A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

# Summary When a university library underwent renovation, thousands of books deemed to have low checkout rates were discarded into a dumpster, prompting the author and her colleagues to fight against the removals by identifying valuable titles and having students check them out. The incident resonated deeply with the author's research on Edith Wharton's personal library, where she had discovered that physical traces of Wharton's reading—annotations, underlinings, and marginalia—revealed how the writer engaged with texts across multiple languages and subjects. The author argues that while preserving libraries alone cannot rescue reading culture, it remains an important starting point in valuing books as records of intellectual life and human understanding.