“The ‘O’ Terror of ’88”

For much of the year 1988, several American university libraries were held hostage by what is now commonly known as The ‘O’ Terror of ‘88.

It began on Monday, January 25th, when a student employee at the on-campus library of Sampson University in a suburb of Salt Lake City paused in mid-shelving to inspect the book she held: Rachel Ray by Anthony Trollope. The student had heard of Trollope but had never read anything by him, and as the title intrigued her she opened the book curious to read a paragraph or two.

Mere minutes later the student employee was pounding down the aisles of the eighth floor literature room to reach the lobby elevator. Frantic, she pushed buttons. Rather than wait, she took the stairs. In her arms she cradled a number of books, both hardcover and soft.

In the head librarian’s office the books were opened and the terror was revealed: In every word on every page of every volume present the letter ‘o’ had been filled in completely, as if it were a bubble on a college entrance exam answer sheet.

“Pen,” Jonathan Lemley, the head librarian of Sampson U., was quoted as saying. “Why did they have to use pen.”

Within an hour the library was evacuated of all non-essential students and faculty — anyone who wasn’t willing to help out in the full-scale inspection ordered by Mr. Lemley. The search did not end until five days later, when it became apparent that the attack sunk far deeper than anyone could have fathomed.

Out of a total of 887,655 volumes, 548,237 had been irreparably damaged by having every ‘o’ on every page filled in with pen. In most cases the offending color was either black or navy blue, but in several notable instances the perpetrator or perpetrators had used colors as varied as burnt sienna, fuchsia, purple-people-eater, lime green and periwinkle.

“True,” Mr. Lemley was quoted as saying in the wake of the library-wide inspection, “most of these books were unpopular. They hadn’t been checked out for five, ten, even fifteen years. But they are still books. Were…still…books.”

Just as SampsonUniversity was releasing news to the public on the full extent of the damage done to its library holdings, other university libraries were finding they too had fallen victim to the ‘O’ Terror.

In New York, Mortson University counted nearly half its holdings as being irreparably damaged. In Mississippi, Van Loren College counted a whopping 91% of all books on all floors as being marked cover-to-cover with the dreaded bubbled-in ‘o’.

“They even bubbled in all the ‘o’s on the copyright pages, the bastards,” one official, who asked to remain anonymous, said.

“What happened?” Ube Santorany, head librarian of Xitix College in Rapid City, South Dakota wondered aloud at a press conference given on Tuesday, February 23rd. “Were we just not looking? Were we reading any of these books?”

“Or were the books not reading us?” his colleague, who asked to remain anonymous, added.

“Thank God we caught this in time,” said Tanya Fallaton, head librarian of Vics University in Seattle, “before the terror really spread. As it stands the culprits ‘o’-ed over mostly things like the outdated texts on human sexuality from the turn of the century and the collected poetry of Gene Fitzmonotgry. Just imagine if they’d gotten their horrible little pens on the ‘o’s of J.D. Salinger or Maya Angelou.”

The terror continued unabated. More and more books turned up dead, their pages filled with completely black or colorful little circles that had once been the legitimate ‘o’s of legitimate words. By the summer of ’88 many college libraries across America were in maximum security mode, ready for lock-down at the slightest indication that an ‘O’ Attack was underway. Cameras were installed. Private guards were hired. Sniffing dogs were set loose in the halls and corridors and stairwells.

“What we are dealing with here,” Mr. Lemley of Sampson U. was quoted as saying on September 14, 1988, “is a coordinated effort by a group of well-trained terrorists who want nothing but to discourage reading in our university libraries. This is not just one lonely sick and crazed individual. Far from it: this is a fanatical group capable of terrorism on a grand scale.”

But no one was ever caught. Libraries braced for a war. They braced for the Big ‘O’ne that never happened. On Wednesday, December 7, 1988 all university libraries victimized by the ‘O’ Terror received an unsigned one-page letter, the typed comments of which read ‘I have filled the void.’ The attacks abruptly ceased. All efforts to trace the letters back to their source proved futile, and the ‘O’ Terror of ’88 was filed away on the shelves of history.