A Momentary Taste of Being

Gorgeous--Czech Baroque Library via Books inq

Have you seen these?  They aren't just in Polk Co (one south of here) but my branch has vending machine books for the Spanish speaker--nothing yet for English.

Egyptian Students Protecting Libraries

One wonders in some of these whether the books were ever touched

A blogpost from some years ago, but worth seeing again-- Great Libraries of the World via Tea at Trianon

A foretaste of the John Updike Archive

Reading what our inner (or outer) teenager bought Who doesn't love a super-low-price booksale?  You can risk a quarter on any sort of literary nonsense--who knows what will turn up?

It is horrifying to admit to any duplicate books in a collection other than study copies and pristine copies, or personal copies and loaner copies.  However, I have discovered the following duplicates in my library and it does say something about me and the library I keep: Daisy Miller , Washington Square, Portrait of a Lady, Mrs. Dalloway's Party, Kew Gardens, (oh, here's a mortifying one) Flush, The Sea and Poison, Kokoro, Some Prefer Nettles (this is explained by the fact that my original is falling to pieces). And that's only the start, I'm afraid.  I think I shall leave off plowing through the newly opened room for the evening to give myself respite and breathing space to recover from a surfeit of nearly everything.

Today went to the library and finally found Orhan Pamuk's Istambul .  It could be justified to place it in biography; however, it was filed in biography under the name of the person who translated the book from Turkish. A miscatalogued book is potentially a lost book.  It certainly is of no use to those of us who would check 949.xxx for historical books about Turkey and even less to those looking for a biography of Pamuk under P rather than K (I think--Kelly or Kellogg) for the translator.  I'll bring this to the attention of the circulation department, but I rather doubt anything will be done about it.  I recognize the monumental amount of work that goes into correcting this kind of error and given that I'm one of three people in my area likely to want to read it--there is certainly no reason to go through the effort.

So Many Books links to a study of recreational reading in Academic Libraries I know that when I used to attend Ohio State University, I would spend hours upon hours in the main library building wandering through the shelves of fiction, philosophy, and religion (my degree is in Paleontology).  I discovered the lesser known works of Gaston Leroux, and countless other wonder major and minor as a result of having access to the wonders of this amazing library.

This is a sad story. And one that we may hear more of in our quasi-literate culture.  Libraries simply aren't a priority because we know that they don't perform any important function in our education and continued functioning as citizens. I admit, that there are a great many people who never set foot inside a library; however, with the services offered today--computer use for those without, videos, audios, books, classes, meeting spaces, book groups--libraries are an asset we should never take for granted.