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---------The
memo was all of three paragraphs. Granted, one of
those paragraphs included a run-on sentence that was a couple
of hundred words long, with four parenthetical asides and a
colon--its author was, after all, Sanford "Sandy" Berman--but
nevertheless, most who read the memo would agree that it was
organized into three paragraphs.
It was a Monday, this past January 18, and Berman had
wedged himself into his small cubicle in suburban Plymouth's
library administration headquarters, turning his attention to
his manual Remington typewriter. Its metal keys had not a
speck of dust on them. The black ribbon was fresh. What he had
in mind was a simple three-paragraph note--something quick,
well-reasoned, and noisy.
Cover Photo By
Tony Nelson | On that winter
morning, Berman was at his station as head cataloger for the
Hennepin County Library (HCL) system, as he had been since
1973. For a man in charge of more than a dozen catalogers,
Berman wasn't fond of hierarchies--thus his conviction that
"Supervisors should be accessible and not occupy some sort of
mystified space or be up on some metaphoric pedestal!" And so
Berman's cubicle was the exact size as all the others there.
As he tapped away on a sheet of HCL note paper--"Building a
Great Library," it read--Berman took the liberty of explaining
himself in prose thick with ampersands and blobs of correction
fluid, typed-over letters, and words shoehorned into the
seemingly nonexistent spaces between lines. High-tech spell
check? Laser printing? Berman's memo, as it rolled from the
typewriter, a bit crumpled and smudged at the edges, had the
visceral stink and charm of an era that's all but gone. He
opened cheerily, with "many thanks" to Bill DeJohn and Carla
Dewey of MINITEX, a state-funded network of libraries based at
the University of Minnesota; he argued his points, then closed
"with warmest regards" and signed off with a flourish--an
outsize S, his own Zorro mark.
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