Princeton's new $6,000,000, six-story Firestone Memorial Library would be the world's largest open-stack collection: anybody could get at the books by just walking to the shelf. All Librarian Julian P. Boyd had to do was move in the 800,000 books, waiting 30 yards away in the overcrowded old library. He had promised to do it in such a way that no book would be hors de combat more than four hours.
Boyd considered using conveyor belts and moving vans, decided instead to rely on raw Princeton manpower. He hired 35 undergraduates for $1 an hour, eight hours a day. For ten weeks,...
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