Soon after David Sleasman became librarian at the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play in Rochester, New York, he got a phone call about checkers.
The caller wanted to donate his father’s collection—not of boards or game pieces, but of the literature of checkers. “I’m thinking, ‘How much can this be?’” Sleasman remembers.
The answer? Twenty-seven storage tubs.
It’s all in a day’s work for Sleasman, who (along with two catalogers and two archivists) wrangles 260,000 library holdings, 3,000 linear feet of physical archives, and nine terabytes of digital archives, all pertaining to the history of play. The library and archives are housed at the Strong National Museum of Play, where kids and adults romp through exhibits of toys through the ages, play pinball on vintage machines, and navigate a ropes course.
Things in the library and archives themselves, though, are a little more sedate. “We’re separated from the public, except to hear their screams on the ropes,” Sleasman says.
The library and archives attract enthusiasts and scholars alike, who come to peruse items like sketches by the creators of the Berenstain Bears, the diaries of Parker Brothers founder George S. Parker, and more than 46,000 toy-manufacturer catalogs from the past 125 years. “It’s a little hair-raising to read the call numbers,” Sleasman says of the toy catalogs. “You have to be very centered as a human when you shelve that material.”
If he gets his way, though, it may one day be even harder to concentrate in his workplace. “I keep advocating for moving arcade games into the library,” he says. “If there’s one library in the world that should not be quiet, it’s ours.”
