Toman the Seeker

My first encounter with Michael Toman came on a Monday morning in February of the damp winter through which the citizens of South Pasadena were subjected to my attempt at becoming a reference librarian. He had been assigned the unenviable task of holding my leash at the reference desk through a morning shift. We sat a few feet apart exchanging small talk to kill the minutes until the doors came open. I don\’t recall a word of what we said; I was too worried about looking bad. Somehow I had come to feel that I should be instantly expert or at least highly competent in matters of reference from the initial moment. Toman seemed to sense my unease; he kept up a pleasant stream of banter until the clerk turned the key in the lock. He\’s a good talker and I almost forgot that I was afraid of making a fool of myself.

And then the patrons arrived to give the day some meaning. A man came up to ask about a novel; my partner gave a tickle to the keys and brought up our holdings; somebody asked for directions to a place in town; Toman accommodated them. Before the first hour had passed, he was letting me lend my penny\’s worth to the situation and I felt the knot in my gut loosen. When the shift was over I gave some thought to what had gone on there at the desk. I didn\’t have anything like a complete portrait of the man, but there was enough of a sketch to think about as I drove the few miles home.



I have in this lifetime seen quite a few folks work a reference desk. I have done it myself, as a callow youth in a college library where the budget didn\’t support anything more elaborate than my own services on summer evenings. I have watched the good, the imperfect and the indifferent, but I came away convinced after that first shift that I had never seen anything quite like Michael Toman.



If you came across him in the street you\’d think he was an insurance salesman, perhaps the owner of a clothing store; put a tape around his neck and he\’d pass for a tailor. Away from the desk he gives no sign of what he is or does; he seems like a middle-aged guy gone a bit soft, an ordinary man with an unremarkable face and manner.



Even at the desk he seems to be little more than a mild presence as he awaits the arrival of a patron. Then the customer comes up and the man with the haberdasher\’s face asks his question: \’How can I help you?\’ The voice goes with the face and the pressed dress shirt, but there is something in the eyes that hints at more. The customer says, \’I was looking for a book about opera singers,\’ and at the completion of that sentence, Toman becomes a librarian.



He responds softly, \”I think I can find you something.\” The voice is the same, but there is something in the tone that suggests he will find you something, right here, today-that you will not go home without something about opera singers, just as you would not have gone home without something about tulips or manganese or the tax code. Nothing is more certain than that Toman will find you something. I have never seen otherwise, except when the request is so strange, so difficult or so abstruse that the collection and his effort will not support a reasonable solution, in which case the patron is sent elsewhere-and not merely out the door to find his own way, but with direction to another place, a place with more or better or deeper or more appropriate resources. Toman makes sure of that; the way he works a customer, you would think he was on commission.



Come to think of it, he acts like a waiter whose pay comes only in tips. His technique is to let you have a say, whereupon he responds like the head waiter of a good restaurant: he never disagrees with the customer\’s request, never alters it, hardly ever asks for explanation. If the man wants oysters out of season, Toman will simply advertise that they have a fine port which goes better with beef, in his most convincing voice, which seems to bear the experience of decades. The customer who desired the mystery we didn\’t have will likely come away with one we had that is of the same variety, and which will doubtless work to the same effect, for Toman is a connoisseur of such things, of many such things, as one believes him to be from his first word; he does not so much project confidence in himself as in the process: from his first sentence, the man disappears into a function in which he is merely a component. The game as he plays it is not about Toman but about the Search. Your search is his quest, and he will likely take better care of it than you would in a week of trying.



The man with the pale face and the manners of a maitre d\’hotel will take you himself through the mysterious aisles to find the item that will please you most. He does not point and never gestures; he merely begins to walk toward the place he expects to find your treasure, and of course you follow. On the way to your rendezvous with literature or non-fiction, Toman will deliver a small lecture, just a few choice words about your selection, perhaps about the genre or the author. He will say, \’Asimov\’s work is so broad in scope that one finds him in many categories, as we shall no doubt discover.\’ He says \’we,\’ and the follower believes that the search is for him, too-that it is the foremost thing on his mind, the only thing in focus.



