Bars on books jar Harvard students

The students who have long cherished the small library inside Dunster House, Harvard’s oldest dormitory, discovered a new feature there this week: two brass bars stretching across nearly every shelf, making the books impossible to peruse.

The unannounced change - in effect making the library into a kind of museum of hardbacks - astonished those who revere the musty collection and have become accustomed to indulging in its broad span of history, fiction, and other genres.

When Jacob Sider Jost, a fifth-year PhD student who serves as a resident tutor at Dunster, noticed the bars screwed into the shelves, it smacked of some kind of “anti-intellectual’’ measure that was either punitive or part of a trend turning printed literature into more an artifact than a resource.

“It seemed very peculiar that anyone at the university would want to actively prevent students from handling books,’’ he said. “There’s a very negative response to how this was done. There was no warning and . . . worse than being locked, the books are actually permanently fixed on the shelves, from which they cannot be removed.’’

Dunster officials have since apologized to concerned students and have explained that the bars were needed as a temporary way to protect the books - some of them highly valuable volumes or irreplaceable first editions signed by authors - after it appeared that several works had been stolen.

Government professor Roger Porter, master of Dunster House for eight years, declined to identify the missing books and would only describe them as having “considerable value.’’ He said about 250 bars were installed because they presented an inexpensive option to protect the books while the college catalogs them and considers its options.

He does not know when the bars will be removed.

“With more than 10,000 books, we don’t know how long it’s going to take to do an inventory,’’ Porter said. “But until then, we needed a way to secure them. Our whole interest is in preserving a wonderful library.’’

But students complained that the collection now seems just for looks, akin to a Potemkin village, and that there could have been other ways to protect the books while allowing students access.

“Something of the same effect, creating less drama and insult, would have been to put glass doors on the [book] cases,’’ said Sarah Jessica Johnson, a junior majoring in history, literature, and French who called the decision to use the bars “rash.’’ “These then could be opened with a key at the discretion of a librarian, leaving the books available to students.’’

Richard Menchaca, a senior majoring in English who works in the university’s library system, called the bars a “totalitarian approach’’ to security.

“To lock the books up is one thing, but to withhold the keys is quite another,’’ he said. “Besides, what is a university without its books?’’

Dunster is not the first library to experience a theft at Harvard, which has a collection of nearly 16 million books.

In 2001, university librarians discovered that 46 books, journals, and pamphlets printed about the time of the French Revolution and valued at an estimated $10,000 had been stolen from Widener Library, the university’s main library. The year before, librarians revealed that 41 rare Chinese books worth more than $1 million were stolen from a secure area of the Harvard-Yenching Library, the largest collection of East Asian books outside Asia.

The books at both of those libraries remain accessible to students.

“I was confused when I was notified, went to the library to confirm the story about the bars, and was even more confused when it appeared that they could not be opened by some sort of key,’’ said Mohindra Rupram, a senior who majors in history and relies on Dunster’s collection of the Loeb Classical Library, copies of Roman and Greek authors in the original Latin and Greek and in English translations.

He said much of his concerns have been mollified after learning the library would move some classics and other works not deemed invaluable from behind the bars, which Porter promised would happen soon.

Still, Rupram said something will be missing.

“A huge part of going to Harvard is the House experience, and the limitations on the books in the library - one of our most beautiful - take away from that experience,’’ he said.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.