In a far corner of Widener's "B" level just off a tiny locker-room for lady employees, stands a huge bronze door. The door is kept carefully locked--for behind it Harvard hides its dirty books.

If you want a novel by Henry Miller or William S. Burroughs, a back issue of Playboy or U.S. Camera, or any one of several hundred sociological and medical textbooks, do not waste your time in the stacks. These items are not for the undiscerning eye of the casual browser.

Go instead to kindly old Miss Elizabeth T. Droppers at the main reference desk. If she can be convinced that your motives are pure, she will take from its secret hook the key to the XR cage, disappear into a distant elevator, and reemerge eventually with the juicy morsel. After a stern warning not to mark any pages or remove any pictures, the forbidden fruit is yours to enjoy for as long as you like--provided you don't try to take it out of the main reading room.

Does Harvard University, which makes no bones about limiting the heterosexual hours of its students, also try to censor away the vicarious pleasures of reading?

"No," says Miss Droppers, "it's not that we're puritanical--we protect these books because most of them are out of print."

"No," says Louis A. Sassow, acting head of Reference and Circulation, "those books are in the XR cage primarily to protect them from theft and mutilation."

"No," says Miss Susan M. Haskins, Associate University Librarian for Cataloguing, "it's just that we need tighter control over what I call the 'high voltage' material."

None of these reasons seems to justify completely the XR system. Many of the restricted books are not only still in print, but can be purchased for under a dollar in any drugstore in the Square. They are hardly worth the trouble of stealing from Widener. Many of Widener's locked-up books stand on the open shelves of Lamont and even of Hilles--unmarked and often unread. Undergraduates seem much more interested in defacing Ec 1 textbooks. There is little voltage in an 1888 treatise on "Why Priests Should Wed" or a Russian medical text illustrated with curvaceous line graphs--both classifiedXR in Widener.

What is it about a book that lands it in the XR cage? The answer lies beyond the tiny locker-room, just past the grimy sink inside the bronze vault fitted for two padlocks and perhaps a bolt.

The XR books, which total about 2000 (no one seems to count) line both sides of a dimly-lit iron cage. The binding of each volume bears the pure white call-letters "XR" and a mysterious number (no one seems to know what they mean).

Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? blushes the first book. Next to it stands a box of pamphlets labeled "Birth Control" in trembling black.

Outside the bronze door, several ladies from Binding are getting sack lunches from their lockers.

"Hey, somebody left this door unlocked."

"Aw, that's a lot of trash in there."

"It's art, my dear."