On Hiatus

Librarians on Wheels

I know, when you normally think of librarians on wheels you think of those old boxy bookmobiles rambling around on county roads, delivering books to patrons in areas not fortunate enough to have a real standing library. But that's not what I'm talking about. Instead, I'm talking about roller derby librarians, who smash ribs and stereotypes at the same time.

Meghan Gaynor, that's her in the front in the red, is actually hanging up her skates. Apparently, being a roller derby queen (and yes, Jim Croce is playing in my head right about now) is not a sport that one normally plays later in life. Like beer pong, it's an activity best enjoyed by those of the younger set.

But then this got me to thinking. We used to have carhops back in the day, where the waiter or waitress would bring your food out to you in your car while on skates. Why can't we adopt that business model (since libraries nowadays will accept anything from the business model) and just put skates on our librarians? It should please administrators as we would be able to get a book off the shelf just that much faster. Laid off half the staff? No problem, just throw them on some skates and they can zoom around the library and all your patron service problems arising from decimated funding will vanish almost as magically as your book budget did.

There could be one downfall though. I can only imagine the endless committee meetings about what type of skate would be allowed. One side arguing for old school, another for in-line. One side arguing that we must preserve our cultural traditions, the other arguing about the need to embrace new technology. And in the end, the patron just wants to know where the section is for 796.21.

A Plethora of Forgotten Words

When I was doing my time serving this great country of ours, I had a army buddy who would say the most ridiculous things. Not things that were grammatically incorrect or even mildly amusing, just words that shouldn't be used during a military drill. One day, during one training in the middle of a field, he said "Look, there's a plethora of trucks." What? You couldn't just say a shit-load of trucks like everyone else in this unit would have said? I was convinced he had one of those word a day calendars because he would come up with the strangest words.

In his honor, I wanted to point people to this website that is sponsored by the people who put out the Oxford Dictionary. Save The Words offers a plethora of words for you to adopt that have fallen out of favor. Need just the right word to describe that homeless fellow hanging out in the library lobby? Maybe he's mingent, which means he's discharging urine. Exactly how little are these words used? Well, the spellchecker said I spelled "mingent" wrong, so there is some subtle satisfaction in knowing that I am slightly more intelligent than the spell-check function.

While I am one is who is much more interested in seeing language evolve (witness all the times people have criticized my choice of words and I have to tell them that I am creating new ones), for those who would like to save the past, and sound slightly pretentious doing so in my opinion, have a go.

There's some scray stuff going on.....

....and it's not even Halloween.

Apparently there are ghosts in two (count'em, not just one, but two) libraries in Scottsdale, Arizona. It appears that even the dead like to hang out in libraries. (I'm guessing it's to get better Internet service because I hear the service that you get from the other side is just horrible)

Apparently a conversation was caught on tape that went as follows:

"Do you sit in that chair a lot over there in the corner?" the reporter asked.

What sounds like a male voice saying "no" can be heard a few seconds later.

This just proves that ghosts aren't stupid. Anybody who has ever worked at a public library can tell you that you shouldn't sit in a chair there. At my old job, we had to take the chairs out of commission every now and then and sanitize them. So that seems like a softball question to ask a ghost. Instead, they should have asked the ghost who it is that keeps stealing all the books on paranormal activity from the library. That would have been some useful information.

Librarians have good taste

Jean Preston, according to all of the newspaper accounts, was a modest woman. They say she travelled by bus, bought her clothes from catalogs, and ate frozen dinners. But this librarian seems to also have known a thing or two about the finer things of life. Here's what they found in her house after she passed away:

Two panels of the San Marcos altarpiece by none other than Fra Angelico.

The two panels, one of which you see to the left, sold at auction for approximately $3.5 million. Her dad bought them back in the sixties when she commented on how much she liked them. Original purchase price? Less than $500.

But just like those infomercial ads, "Wait, there's more."

She also had a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and another by Edward Burne-Jones. Estimated worth of the pair: $2 million.

Don't worry though, as a librarian, she also valued books. She had a rare edition of Chaucer's works, worth about $150,000.

All told, she had approximately $8 million worth of valuables in her home. Not bad for a retired librarian living on a pension.

What a librarian looks like

Sure, when you picture a librarian, you usually think of the bun, the glasses, yadda yadda. But that's not what Giuseppe Arcimboldo saw when he thought of librarians. He imagined them being made out of, what else, books. This sixteenth century Italian painter, though employed as a royal court portraitist for his day job, painted highly amusing portraits of people made out of such things as roots, vegetables, and flowers. Arcimboldo, though his work was always well regarded, received renewed attention three centuries after he died when surrealists like Salvador Dali discovered his work.

What librarians stand for

Believe it or not, I don't like every book we have here in our library. In fact, the contents of some of the books make me downright furious. But I buy them anyway, and I make sure they are available for our patrons to read. I believe that is my responsibility as a professional librarian.

That's just what Jeanne Layton did as well. Ms. Layton passed away this week, but in 1979 she was willing to lose her job to stand up for one certain book to be in the library, Don DeLillo's Americana. She believed that members of the community should have access to a broad range of books, even a book that some might deem obscene.

As a veteran myself, I fully appreciate the sacrifices made by our troops in uniform. But we should also recognize the sacrifices made by those in communities across the country who defend our civil rights, and so often receive little notice. Ms. Layton eventually got her job back, but it came at a great price. And I wonder, how many of us would be willing to risk our livelihood so that a single book could remain on a library shelf? I publicly admire her strength but secretly wonder if I could be so strong if I was placed in the same situation.