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A Lib Utopia

N my fiftieth reunion, after visiting the recently completed Students’ Building,
I dropped in at the Lib to renew old times. As the heavy door swung open,
my feet were suddenly knocked from under me, and I sat down heavily.
Upon regaining consciousness | became aware of a huge face, like that on the
funny pier at Atlantic City, gazing down at me from what used to be the top of the
stairs, and from the mouth of this creature popped the form of one girl after another,
who catapulted down a winding slide to the basement floor, where she came to a
stop in a bowl-like structure. | determined to follow, no matter what the cost,
although my skirt (they all wore knickers) somewhat hampered my motions.
After climbing up a rope ladder at the foot with the help of an attendant in livery,
I entered the sanctum long ago known as stacks. It might more properly be named
“snacks’’, for this part of the library had been rented in 1950 by the famous cater-
ing firm of Knox, Donohue & Daughters, and the card catalogue had been trans-
formed into an automat. The Reference Room was leased as the ‘Ratz Eric
Salon”. Here one could buy anything from a balloon to a ball-gown. These two
business concerns had run the Book Shop out of existence.

The New Book Room was filled with tea tables, and each section between book-
cases at that end was curtained off into an alcove for the use of suitors, the only
regulation being that an official chaperon should dangle her legs from the stack
gallery above.

Ascending by an escalator, I found the students playing cards at each of the
two hundred little tables which filled the main room. From the chandelier hung a
trapeze where Dr. Gray, still youthful, could exercise, his beard floating in the
breeze. Dancers circled round to music radioed from the Surette-Alwyne Memorial
Band. At the far end of the room a row of musical chairs played while one gazed
at Mrs. Jarley’s wax-works of Barty in his cell, P. T. in an Arabian bath-tub, ete.

Descending the winding staircase, I found Dr. Arlitt conducting a maze.
I paid fifty cents to get in, but soon gave an attendant a dollar to get me out.
Another dollar was parted with e’er I entered the Athletic Side Show where Miss
Applebee was effecting remarkable psychological cures for the fat and thin by
showing them their reflections in curved mirrors.

I left all these innovations with a feeling of longing for the old days, and I
entered the Cloisters in the hope that here, at least, nothing would be changed.
But as I opened the door a gong sounded, and from each of fifty diving boards
attached to the wall of the Cloisters, a girl dived into the fountain, now greatly
enlarged, for her daily bath.

Grace Ruoaps.

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