the Internet”—as more kinds of photo references are available online—but the photographs in the Times story are so appealing, something tells me there’ll be a lot more New Yorkers pawing through the folders very soon.
I also wish the Picture Collection was accessible online. Seeing an image onscreen isn’t the same as holding it in your hand, but this great New York asset would then be available to people in Peoria—or to me from the comfort of my apartment. (I can be at the Schwarzman, door to door, in 35 minutes, but I’ve bought books online rather than see them there for free. But I’m talking about books from the ’70s that can be had for $15 or less—my time-money calculus is different than scholars who need obscure volumes or people working in more distant periods.)
Of course, I can’t possibly come down on the side of searching in its great rivalry with browsing, because browsing is the point of my book. Having a place where you can go, where you know you’ll find women interested in drinking, dancing, and hooking up; or interested in books and the things inside them; or watching and playing softball; or in building a new kind of community is very different from having an app where you can search for a woman. Knowing that there’s a bar you can go to any night of the week is different from having to consult the Internet to figure out where tonight’s parties are happening.
And just as an online search, in the Times‘ words, “spits out the most popular choices in a self-reinforcing stream of predictability,” the apps do the same with humans.
Searching is efficient, but that doesn’t mean it’s better.
RECOMMENDATIONS: I was absolutely destroyed, in the best possible way, by the recent season of Making Gay History, in which host Eric Marcus tells a very personal story about coming of age in the AIDS crisis. (And not only because ’80s-era Eric looks so amazing in the tile art. That clone mustache!) Every episode is solid gold, but the coda to Episode 3 is a great reminder, should such a thing be necessary, that AIDS research and information-dissemination are still colossally fucked.
LISTEN TO ME: I got to talk about Grindr and Todd Stephens’ great movie Swan Song with Christina Cauterucci and Bryan Lowder on the September episode of the Outward podcast.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this newsletter and want to share it, or were forwarded this edition and want to subscribe, the link is https://buttondown.email/WhereAre. The archives are here. When my book is ready to be preordered, this is where I will tell you about that, but that won’t happen until 2024. Reply to this email to share any thoughts or ideas.