When the tour is done, the patron will find himself back at the desk, where his guide will inquire whether he has any other desire; somewhere in all this Toman will have discovered whether the person has a library card, whether they know they can review their own record on a home computer, and provided some other tidbit of information to close the episode; generally he presents them with a schedule of hours as a sort of parting gift.



This routine, if such a variable sequence can be called that, is repeated over and again for the entirety of the shift, for every shift at the desk. Two things make it different from the work of most others: the first is depth and the second, technique. Depth is so individual an attribute that it hardly makes sense to talk of its acquisition, but technique is a different matter altogether. One can learn technique; one may practice method, and there are few better models than Toman at the desk, but there is something behind his effort, a desire that fuels his consistency. Fresh or tired, Monday shift or Friday hours, Toman is the very same person to anybody at the desk. It isn\’t that he doesn\’t flag or need a rest, it is that he doesn\’t want you to feel that you have gotten him at the end of his string-he doesn\’t want to be tired for you because you didn\’t come in looking for a tired librarian. You came in looking for a book or some music and a good attitude would certainly be welcome. Toman\’s manner and appearance arise from many years of visiting libraries; he gives you what he wants to see in a librarian, because that is what a librarian is, what a librarian does, until the relief comes or the lights flicker and it is time to head off home. For Toman, technique is the right thing in the right way for everybody who comes through the door. He takes a silent stubborn pride in this. You can read it in his eyes.



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When they set me out to work with Michael Toman, the first thing I noticed is that he doesn\’t waste a moment of time. He always seemed to have a pile of work with him of some sort to take up the moments between patrons. Quite a lot of the pile consists of book reviews. Toman is a librarian of the old school; he thinks that he can and ought to get a look at a fair portion of the new books and reprints that flow from the vast machinery of the publishing industry. The reason he can read so many reviews is that he subscribes to them; that and he seems to check the \’please send\’ box on every coupon he comes across. The result is that he receives every book blurb on practically everything written in English. And reads them. There is a purpose to this exercise. Toman is building a collection.



Toman doesn\’t have a specialty, though he concentrates in a few areas. Right now he is attempting to enlarge our music collection. In practical terms that means he is trying to stay a step ahead of theft, damage and obsolescence by selecting CDs that are worthy of a well-educated and affluent community. In order to do this, a person would have to know an awful lot about music. He did not, at least not at the outset, but he knows a good deal now, because he has made it his business to know, made a study of types and artists and periods and composers, in addition to whatever he had accumulated in the way of personal tastes over the years. When I asked him about the accretion of this knowledge, he passed it off the way you would if I had been astonished that you sent in your gas bill on time. To him this is only the way of the librarian.



If you turn left at the reference desk, just beyond the stairs there lies the Teen Room, a spot where we direct the noisier adolescents to crack their chewing gum. The lure of the place is Toman\’s collection; its centerpiece is the comic book shelves, where action heroes, space creatures and Little Nemo elbow each other for room in a wild universe. I knew who Little Nemo was before I came to the library, but Toman is the first human I\’d met who had a similar interest. But he more than trumps me in the area of Elastic Man and wipes me out completely where Batman is concerned. What the man doesn\’t know about comic books isn\’t worth knowing. I have suggested that this is evidence of wasted youth; his response was that I hadn\’t seen anything yet. The collection keeps growing as fast as my friend can obtain new titles by purchase or donation. These aren\’t cheap items and they have a tendency to walk off, but Toman isn\’t dismayed. He knows that only popular stuff gets stolen and keeps plugging the holes when we have the cash.



Toman deals in science fiction like an expert; in American fiction like few others who are not teaching the subject. He is wide and deep, and where he is deepest nobody has seen the bottom. He is a veritable ocean of erudition about the mystery genre; many and many a time he has shamed me by discussing some writer whom I ought to have known myself, but didn\’t; he knows the oldest ones, the merely antiquated and the out-of-print, the new, the modern and the post-modern; the noir, the cozy, the weft and warp of the category top to bottom and in-between. If there is a significant mystery writer living within two days\’ ride, Toman knows him, knows of him, has probably heard him speak or could pick him out of a crowd. May God help you if you ask for a mystery recommendation on his watch.



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