Tucked into a far corner of Lamson Library’s top floor, beside the metallic shelves and shelves of books, is the office of David Beronä (Buh-ROAN), the Library and Academic Support Services Dean at Plymouth State University. His office is roomy, with abstract art decorating the wall beside images of Neil Bousfield woodcuts, a wooden desk nearby, and a silver Apple laptop open before him. He has light gray hair, rounded black glasses, and an eager, welcoming presence.
Mr. Beronä followed a career path about as linear as the painting beside his desk. After taking a BA in English, he moved from Ohio to Maine where he worked numerous jobs-reading manuscripts, binding books, reviewing galleries, and writing up newspaper articles for the seasonal tourists. In the meantime, true to his love for books, he wrote five unpublished novels. His next step was to travel down to Boston, where he earned a Masters in Library Science from Simmons College.
Now at Plymouth, he chairs the Humanities Council, oversees the library, and works on outreach projects to increase the collaboration between libraries. Mr. Beronä still sees himself as a scholar, especially in his prolific passion for wordless books: he’s published thirteen book introductions, twenty-one articles, two book chapters, one book, and over one-hundred seventy-five reviews. That’s in addition to editing two books, serving as a guest editor and exhibition curator, and presenting twenty-five papers.
Clock contributor Kallen Curran sat down with Mr. Beronä to discuss his life, work, and scholarship.
Clock: Where did you grow up?
Beronä: I grew up in Ohio. I was born in Dayton, Ohio, in a little town called Enon. The nice thing about Enon was that it was just a couple miles from Yellow Springs, Ohio, which is where Antioch College is, and it was an alternative college, especially when I was growing up. Educators would come from the college and teach some of our classes. They had beards back then, which was a little non-traditional. I remember one class they came in and asked us to rearrange our chairs from a strict linear order to a circle, and it was the first time anyone attempted to move any chairs or desks. So it was nice to have them around and grow up with that different aspect.
Clock: Did you go to Antioch?
Beronä: No, no I didn’t. I went to Wright State, which was the state university next to Antioch.
Clock: What did you study?
Beronä: English.
Clock: Were there any favorite classes there?
Beronä: I liked the poetry class. The first class that I took had acquainted me with T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which is still one of my favorite poems. It also introduced me to Kenneth Patchen who was a Beat poet and also an experimental writer with what he called picture poems. He would draw pictures that worked well with his concrete poetry, and I still admire his work quite a bit.
Clock: What work did you do after college before becoming the dean here?
Beronä: A lot. I initially came up here and just loved New Hampshire and Maine. I had a number of jobs associated with books before I went to get my Masters in Library Science. I was a book binder in Dillingham’s Bindery up in Bangor, Maine, which was really exciting. I learned how to do fine leather work, board and cloth, and everything associated with binding. So I loved that and, using my English major, I would go into a town and see if they needed any help. And sometimes they did. When I moved to North Berwick, Maine, I went to the York County Coast Star and they said, “Yeah. Why don’t you do a little weekly town report?” So I started that, and then I picked up a gig doing art work, art reviews, and I called it “Seeing Things.” In the summer we published a little ‘rag,’ and it would have my reviews in there of the art work around the area or the openings of the galleries. So I always pushed myself that way to use my writing skills as much as possible.
I became involved with Weiser Publishing, which was a New York publisher who moved up to Cape Neddick in the eighties and moved his whole production team there. I was an assistant production manager, so I actually got to read all the manuscripts that came in, and then I’d move those over to the president and the production manager if I thought there was anything worthwhile to pursue. And then obviously write the rejection letters. And as a writer myself, I took a little bit more time with those rejection letters because I used to receive tons of those myself.
Clock: Did you write mostly poetry?
Beronä: No, I did a little poetry, but mostly fiction. I’ve written actually five novels; none of them were published. The thing about that was that when I was in graduate school in Boston at Simmons College I had a report to write about something visual like an illustrated book. The assignment was to find an illustrator that you enjoy and write a paper about what was important with this illustrator. So I wrote a paper about a Moby Dick illustrated comic, and the instructor at the time was the noted scholar of modern photography. She said in class, “Oh, Mr. Beronä, I see you like comics.” This was graduate school, and I think she was trying to embarrass me. Well, I don’t embarrass easily, and I love comics-I always have-so I said, “Yeah, I love comics.” And she said: “Well, this was a good paper. Is there anything you like more specifically about comics?” I told her about loving adult comics, which at that time were Zap Comix and Crumb-they called them underground comics-but then I mentioned to her that there were these things called woodcut novels. She knew nothing about those, so what she did was have me let her look over the weekend to find out about them and then have breakfast on Monday.
