During one of his routine sweeps through the stacks of the library’s North Tower, Ivan Albertson noticed a used condom dangling off a bookshelf. “It was obviously planted for showmanship,” Albertson says, imagining the trouble it took for a couple to find a more private place to fornicate, then return to arrange the rubber.
In the three-and-a-half years Albertson has worked at the library as a stacks management assistant, even the obscene objects he stumbles upon have become treasures, sparkling rarities that brighten his days. They also become fodder for stories, material for the library’s newsletter, The Lantern, and the subjects of mysteries, which Alberston is convinced are his to solve. “There are things that seem too strange, like someone’s planting them for me,” he says. “I can’t prove it.”
The other day he found something he was sure someone had left expressly for him. It was a concert ticket stub from March 2002, for The Fab Four at the Hilton in Las Vegas. “I question its origin,” he says, adding that it was “perfectly framed” on the shelf. “I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why it would be there. I just think that it was planted for me.”
Albertson spends most of his days with headphones on, listening to rock music from every era. He empties the book drop, retrieves journals and dissertations from a storage facility in a nearby building, shelves, sorts and shifts. Then there is what he calls “cosmetic work on the stacks,” neatening and straightening the books, which has become a kind of habit. When he used to frequent the Skokie Public Library, people would think he worked there because he would automatically rearrange the CDs. But Albertson finds most of his curiosities during his ongoing search for missing books, which he looks for by guessing the ways people could misread and misfile call numbers. When we spoke, there were 12 books he was looking for. He found four, shelved erroneously because someone inverted or mixed up the digits, like filing 791.285 under 791.825. “He’s usually combing the stacks,” says Deana Greenfield, a Weinberg graduate student who works as a library aide in Albertson’s department. “The image I have of him is of him wandering through the stacks with his headphones and his little scraps of paper with his scribblings of call numbers.”
At 25, Albertson looks older than he is. His curly brown hair is thin and spliced with strands of gray; his hairline has begun to recede and a quarter-sized spot in back is balding. When he smiles he blushes sheepishly, and his whole head seems to turn bright red. He hesitates and pauses frequently in conversation, often staying silent so long he seems to be gravely pondering my questions, or to have forgotten it entirely. He scratches his chin, and clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. When he finally speaks, his responses are often frustratingly laconic, and sometimes seem more like questions. He peppers his sentences with so many “ums,” someone charging him a nickel apiece could make a quick dollar. He seems to agonize inordinately over the question of why he started keeping his file of finds. “Um, to photograph them?” he answers eventually. Sometimes, he talks to himself, wondering aloud, “Will I find it in here?” as he goes through one of his archives of finds.
Albertson got the job by happenstance. He had returned to Evanston after graduating from Carleton College in Minnesota. He was planning to pick up his perennial minimum wage summer job at the library when he learned that another position had opened there. In college, he hadn’t really planned ahead; while his peers were applying to jobs and graduate schools, he was just focusing on finishing his degree. The position in stacks management was serendipitous. “I sort of lost all other ambitions, at least in terms of careers,” he says. “I don’t know what I would have done.” He earns $14.47 an hour and can afford a studio in Chicago near Wrigley Field.
Albertson has been at the library now for six years. He hasn’t thought much more about long-term plans or a future career. “It’s a little scary to think of it that way, but I don’t see myself leaving anytime soon,” he says. “Preserving a library is certainly a noble profession.” Outside of work, his other hobby is film-making, and he sees a lot of indie films, almost always alone, and writes occasionally. He has a feature film script in the works, but has hardly touched it since last summer. He shied away from the project when he realized, even if he did finish it, he wasn’t equipped to take it to the next stage. “I don’t want to get too meta with that part of my life yet,” he says. The movie is about “um, relationships,” and is partly inspired by a female friend’s diary, which “provides insight,” he says. But he would like to venture into more fictional territory. “The only ideas I have are based on my life,” he says. “I’d like to be making up things.”
But finding things is Albertson’s specialty, which makes him very good at his current job. “No one does better than he does when we search missing and lost books,” says Daniela Vassileva, the stacks management supervisor. “He’s the one. He’s the best person in the whole library.” When Albertson worked in the library while he was still in college, he won a competition for finding lost books. “He’s very good with the numbers. I cannot compete with him,” Vassileva says. “He has a very special skill we really need.”
The collection of finds has special value to Albertson, and he has toyed with the idea of writing a script about “someone who finds things,” but decided it was too narcissistic. “I’m too disappointed in myself for not being more creative,” he says.
