Harvard Hides Its Dirty Books

In a far corner of Widener's "B" level just off a tiny locker-room for lady employees, stands a huge bronze door. The door is kept carefully locked--for behind it Harvard hides its dirty books.

If you want a novel by Henry Miller or William S. Burroughs, a back issue of Playboy or U.S. Camera, or any one of several hundred sociological and medical textbooks, do not waste your time in the stacks. These items are not for the undiscerning eye of the casual browser.

Go instead to kindly old Miss Elizabeth T. Droppers at the main reference desk. If she can be convinced that your motives are pure, she will take from its secret hook the key to the XR cage, disappear into a distant elevator, and reemerge eventually with the juicy morsel. After a stern warning not to mark any pages or remove any pictures, the forbidden fruit is yours to enjoy for as long as you like--provided you don't try to take it out of the main reading room.

Does Harvard University, which makes no bones about limiting the heterosexual hours of its students, also try to censor away the vicarious pleasures of reading?

"No," says Miss Droppers, "it's not that we're puritanical--we protect these books because most of them are out of print."

"No," says Louis A. Sassow, acting head of Reference and Circulation, "those books are in the XR cage primarily to protect them from theft and mutilation."

"No," says Miss Susan M. Haskins, Associate University Librarian for Cataloguing, "it's just that we need tighter control over what I call the 'high voltage' material."

None of these reasons seems to justify completely the XR system. Many of the restricted books are not only still in print, but can be purchased for under a dollar in any drugstore in the Square. They are hardly worth the trouble of stealing from Widener. Many of Widener's locked-up books stand on the open shelves of Lamont and even of Hilles--unmarked and often unread. Undergraduates seem much more interested in defacing Ec 1 textbooks. There is little voltage in an 1888 treatise on "Why Priests Should Wed" or a Russian medical text illustrated with curvaceous line graphs--both classifiedXR in Widener.

What is it about a book that lands it in the XR cage? The answer lies beyond the tiny locker-room, just past the grimy sink inside the bronze vault fitted for two padlocks and perhaps a bolt.

The XR books, which total about 2000 (no one seems to count) line both sides of a dimly-lit iron cage. The binding of each volume bears the pure white call-letters "XR" and a mysterious number (no one seems to know what they mean).

Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? blushes the first book. Next to it stands a box of pamphlets labeled "Birth Control" in trembling black.

Outside the bronze door, several ladies from Binding are getting sack lunches from their lockers.

"Hey, somebody left this door unlocked."

"Aw, that's a lot of trash in there."

"It's art, my dear."

"Oh, baloney. The money they must put in those books ought to go in our salaries."

"No wonder the younger geeration is like it is, with books like those. Let me show you this one books of poetry..."

Soon the ladies move on to lunch and the inspection continues. It soon becomes apparent that no single characteristic sets the XR books apart from other books in the stacks. The XRs fall into six broad categories.

First, legitimate textbooks and studies in fields such as medicine (The Human Sexual Response), sociology (Morals in Wartime), anthropology (Sexual Life of Savages), etymology (Anatomy of Dirty Words), history (Southern Rape Complex--Hundred Year Psychosis), and drug experimentation (Opium, Aphrodisiacs). Included in this group are the studies of Alfred Kinsey.

Second, pseudo-scholarly works like Matt Bradley's New American Sexual Appeties, subtitled "A Shocking Expose of What is Happening to Our Society--The Causes Behind Juvenile Sex Sprees, Wife-Swapping, Perversions and Mass Rape." Typical titles include Sexual Truths, Among the Nudists, and The History of Eroticism--a six-volume set fully illustrating such avocations as whipping tortures and group fellatio.

Third, spicy and well-advertised novels--Lady Chatterly's Lover, The Story of O, Marquis de Sade's Complete Works (in French). Also included here are such under-the-pillow classics as Come to My Parlor, which was widely banned when first published in 1934.

Fourth, actual' hard-core pornography of the kind sold only from beneath counters at local taverns. Since much of this material is printed in foreign languages, its classification is a matter of looking scatological -- like the Swedish Karlek, which contains a lurid pink cover photograph of a fully nude couple engaged in cunnilingus.

Fifth, books of humorous poetry, whimsical fiction, parody and satire. This category includes Playboy's Little Annie Fannie and The Curious Sofa -- "A Pornographic Work by Ogdred Weary." Harvard owns No. 83 of the 212 copies printed in 1961 of this work, which bears the title-page inscription, "A perfectly plain brown paper wrapper for purposes of public concealment may easily be made at home." It is an obvious spoof, but someone in Classification didn't laugh.

And finally, books that somehow don't quite fit in with the others in the XR collecton. There are few as puzzling as Variations in the Rotations of Azimuths. Sassow says he recently removed a set of air-raid instructions from World War II. Also included in this category is The Making of Tanganyika, which must mean the classifier eitiher took the wrong meaning of the verb or thought "Tanganyika" to be a personal noun.

From this jumble of material in the XR cage, it is difficult to guess what criteria Harvard uses to condemn a book to the XR imprisonment. Sassow admits that there are no written cri- teria for judging XR books, and says there are inconsistencies in the classification. A quick check of the Widener card catalogue illustrates these inconsistencies. Of Widener's 39 books on homosexuality, for example, 30 are kept in the XR cage and nine in the stacks. On the other hand, only 11 of 79 books on prostitution are classified XR. The bias is clearly heterosexual.

Sassow says that books are classified XR by the same process in which the standard Widener call-numbers are determined. "There are no book jackets available," he says, "but we go beyond the table of contents--it isn't a casual thing."

Grey-haired Miss Haskins, in whose pleasant pink office filled with potted philodendrons the final classification of most XR books is decided, disagrees with Sassow. "It's a question of someone happening to notice bad language," she says. "Our classifiers don't have time to read any book.

"Most of the XR material relates to sex. Medical books are classified XR because people like to cut out nude pictures to hang up as pin-ups. If a book is banned in Boston, we will put it in the XR cage."

Both Sassow and Miss Haskins emphasize that an XR classification does not prevent the use of a book--except that library users cannot browse through the cage or remove the books from the reading room. Unfortunately, many students do not understand the XR system. A junior recalls hiking to the Biology Library as a freshman to get the Kinsey Report because he did not know Widener made it available for general use. The Bio Library also kept the book in a locked cabinet, and the freshman was allowed to read the book for one hour--with a matronly librarian hovering at his shoulder.

Another unfortunate thing about the XR system is that no evidence that these books exist is displayed in the Widener stacks. Students who do not make repeated individual references to the card catalogue often pass up helpful material that they are unaware Harvard possesses.

Sassow has mixed emotions about the XR system. "It doesn't bother me that books like Candy are in the open stacks," he says. "From my viewpoint, you can open up the whole shooting match. But with people being the way they are, it just isn't possible.