A Cuddly, Cozy (La)Monster

Cries of sacrilege and inevitable mayhem over a café in Lamont Library were printed on this page as early as October, 2005. With fresh memories of scantily clad Dudley Co-op residents and flying burritos, concerned studiers and bibliophiles were rightfully worried that Lamont might become the type of library that The New York Times recently exposed in “Lock the Library! Rowdy Students Are Taking Over”—a center of chaos and disorder.

Five months after its ribbon-cutting, however, the Lamont Library Café has settled—after a few decor and menu changes—into a comfortable place along side the library’s traditional offerings of books and desks. Pandemonium has not erupted. Books have remained relatively grease-free. I would even wager that, in general, Lamont is a more productive and rewarding place than it ever was (at least for those students who have avoided boredatlamont.com).

To some of the café’s regulars (myself included), that statement might seem facetious: Does anyone work at night in the continuously packed café? No. Touché. Freshmen girls giggle at the countertops with their non-fat, sugar-free, mocha chip frozen lattes, biology students converge at desktop computers to browse YouTube instead of their missed lecture videos, and Social Studies 10 types gather in the back with Marx and Durkheim in hand, but who are they kidding?

Thankfully for the true studiers, though, the café has created a black hole of productivity where social types and procrastinators have met to wile away the hours. To my knowledge, there have been no screams, no trapeze artists, and no comedy groups climbing the reading room walls during the fall semester. The third floor reading room—dare I say it—has become boring. Should the café receive all the credit? Who knows. But for some reason, library shenanigans—such as last spring’s impromptu 3 a.m. dance party—were blissfully absent from the library proper even during reading and finals period. The café has rewarded the social types with a haven and the worker bees with a respite from their hated disrupters.

Of course, not everyone purposefully wastes time in the café: I have seen a fair share of robots who—with ear buds in place to drown out the rumble of blenders and annoying giggles—can write a paper or pound through a sourcepack (or at least appear to). But even though these quasi-workers like to think of themselves as fitting with the traditional Lamont type, they have chosen the café as their place of work for a reason, and judging from their average weight, that rationale is not linked to their proximity to food.

It is because the café is a guaranteed social center—that missing core in the Harvard undergraduate experience. I often find myself strolling through the café for no apparent reason other than to check who is there, with the comforting knowledge that I will almost always know someone. Maybe that’s an indictment of my social circle, but if the variety of people in the café is any indication, I am not alone in feeling its aura of sociability. Rather than gains in work, café dwellers—including those who purport to be “working”—have gained the valuable addition of extra social time, while not feeling the guilt of the “Harvard” student who chastises himself for not living in the library.

As long as the café continues to be undisruptive to the rest of the library, and even act as a magnet for the disrupters from the reading rooms, it should be a welcomed sacrilege in the world of books.



Andrew D. Fine ‘09, a Crimson associate editorial chair, is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House.