It has been said that if you chant his name three times, he will appear. It has been said that he played in the first (ever) punk band (ever!?).  It has been said that he is a “mythical wise wizard, like Gandalf the Grey — effusive and emphatically excited.”

Chris Schiff has been a research librarian at Bates College for twenty-three years, and while I don’t know what it is that I’m looking for, I suspect he has it. I just have to ask…

I found him in his office on a Monday morning. While the walls have rows of metal shelves drilled into them, many of his books and papers sit in boxes, some of them on the floor. I ask him what it’s like to be a librarian, and he says, “Shelving is everything.” I see he embraces alternative methods, but then again, an office is no library. He will later pull from these stacks with great care and little rummaging, evidence of their placefullness. 

“I got my first library card when I was six years old, which would be 1964. I can still remember my first librarian was named Mrs. Gorman, and the books I checked out from Mrs. G were the same books my mother checked out. Her name was written on the checkout slip inside the cover.” 

(Librarians, it seems, are professionally waiting for you to ask them questions.)

Chris Schiff grew up in the wild west border town of Trinidad, Colorado, and it was the library that looked after him and his sister while his mother did the shopping. 

“So then, down through the years, it was always a place that I went.” From Carnegie Public Library in Trinidad to the University of Colorado, UT Austin, Wesleyan, Madison and finally, to Bates College, Chris Schiff has been in the library. He tells me it is the best place for a curious person. He tells me he is the Sherlock Holmes of anywhere that he is. He tells me about the mysteries, big and small. He tells me about his first mystery.

It was 1980, five years before the first computer arrived on the University of Colorado campus—everything, and he means everything, was in a book. “It was a mellow job, but you got taken all over the library. One day, I got sent up with a cart load of books to shelve in the Native American language section. What you do when you shelve a book is you figure out where it goes, then you check the two books before and after it.” (Remember how shelving is everything?) 

“So I was shelving, and I saw a sheet of paper sticking out of one of the books, and it was a sheet of tracing paper, super thin, the kind where you can almost read what’s behind it, and this piece had certain squares, perfect squares punched out randomly over the paper.” But not so randomly, Schiff thinks. Punched out, perhaps, to create a key. 

Schiff considers the presence of Cold War era agents (apparently common in Boulder at the time), Navajo code talkers and the extensive Russian language department at CU– he considered then and he considers still. It seems, though I could be wrong, that Schiff prefers his mysteries unsolved. Would they really earn their title otherwise? This is the landscape of glittering unknowns that Chris Schiff, librarian, has made a home in.

“It doesn’t have to be like opening King Tut’s tomb. Sometimes it’s just one word on a page.” Sometimes it’s hole punched parchment protruding from a Navajo language book, or maybe it exists between Russian Cyrillics and the Greek alphabet. Sometimes it is the shade of green, the year of production, the arsenic laced fibers. Sometimes it is the pulp dense pages of a first edition of the Origin of Species and its unbroken second volume seal that tells us that it was not read on. Sometimes, still, it is just one word on one page.

It is now, several anecdotes into our conversation, that Chris Schiff draws several papers from his pile. He holds out to me a stack of tea-brown sheet music, his latest find. These fragile, gently held pages are the publicly administered songs of patriotic victory printed in newspapers to be sung to the soldiers returning home from the first World War. 

“I’ve held these things in my hands,” (at other points gleefully referred to as “my grubby little mitts!”), “That’s what being a rare book librarian has done for me.”

I leave his office knowing quite a lot more about the rag content of paper, Frances Picabia, the Collections Deposit Library in Austin, and dadaism. I leave quite happy. 

So try it, really. Close your eyes: Chris Schiff. Chris Schiff. Chris Schiff.