Library Stuff

As I head into my 10th year as Director of your library (Where has the time flown?), I’ve written on all kinds of topics and honestly after a while, it gets a bit tougher to find something to talk about that won’t put you to sleep.
Well this time out certainly won’t be scintillating or provocative but perhaps a bit amusing and maybe if I’m lucky, a chuckle or two. You see, I’m going to expose some library miscellanea right out of “The Whole Library Handbook 4”, Dewey # 020.973 EBE that is usually reserved just for librarians. It talks about everything you can possibly imagine about librarianship and more. I know, hot stuff, but you got to work with what you got. So let’s see what nuggets of wisdom can be revealed from this holy grail of library world………..

-Quotes:


“There are, of course, worse places to wait for someone than in a library.”


-Valerie wolzien, All Hallows Evil (1992), p. 84


“In a liberry, it’s hard to avoid reading.”


-Anonymous student, in New York Times, July 23, 1976, p. A21


“For myself, public libraries possess a special horror. The stillness and the heavy air, the feeling of restriction and surveillance, the mute presence of these other readers, ‘all silent and all damned’, combine to set-up a nervous irritation to quiet study.”


-Kenneth Grahame, Pagan Papers (1894) p. 57.



-Librarians in Detective Fiction:


“The Gutenberg Murders”, 1931, by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning


Nine leaves from a Gutenberg Bible have been stolen from the rare books collection of the private Sheldon Memorial Library in New Orleans. The chief suspect, assistant librarian Quentin Ulman, turns up dead. Head Librarian Dr. Prentiss- “a scholar of pictures and legends, tall and slender, with a droop to his shoulders that suggested much bending over a desk, and long delicate hands that seem made for caressing the crumbly pages of old books”- may not be the quiet bibliophile he seems.


“The Cruellest Month”, 1991, by Hazel Holt


Irascible part-time librarian, Gwen Richmond is killed by a falling Encyclopedia Britannica in the New Bodleian Library at Oxford, but British literary critic Sheila Malory suspects foul play.


“Enrollment Cancelled”, 1954, by D. B. Olsen


Two female undergrads at Clarendon College are murdered, both of them know to straitlaced thirty-something librarian Miss Pettit.




-Odd Book Titles:


“How to Cook a Bigfoot” by Theata Iona Crowe, 2000


“The English: Are They Human?” by Gustaaf Johannes Renier, 1931


“Santa Claus: Last of the Wild Men” by Phyllis Siefker, 1997




-Librarians in Film:


“All the Queen’s Men”, 2001:


Romy is a sexy librarian and underground resistance fighter in Nazi Germany who operates a safe house in the library’s attic.


“Firestarter 2: Rekindled”, 2002:


Pyrokinetic student Charlene McGee works part-time in the campus library.


“Ophelia Learns to Swim”, 2000:


Dian Kobayashi is the Librarian, a super-heroine who is a fount of knowledge.




-Haunted Libraries in Florida:


Miami, Southwest Miami High School:


Books in the Media Center are often rearranged and the lights flicker.


Tampa, Howard W. Blake High School:


A cold spot can be felt around the tables in the back of the library.


West Palm Beach, Palm Beach Atlantic University Library:


A janitor who disappeared mysteriously haunts the library near an old janitor’s closet.


Well there you go; a plethora of useless library info for your entertainment. But I think it would be a fitting end with a library joke. It goes like this:


A patron asked the librarian why “Tales of Robin Hood” had been withdrawn from the collection. The librarian replied, “Too much Saxon violence.”


Hey, it’s the best I got.