The stacks through which Albertson wades daily are like canyons, and they seem as endless and disorienting as the side streets of New York City. Through them he wanders, rearranging books and tidying. “I have an eye out for little pieces of paper, because it’s trash,” he says. “Most of the stuff I find are notes or call numbers.” But in his office, in two teeming manila folders, is his ever-expanding collection of finds that are much less mundane, and often unbelievably bizarre. There are photos, graduation and Christmas cards, a driver’s license that looks like it could be fake because the person is wearing sunglasses, interlibrary loan notes from Germany two or three decades ago, a list entitled “Things I’m having trouble with,” with just one bullet point that says, “The difference between homogeneous and heterogeneous.” There is an ad for a jock itch remedy, a game of hangman solved with “big lardy dean,” a printed e-mail with meticulously detailed instructions for thawing and cooking 600 pans of stuffed pasta in an oven, a watercolor design of a winged costume for a production of Charlotte’s Web. There is a picture of a 5- or 6-year-old next to someone dressed up like a giant rabbit, a limerick that begins: “The bounciest girl in Gibraltar/Demanded a very big halter.”
Albertson has also found a roll of toilet paper, stage props made from wallpaper swatches and construction paper and even a cigarette butt, which he still keeps wrapped in a napkin, and which worries him because of its proximity to the books. He plans to eventually photograph it for the library newsletter but seems to value it separately as a kind of trophy, the way some people hold on to unusually shaped seashells because they seem too precious in their rareness to discard. “I just wait for the gold to come, when there’s a prom picture or something,” he says. But generally, he prefers written artifacts. “You might get a little more sense of the mystery of human communication.” He remembers the first time he stumbled across something interesting. It was a note that read simply, “Dear Ally, I am not kidding. Love, Abby.” Of this, he says: “It was the first thing I found that was full of mystery that I would never solve.”
Albertson has always had a penchant for finding stray items and holding on to them. Through the time he was in high school, he used to pick up every coin
he saw on the ground, even plunging into fountains to get them. “I guess I generally hold on to things I don’t need,” he says, admitting there is an empty toothpaste box still sitting in his apartment because he hasn’t gotten around to throwing it out yet. But he doesn’t keep everything. A colleague recently brought him a colored postcard from IKEA thinking he would like it, but he recycled it instead. “I’m growing more selective,” he says. “It’s gotta wow me. Otherwise, I’ll have to get a bigger office.”
Though he sometimes recognizes the people in pictures he finds, Albertson hardly ever mentions it to them or returns the items. His interactions with the college students are limited, but he speculates on who writes the more nonsensical notes he finds on napkins, newspaper clippings, and other places. He found one napkin with a note that reads, “I have discovered something super-amazing in the library. If you ever forgive me, allow me to take you there?” He imagines one student passed it silently to his study partner. Some items, like the list of troubling subjects, he thinks are just a way to vent frustration. “The person didn’t mean for someone to read them,” he says. In some pieces, Albertson sees other merit. He kept one picture of a room so cluttered with haphazard piles of boxes that there is only a tiny square of light showing from the window, books and board games stuck precariously on top. “I always think it’s, um, a symbol?” he says. Then he tries out the voice of the photographer: “‘I must be proud of it, take a picture of it, show it off,'” he imitates, “‘before Mom makes me clean it up.'”
Every day, the library hosts scores of visitors who, among other things, lose and leave various traces of their presence. The library employs about 200 full-time staffers and 240 student assistants, and estimates that on an average day, 1,960 people enter the building. Albertson’s office, which he shares with his supervisor, is adjacent to the time-card station for the work-study program, and he tends to overhear gossip. “Did she just say, ‘I slept with him?'” he wonders aloud after a long, listening pause. “I accumulate information about people and it goes in the file,” he says. Albertson has become friendly with some of the students, “but … not real friends,” he says. Recently, he planned to have lunch with a student worker whom he says he first got to know when she recognized him from the library outside the student center, three-and-a-half years ago. But she never showed up.
Just the other day, Vassileva, Albertson’s supervisor, admitted that she knew a couple of student workers used to leave things for him to find, but they hadn’t done it in years. “Are there things I’m just now finding or still haven’t found?” he asked. “No, you found everything a while ago,” she said. Albertson decided not to ask her which items in his collection had been planted. “Better to preserve the mystery than find disappointing answers,” he says. The case is far from closed; there are probably more items out there, somewhere in the stacks. Vassileva remembers the two women leaving notes with Albertson’s name on them, which he doesn’t remember finding. He may soon, though. “I’m always on the watch for things that I think might have been planted there for me,” he says.
