Woah Nelly

Bwog meets every week in the SGO and has recently noticed that one of the closet doors has been re-labeled as the CUSFS library. We sent Britt Fossum, recovering LARPer and a firm believer in extraterrestrial life, to go check it out (and maybe check out some books). She walked out feeling like this.

For three hours every Friday, a tiny nondescript door in the Student Governing Office on the fifth floor of Lerner is unlocked to reveal a closet-sized room stuffed with books, videocasettes, and stacks of comics. This is the library of the Columbia University Science Fiction and Fantasy society, and for anyone familiar with the nerdier side of pop culture, walking through the door is like stepping into a treasure trove.

I decided to stop by for the first time this week (despite having been on the CUSFS listserv for the better part of two years) and was immediately greeted by the friendly face of Aleksander Obradovic, the current official Librarian of the society. According to the CUSFS constitution, his job description entails taking care of the library and holding “office hours” of a sort every Friday. He was more than willing to stay an hour or so past his scheduled time of 11-1 to allow a curious visitor (me) to poke around through the shelves of books. He admitted that space was a bit cramped in the room as the science fiction books share space with the Philolexian Society’s alumni collection. This explains the shelf containing the complete works of William Shakespeare that doubles as the librarians desk space. All of the books are double stacked in rows and roughly organized alphabetically by author. Novels are grouped together with anthologies, graphic novels, and informational books each occupying their own shelves.

I saw numerous titles that I recognized as well as hundreds that I had never heard of before–popular books like Dune, of which the library has two copies, are almost always checked out. More obscure titles such as The Red Spider by Doc Savage, a book about communist spiders, are still readily available.

The entire catalog is available online in case you are looking for a specific title. During my visit I saw several of my favorite graphic novels (as well as a few I need to check out soon), some middle school favorites like The Golden Compass and the Abhorsen series, Kim Stanley Robinson, and plenty of Dungeons and Dragons player guides. The library does seek out new books based on requests from CUSFS members, but it also accepts donations–which means I might have found a home for my old DVD of the Children of Dune miniseries and a German translation of a Terry Pratchett book. Although I left empty handed this time thanks to the looming threat of midterms and lab reports, I promised to return again someday.

Vaguely Lisa Frank via Shutterstock