A tiny news item appeared in an inner page of my newspaper recently about a librarian in Florida who had been suspended from their job. The person's crime (it wasn't revealed whether
the culprit was a man or a woman) was the installation of a computer program that had non-existent people automatically checking out books from the library. The librarian's ploy was devised so that-"they [the books] wouldn't be culled." A number of public libraries have initiated the system of checking withdrawal dates and disposing of books that have been ignored for a while. Many readers probably missed this tiny item, but this book person didn't. I recognized it for what it was, further proof of the existence of "the Resistance," the secret, underground movement which knows the importance of books and how fundamental their survival is. A movement that will never die. Those of us in the know realized it meant that another member of our group was quietly and privately subverting the trolls and drones in their sinister attempts to destroy the most important vehicle for passing on the records of civilization: the book. Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 related another version of the Resistance, but society never caught on that his book described part of a larger revolutionary underground movement that still functions today. Orwell also described the enemy in 1984, but he only implies the movement's existence, for Big Brother appears to have won the war. Our people know 1984 was only a warning, and that the war continues.

This noble Unknown Librarian, working quietly on their own, in the midst of the enemy, continues the struggle to save books from their first graveyard: the dumpster. The dumpster is sometimes abetted by the "pulp machine," a weapon so insidious and frightful that its very existence is hidden behind high walls and barbed wire. We've all seen the shredder, the pulp machine's equally insidious but seemingly harmless precursor-but who has even seen one of these "pulpers"? Only the operators and chief drones who command the plot to suppress our common heritage, the record of our rise from the swamps of pre-civilization.

But their vile plot isn't working-as that tiny item on page ten proved. The underground is active everywhere, secretly guarding a past hidden right in the Enemy's midst. And despite the hordes of the indifferent and ignorant.

It could be argued-and I do-that the used bookseller is the public face of our movement, the first line of defense. But we are not the only ones on the frontlines. For in the foreground of the movement, although often not aware of their revolutionary tendencies, are the many ordinary citizens who call us to sell their books. When they are informed that their books are unsaleable and unwanted by us, they are eager to give them away; anything but destruction. Used-book sellers encounter many people who go to considerable trouble to donate their books rather than see them thrown in a dumpster. They are our collaborators, even if they don't realize it. No true book lover can stand the thought of books being destroyed; their reaction to the very idea is invariably revulsion.

When we booksellers meet these people, we recognize them at once as ours cohorts, albeit still-dormant ones. They usually don't realize that we are prepared to use all our available resources to safeguard their books. We have access to all known methods of moving books into safe zones. Sometimes these people never catch on that we know exactly what we are doing when we guide them in the proper direction. The dumpster and the pulper can never be the final solution, for we used booksellers will not allow them to be.

Like the underground railway that carried slaves to freedom, or the resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe that guided downed airmen to safety, we quietly ensure that unwanted books are saved; that civilization continues. Though the annual college sales adversely affect used bookstores by stealing our livelihood, we'll still steer books their way before allowing them to end up in the garbage. Perfidious as these sales are, at least the books end up back in the eternal flow.

The samizdat literature that proliferated in spite of the suppressive tactics of communist dictatorships is another example of this spirit. The vast underground literature of the sixties-- defiant, often obscene, has today risen to respectability. The literary artifacts of that glorious period-antidotes to the deadly virus of 1950s boredom that instigated it-are now reaching high prices in the rare-book market as the printed history of that revolutionary period is assembled in institutions. Today you can enter Harvard, Yale, or the University of Toronto and find in the library catalogue such things as: Fuck You, a magazine of the arts that might well be found right beside The Saturday Evening Post with a Norman Rockwell cover. That commie pervert Allan Ginsberg, whom your father feared and despised, is now ensconced in the American canon just after his precursor, Walt Whitman.

Now we are surrounded by electronic machines which the Enemy thinks will further rob us of a means of saving, our civilization. Attempts at limiting our intelligence by suppressing the ability to communicate complex ideas are also being combatted by cunning revolutionary counterattacks. Only time will tell where the underground challenge to these latest abominations will arise. My own guess is it will be somewhere in the genre of graphic novels, or maybe through some new form of poetry born from the defiance of rappers. But it will appear, for history teaches us that the human imagination is irrepressible. We in the Resistance plant the seeds, and our movement expands as the trolls and drones doze on, oblivious. Of course, we will try to save them, too, at least those who aren't already lost in their moronic addiction to Twitter or whatever new fad is robbing them of their intelligence.

So, as you enter the public library and are confronted by row after row of computers, each with a near comatose body hypnotically staring at its screen, do not despair. Go right past them and wander through the stacks. There, you'll still find real people browsing, pulling books off the shelves, examining them with curiosity and wonder; even reading them.

Once, many years ago, I entered a Toronto Public Library branch at seven in the evening with my old mentor and friend, Jerry Sherlock. We were doing a public service, it was one of those evenings where the library invites people to bring their printed or written treasures in for the experts to assess their value – the book equivalent of the Antiques Roadshow. As we entered, there were around ten people at the checkout desk, and as I passed it I noticed that every single one of them was checking out a movie. Not a book amongst the lot. This was pre-internet, so the now-common tiers of computers weren't there. Inside, the library itself was empty.

Being early for our session, I wandered about. Not having been in a branch library for many years, it was curious to see books on open shelves instead of the stacks I was accustomed to from the reference collections where I usually work. I wandered around the empty library, immersed in memories of my youth, until I discovered a separate children's section where I noticed the first person I'd seen, a kid maybe six or seven years old. Naturally, I was curious to see what he was examining so I sidled up to where he was browsing and looked over his shoulder. He was in front of a shelf that contained the books of Thornton W. Burgess, the first of my childhood book heroes, all of whose animal stories I had read many times. The boy was holding a book from the familiar red-jacketed series of Reddy Fox and his friends. I was elated.

"Do you like those books?" I asked.

"Yes, I love them," he replied. "They're my favourite ones."

"I loved them too, when I was your age." I said, seeing in this kid the wonder of my own childhood. "Who's your favourite character?" I went on. "Mine was Reddy Fox."

"Mine's Jimmy Skunk," he replied. "Nobody pushes him around."

I was already lost in the emotion of it all.

Two readers, the only customers in a public library: a young kid just beginning a life in books, and a middle-aged man who'd spent a lifetime immersed in book culture and who'd been saved countless times from disaster and despair by all that followed from his discovery of Reddy Fox, Buster Bear, and Old Mother West Wind. We discussed our heroes, the kid and I, till I was called to do my civic duty. I told Jerry about the meeting, and that our life's work was not in vain. He was equally heartened.

We had a large crowd that evening, but all I remember---except for the woman who showed us a stack of letters on blue paper written by Gertrude Stein to her grandmother in Toronto, which I've been hoping will show up again before I die – is that kid and his enthusiasm, wonder, and obvious enchantment. Most of all, I remember his surprise at having what may have been, I like to think, his first conversation with an adult who spoke to him as an equal.

Everywhere we are assaulted by the trolls, the mindless fools who cross the street Twittering their inane, pointless comments about life, often being hit by cars and other pedestrians; people who seem unaware they are Tweeting their lives away. Killed by inanities, another plague of the twenty-first century, as insidious as typhus and other invisible pestilences of earlier times.

Those of us who've received the enormous gifts that books provide are only too aware of what these fools are missing.

Coda: Last Halloween I was too indisposed to shell out to the kids, so I gave a big bag of candy and a bigger bag of books to my neighbour to pass out for me. She told me the next day that the kids were enthralled by the books. The Resistance continues ...



-David Mason