So, in a true scholarly fashion, she looked through all the indexes and tried to find more information about this topic, and there wasn’t any. There really wasn’t. There was one article that was written in the seventies about it, but that was it. So she came back to me; we talked; and she said, “Oh my God. This is an unbelievable topic. No one’s doing any research on it. You should really pursue that.” So that’s what I did. For the last twenty-five years, I’ve written numerous articles and a book. She was the one who opened that door. We had great conversations-I said, “I really wanted to write the great American novel.” And she said, “Oh, I did, too. And look at us: we’re like scholarly nonfiction writers.”
Clock: Can you tell me about what a wordless book is?
Beronä: Basically it’s a book-a lot of times it’s referred to as a woodcut novel because a lot of the wordless books in the beginning used woodcuts for the images. There’s a lot of cartoony pen and ink; lithographs were used. Any type of illustration that does not use text to support or to caption the page. That’s basically it. It’s a narrative that’s told basically in pictures.
Clock: Why do you like wordless books so much?
Beronä: I like them because it’s challenging as a visual narrative, and I’m always curious about how my mind works from one panel to the next or one page to the next. And what that’s called in technical terms is closure. If you’re looking in the book, reading from one panel to the next, the little gutter is a pause for you to interpret what’s happening in the next panel. We all have what’s referred to as a hungry eye, trying to find meaning out of images that we’re given. So we extrapolate an image we have in one panel to make sense of the next panel. We identify characters from one panel to the next. We may identify signs even though they may be wordless.
Clock: What place do wordless novels have in today’s society?
Beronä: They’ve been around for a while, since the early part of the twentieth century. And I would say that it’s growing a lot. The whole genre of graphic novels, comics per se, has become very large. The thing about it that’s really interesting is that, since there’s no words and the idea of literacy is not involved, the idea of language is not a barrier so artists (and I use that word generally to include writers as well) can tell stories and have it understood in almost any country.
Clock: Can you talk about your motivation to write about these books? Why not just read them and have it end there?
Beronä: Because I’m a scholar. I prefer to review them, write about them, and then get others interested in these books through my writing.
Clock: You’ve written dozens of articles and papers. How do you find the time to write?
Beronä: I set time aside. Because I’m a morning person, I get up early, meditate for twenty minutes, and then write for forty minutes. I’ll also write in the evening if I have to, but the morning works best. It’s all about making the time.
Clock: What got you into meditation?
Beronä: I’d struggled in the past to meditate, to get to that place when I’m meditating. Then a friend of mine suggested I work my way up there minute by minute, starting with one minute. So I’d set the timer and do it for a minute until I worked my way up to twenty. I also do verbal sayings to get myself in that mindset-away from everything else-that’s just great.
Clock: Who’s your favorite author?
Beronä: It changes as I read more and more literature. Right now I’d say Lu Xun-he’s a Chinese writer who brought European wordless novels back to China in the thirties to inspire revolutions. Overall, though, I really like Masereel.
Clock: What’s a typical day like for you as the Dean of Lamson Library?
Beronä: I’m in charge of the library, the writing center, the PASS office, and the Learning Technologies and Online Education department. I deal with the personnel a lot, like if there’s an issue with the staff, and I’m in charge of working with the building. So if there’s an issue with one of the bathrooms, for instance, [administrative assistant] Daphne Morin and I take care of that. So it’s personnel and building first, then meetings, then projects, and I also do outreach.
Clock: How do you see Lamson Library changing over the next few years or decade?
Beronä: I see a lot more electronics. I don’t see the end of print, as some people suggest. It’s always going to be print and electronic. What I see is that we won’t have as many secondary materials; it wouldn’t make sense if every library in New Hampshire has two copies of all of Robert Frost’s poems. Books will be shrinking, not by much, and we’ll see more study areas. We’ll also be more distinguished by our special collections, like our archives.
Clock: Do you feel that libraries are underutilized now that so many people have easy access to information through the internet?
Beronä: No. If you look at Lamson, it’s still the most used building on campus. It’s because we’ve brought in other departments, like the ITS [Information Technology Services] help desk. Students feel safer and more comfortable with more people around. If you look at a library as just a place for books, then sure it’s not going to do well. The library is a social, physical place that also allows for academic endeavors.
Clock: Are there parts of the library that you would like more people to try out?
Beronä: Electronic resources. We spend a lot of our budget there, but it seems to be underutilized. If we see that people aren’t accessing certain ones, we’ll drop them because why pay for something no one uses?
Clock: Do you think a university library has a role to play in the surrounding community?
Beronä: We do play a big role, such as collaborating with the grade school. So we bring in eighth grade students for a day to come here and research a topic for class. That way they get to see what a university library is like. We also waive the fee for a library card for Plymouth and Holderness residents.
Clock: What would you say to a person who says the library doesn’t matter?
Beronä: I would say they have a narrow perspective of life. To me a library is the door to anything and everything you’re looking for.