Japanese courtesan research powerup:In which I advance to the Harvard University special collections
Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you a new holder of a Visiting Researcher card to the Harvard College Library system.
For those of you who aren't from around here and don't know the legends: The Harvard library system is like unto Fort Knox. You can't even walk into the main library without a Harvard ID--the Library Privileges Office has its own door from the foyer. Not the lobby, the foyer. Even Harvard professors can't bring guests into the libraries without permission from the Office of the Librarian. When I told friends at Thanksgiving that I was applying for a card, they said only half-jokingly, "Do you have any convictions?"
But Harvard has good reason to be locked down. They have books that exist at only perhaps a dozen libraries in the United States, and those are the books in the open stacks. Some of the Japanese books they hold are on niche topics that are hard to come by in Japan.
To get access, you have to stump the research librarian for your local library system, then convince her to write a letter attesting to her stumpedness. I spent some time with an amazingly patient librarian at the nearby library, spelling search phrases like "Yoshiwara saiken" and "kuzushiji" for her so she could confirm that yes, the Boston system has no copies of 17th-century guides to Japanese pleasure quarters, and no, no other requestable system has them either, and yes, the Harvard-Yenching Library has the only copy in over a hundred miles. She took it seriously; she wasn't willing to send me to Harvard-Yenching unless I'd exhausted all other resources, out of concern that I'd be turned away if she wasn't thorough enough. But I'd been thorough, and she was thorough, and in the end she wrote me a letter. I handed it to a quite genial man who did not, in fact, breathe fire, and who read it and copied my driver's license, then gave me a gratifyingly official-looking library card. It has my photo and a magnetic stripe, because Harvard will go to those lengths even for a three-month temporary pass.
It gets me into all the specialty collections, not just the Asian collections at Harvard-Yenching. I'm going to have a library orgy.
Even though this is a small thing, it feels like validation.
For those of you who aren't from around here and don't know the legends: The Harvard library system is like unto Fort Knox. You can't even walk into the main library without a Harvard ID--the Library Privileges Office has its own door from the foyer. Not the lobby, the foyer. Even Harvard professors can't bring guests into the libraries without permission from the Office of the Librarian. When I told friends at Thanksgiving that I was applying for a card, they said only half-jokingly, "Do you have any convictions?"
But Harvard has good reason to be locked down. They have books that exist at only perhaps a dozen libraries in the United States, and those are the books in the open stacks. Some of the Japanese books they hold are on niche topics that are hard to come by in Japan.
To get access, you have to stump the research librarian for your local library system, then convince her to write a letter attesting to her stumpedness. I spent some time with an amazingly patient librarian at the nearby library, spelling search phrases like "Yoshiwara saiken" and "kuzushiji" for her so she could confirm that yes, the Boston system has no copies of 17th-century guides to Japanese pleasure quarters, and no, no other requestable system has them either, and yes, the Harvard-Yenching Library has the only copy in over a hundred miles. She took it seriously; she wasn't willing to send me to Harvard-Yenching unless I'd exhausted all other resources, out of concern that I'd be turned away if she wasn't thorough enough. But I'd been thorough, and she was thorough, and in the end she wrote me a letter. I handed it to a quite genial man who did not, in fact, breathe fire, and who read it and copied my driver's license, then gave me a gratifyingly official-looking library card. It has my photo and a magnetic stripe, because Harvard will go to those lengths even for a three-month temporary pass.
It gets me into all the specialty collections, not just the Asian collections at Harvard-Yenching. I'm going to have a library orgy.
Even though this is a small thing, it feels like validation.