Up on the Housetop

Until now I'd been only in the library's basement office, where we do all the sorting, cataloguing, and data entry. Finally one afternoon librarian Jean Cunningham led me up several flights of stairs– from the Paramount's basement to its highest balcony– to an industrial-looking room holding movie projectors, file cabinets, noisy ventilation fans, and many, many steel shelving units crammed with sheet music. These are the Library's stacks.

A more interesting attic than most

It was exciting to visit the stacks, where the music is apparently in order and accounted for, though not without the devoted, uncompensated labor of several volunteers. Shelving the music is a Sisyphean task: there are always loose items, always duplicates, always new pieces of music, always old ones to reshelve. Here also the work can slow when the music itself provides distractions, such as interesting cover art, or the faint pencil scrawl of a musician's note. We're assisted by the amazing thoroughness of Walter Rudolph, who bound his meticulously catalogued sheet music collection in handmade cardboard portfolios. It's easy to find and shelve a Rudolph item, though regrettably he might have trimmed the music and discarded its illustrated cover to fit the sheets into the portfolio.

Mr. Rudolph sewed these sturdy binders for his music collection

Elsewhere in the room are cardboard boxes and file cabinets full of barely investigated treasures. I reached into one box and retrieved a bunch of signed publicity photos of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson: a fan club's overstock? What will we find in the other boxes? And when will we have the leisure to open them?