Eugene Lane and Ellis Library

When I first came to Ellis Library as a humanities librarian, people warned me about the faculty liaison for the Classics department, Gene Lane. “He’s a curmudgeon,” they told me. “He won’t give you a moment’s rest.”

Over the course of many years I have decided that, despite his reputation, Dr. Lane is not a curmudgeon. He is a gadfly in the mold of Socrates. While Socrates attached himself as a gadfly to the Athenian state stinging and goading its citizens so they would care for virtue, Dr. Lane has attached himself to Ellis Library. He goads and stings us to take care and maintain the classics collection.

For the ten years I have known him, Dr. Lane has never stopped rousing and urging the library to do better. When necessary, he reproaches the library for its shortcomings, but he also commends it when it gets something right. Though he might chide the librarians inside the library, outside the library he has been the library’s staunchest supporter, fighting to protect the library’s budget whenever it was threatened.

Dr. Lane has been the Classics department’s library liaison for his entire tenure at Mizzou. This is remarkable because it is a position that professors try to avoid if possible. Junior faculty, who are too green to know better, are usually tricked into the job. As soon as they wise up, they try to get out of the job. In reality, a liaison can do as much or as little as he likes. Most prefer to do little.

Not so Dr. Lane. He is the most conscientious of library representatives. He looks at every approval book that comes into the library. He signs every publication announcement slip remotely connected to the ancient world. Sometimes, he is too conscientious. When I arrived at Ellis Library, I inherited a file cabinet full of book purchase requests. When I asked Dr. Lane why we kept hundreds of book order slips, more than we could ever afford to buy, he told me that six or seven years earlier the state legislature had given the library a million dollars to purchase books and he wanted to be sure that the Classics department would have titles ready if funds became available.

That is typical of Dr. Lane. He is always looking to the future of the library and its users, whoever they might be and whatever interests they might have. Unlike most professors, he is interested in books outside his research interests. He takes a broader view and looks to the collection as a whole. His tendency to be all-inclusive has sometimes frustrated me, but, on the whole, it has worked rather well. Instead of a collection that is deep in a half dozen areas, the collection is good in almost all areas. When the Classics department hired a scholar interested in Late Antiquity, I feared he would break the budget with orders to fill holes in the collection. As it has turned out, he has not broken the budget and I have not had to order as many books as I feared. Instead, I have discovered that the library has a good collection for the study of late antiquity. I give all the credit to Dr. Lane.

Unlike so many of the newer faculty, Dr. Lane loves books and libraries. He comes into the library at least once a week--more often three or four times a week-- and wanders through the entire library. He has been on every floor and, I think, walked down every book aisle. As he goes down the aisles something strange happens. Miscataloged and mislabeled books jump off the shelf and attach themselves to him as if he were electrostatically charged. I don’t know how he does it, but he has found more mislabeled books than anyone who works in the library.

Everyone who knows Dr. Lane knows his formidable intellect. He seems to know everyone who wrote in the ancient world. Obscure authors are his favorites and I am always glad that I do not have to face him in an oral examination. But people might not know that he also has a complete knowledge of the Library of Congress classification scheme. He often discusses it with the Ellis catalogers and explains their mistakes to them. When they appeal to the Library of Congress as their authority, he writes letters to the catalogers there and explains their mistakes to them.

His knowledge extends beyond mere classification schemes, however. He also makes a point of knowing the names of the people who work in the library, from the staff at the circulation desk to those in the acquisitions department. As a humanist, he wants to know your name if he is going to goad and sting you.

Like a good gadfly, Dr. Lane is persistent. If something is not right, he stings and presses until it is made right. Sometimes journals need claiming. Sometimes books need claiming. Books go missing from the Classics Seminar Room. Whatever it is, he never forgets until it is corrected.

Dr. Lane has kept me so busy there have been times when I thought that I worked for him and not the library. But, to be fair, there have also been times when I thought that Dr. Lane worked for the library and not for the Classics department. When we were moving books out of the library to an offsite depository, Dr. Lane spent days looking through books one at a time to be sure that nothing important would be sent away by mistake.

As I am frequently the object of his stings and goads, I have frequently been tempted to offer Dr. Lane a cup of hemlock, but I know that all his goads and stings are for a greater purpose--the library collection, and I reconsider.

The University of Missouri will lose an excellent teacher now that Dr. Lane has retired, but the library will not lose its gadfly. I expect Dr. Lane to keep coming into the library once or twice a week and to continue sending me e-mails telling me to claim this or that journal issue. Dr. Lane shaped and maintained the classics collection before he retired, and he will continue to shape it after he retires.

Future students and scholars who use the collection may not know why it is a good collection, but those of us who know Dr. Lane will. Thank-you Dr. Lane.