KABX · 19.87 · Abraxas · essay · September 25, 2026

1169974

Walter Library, the stacks, the tapes, and the other Jeffrey Johnson.

The first time I walked into Walter Library I stopped inside the door, because I had never been in a room with that many people reading. It was the fall of 1981. I had come to the University of Minnesota from the northern suburbs with a scholarship to the Institute of Technology and a plan to be an engineer, and the university was one of the largest campuses in the country, a city of students on both banks of the Mississippi. I had known that as a fact. Walter was where I found out what it meant. The main rooms went up and up, tall walls of windows, plaster ceilings a long way overhead, and under them the great wooden tables, long enough to seat a dozen to a side, most of the seats taken, every head down. This is about that building: the quiet, the stacks, the tapes, and the day it handed my name to somebody else.

The building had been there since 1924, red brick and limestone on the mall, built to be the main library when the whole university fit on one bank. By the time I arrived the main collection had moved across the river to the West Bank, and Walter held science and engineering, which suited a freshman in the Institute of Technology. It was named for Frank Walter, the librarian who planned it. I did not know any of that then. I knew the door, the stairs, and the sound.

I knew where it stood. Walter was one of six buildings on the mall, three along each side of a long grassy quadrangle with paths that crossed and recrossed it, so that from any of the doors you could watch the whole university going somewhere at once. Walter was the northernmost on the west side, with Smith Hall, the chemistry building, below it, and a smaller, newer chemistry building below that. Across the grass, physics was northernmost on the east side, then mathematics, then a smaller building at the south end where my locker was. The locker mattered in January. The tunnels ran from the parking lots at the far north end of campus all the way to that building, and at twenty below, or in the rain, you took the tunnels. At the top of the mall was Northrop, the auditorium. At the bottom, across Washington Avenue, was Coffman Union, the student union, welcoming at any hour, with the main cafeteria inside it. Between the two, the library was the quiet building.

The sound

The sound was the thing. Students of every shape, size, and color, reading, writing, or whispering so quietly that the whisper was mostly breath. Hundreds of people in one room and the loudest noise was a page. Walter felt as sacred as a church. It asked nothing of me except that I be quiet and pay attention, and it gave the same permission a church gives, to sit still with something larger than yourself. A church of thinking. Everybody in it was working on their own soul, or their own problem set, which at that age is the same thing.

I went almost every day for a stretch, on the theory that I was going to study. Sometimes I did.

The stacks

Behind the reading rooms were the stacks, the steel shelves that held the collection, floor after floor of them, and that is where the time went. Row upon row upon row of interesting old books, most of them on subjects I had no reason to open, which was the reason to open them. I would go in for a calculus text and come out an hour later having read the first chapter of something from 1930 on ectoplasm and séances, a subject I could not have named on the way in. I could not tell you now what most of them were. I can tell you that I liked the rows better than the tables, and the tables better than the classes.

The degree plan noticed before I did. Inside of a few years I was taking psychology, art history, philosophy, literature, and creative writing, none of which counted toward engineering, and liking them more and more. By 1986 I had rebuilt the whole degree around three areas so that philosophy could be one of them. The short version is that it started in the stacks, with books I had no reason to read other than the love of knowledge.

The tapes

Walter would also lend you tape recordings, and I had signed up for music history, so the reading list came with the listening list. That is where I first heard a lot of classical music, on a borrowed cassette, with the score or the textbook open beside it. I had grown up on the radio. This was different. This was sitting still for the length of a symphony because the assignment said so, and finding out partway through that the assignment had stopped being the reason. We were allowed to choose some of our own essay subjects, so when I saw that the Nutcracker was being performed at Northrop that Christmas, at the top of the mall, I chose it, and took my mother. We had a wonderful time. It may be the assignment I remember best.

The tape desk kept your student ID while the tapes were out. You handed over the card, took the tapes, and got the card back when you returned them. It was a good system, right up until it wasn't.

The other Jeffrey Johnson

Johnson is the most common surname in Minnesota, and Jeffrey was a popular first name in the years we were being born, so on a campus that size there was never going to be one of us. That year there were nine. One day another Jeffrey Johnson returned his tapes before I returned mine, and the desk handed him my card. He walked out with it. I came back with my tapes and there was nothing to give me, except his card, and I left that at the desk so he would get it back when he brought mine.

This was before cell phones. There was no way to find him except to wait for him to notice, and to go back to the desk and ask, and to go back again. It took a while. I got it back eventually, and I have never forgotten the number on it, which is the title of this piece. 1169974. I could give it at the desk today.

The name

When I built the complete list of everything on this site, I called it The Stacks, and I put it on the receiver as a plate you open. It is one long list, and it will get longer, and that is the point. The stacks at Walter were long because a century of people had kept adding to them, and the pleasure was in the length, in the row you had not walked yet. The list here is small next to that. It is the same idea, kept in the same spirit, by someone who learned it as a freshman from a building on a mall, in the quietest crowd he had ever stood in.