In Brittan the Norfolk city council has been secretly undertaking an £82,000 sting operation to eradicate a scourge that has plagued the county and left its citizens cowering for far too many years… over due library books.
I would hate to see what they do if you don’t pay your parking violations.
This 15 year old has formed a collection of over 3000 library cards, and now he’s starting to put it online.
My collection started in the summer of 1999, when I was 6 years old. I was visiting my grandparents, who live in Washington State. I had always liked to go to libraries and ask to look at their library cards, just to see what the design looked like. When I went to the Anacortes Public Library, in Anacortes, Washington, I asked to look at their library card, and they said I could have it. This started me on a journey that would involve long hours on the computer, addressing envelopes (can you believe the cost of stamps!) and believe it or not, traveling across the country. Since I started collecting library cards 8 years ago, I have accumulated over 3,000 library cards from all 50 states and 74 countries.
Thanks to Fine Books for first seeing this
For everyone who enjoyed Richard’s article about Things Found in Books, you should read the comments from The Chronicle for Higher Education, who ran the story in their paper.
I think my favourite was the first one…
When I attended the same Univ that my Dad had 30 years earlier, he told me to go check out his dissertation. I did and found a $10 bill inside! I called him and told him. He had forgotten that — when he had recently earned his doctorate — he had placed that bill in the library’s copy of his dissertation, just to see if anyone ever read those things. 30 years later, it was still in there. I initialed it, replaced it, and returned the book.
… all I ever find are receipts, what have you found?
Imagine you are on a vacation in Cuba and an un-scrupulous security guard offers you the chance to sit in Ernest Hemingway’s Chair for $10, or take a look at his library for another $10.
But that’s when the short, sallow-faced secret policeman had come out with his extraordinary offer. I could have any book, any book at all, in Hemingway’s library for two hundred dollars.
An initial covetousness flooded through me. The first editions were what appealed most, especially ones by Graham Greene, Paul Bowles, Saul Bellow, Jack Kerouac, and perhaps if I looked hard enough I’d find that legendary inscribed Catcher in the Rye “Ernest, here’s remembering that time we spent liberating the Ritz bar, your buddy, Jerry.
Adrian McKinty from The Times didn’t succumb to the temptation, but would you?
Saad Eskander is the director of Baghdad’s national library and has been tasked with rebuilding the stacks after nearly 60% of their documents were burned or stolen during the fall of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime.
Eskander might dream of having the problems that beset the British Library, a building where there has been a recent furore about readers having to wait 20 minutes to deposit their coats and about a so-called ” frappuccino” culture of undergraduates that is besmirching the institution’s scholarly reputation. Does he worry for his own safety? After all, some armed groups in Iraq must hate what he’s doing at the library. “I never have a bodyguard,” he replies, “because that attracts attention. This idea of having bodyguards, changing cars two or three times, is very stupid. If they want to kill you, they will do it. If you are lucky you will stay, if not, you will be killed.” That is not to say he hasn’t taken precautions: the 46-year-old has moved house four times with his wife and year-old son since taking up the job.
Scott Douglas, the author of Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian talks about the changing times in public libraries, and dispels the rumor that the library will soon be a great place to pick up chicks…
I say that each person’s idea of the perfect library would differ greatly, however the Daily Telegraph reports all you need are these 110 books…
Though I do have to admit they seem to have covered their bases.
In Colombia, they’re trying.
A country in which 13 million people lived below the poverty line could fill a football stadium for a poetry festival. Colombians are lovers of culture.
Someone asked me if Wales was part of England the other day. A good way to insult two nations. Clearly, the Library of Congress needs to get out an atlas and learn that Scotland and England are different places.
This gets my vote for best book t-shirt in recent memory.
Some of the most stunning libraries in the world, I get a sense of awe just looking at the photos. Which I’m sure do no justice what so ever.
The Guardian blogs that libraries aren’t dead yet.
In 2005/6, 361m books were loaned from all public libraries across Britain. When you quote this figure to library doom-mongers, first they look shocked, then they say, disparagingly, “Well, of course, it’s all Harry Potter and How to Knit a Chicken”. In reality, crafts, diets, how-to and the boy wizard account for only 30% of all loans: nearly 250m books a year are borrowed simply - gasp - to be read.
The Guardian has an article about some of the unheralded treasures that can be found in Britain’s libraries.
An anthology of poetry more than 1,000 years old, a Georgian roll call of abandoned babies, and the tragic fate of a cow in wartime Dorset are among the gems short-listed in a competition organised by the British Library to reveal treasures hidden away in Britain’s regional public libraries.