How to Recommend a Book

 Malia Wallan, "How to Recommend a Book," New York Times Magazine, October 24, 2021, p. 15.

"Recommending books you love is the hardest thing of all," says Joyce Saricks, 72, who worked for nearly 30 years as a reference librarying in suburban Chicago.  Saricks has written several textbooks on so-called "readers' advisory," which largely disappeared from libraries after World War II and is credited with helping spark a national revival in the practice of librarians' suggesting books to patrons.

...

When Saricks was stumped, she often led patrons into the library stacks, where book spines would spur ideas and conversation.  "My colleague used to say, 'The books know when you're desperate,'" she says.  

COMMENT

The librarian in this story is an author of a book for librarians that, according to this author, helped restore a culture of reading and literacy to contemporary libraries.   The story includes a plug for physical browsing, which can lead to finding something unexpected.   The Internet most definitely does not know when you're desperate. 

How Laura Ashley Endures

 Amanda Fortini, "How Laura Ashley Endures, New York Times Oct. 24, 2021, p.ST3

In 1952, a 28-yar old secretary attended a traditional handicrafts exhibition at the Vitoria & Albert Museum in London.  Inspired especially by the hand-printed fabrics she encountered there, the young woman returned home and told her husband that she had never seen anything like them in stores and wanted to try making some similar styles herself. The pair spent 10 pounds on wood for a screen, diyes and linen and, after puring over a handful of instructional library boos, began sild-screening textiles at the kitchen table of their small London flat. 

COMMENT

This gratifying story involves two cultural institutions.  A museum exhibit that inspired a look and library books that showed how to achieve it.   In any case, as Fortinini writes "If you are a woman who grew up in the '80s or early '90s, chances are you have a memory of cveting, wering or living with something by the brand [Laura Ashley]". 

Taking the Crossword for a Test Solve

Steven Moity, "Taking the Crossword for a Test Solve," New York Times, October 17, 2021 p. 2.

The puzzles first go to three testers who work for Mr. Shortz.  One is Nancy Schuster, a former crossword editor and champion of the first American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the country's oldest crossword competuition.  LIke Ms. Eysenbburg, she test-solves the puzzle and keeps her eye  out for anything that is off.

Brad Wilber is the chief faxt checker.  A former librarian, he brings his attention to detail to meticulously check as much of the informaiton as possible.  "You have to watch old commercials on YouTube, you have to check song lyrics, you have to check quotations," Mr. Wilber explained. He then calls Mr. Shorz directly and discusses any errors he has found and discusses potential wording changes. 

COMMENT

My dream job!

Desert Vision

 Helen Macdonald, "Desert Vision," New York Times Magazine,  Oct. 17, 2021 pp. 55-

Villeneuve was 14 when he first saw the book, an edition with an arresting cover in the small library near his school in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec: The face of a dark-skinned man with piercing blue eyes against a remote desert background.  It was beautiful, he told me, lifting a copy with the same cover from his desk.  He has kept it though the years and is using it to write the second movie ("Done" is a famously complex novel, and Villeneuve only agreed to adapt it if it could be broken into two films).  Looking at it even now evokes the same emotions he felt back then" "mystery, isolation, loneliness."  Billeneuve has dreamed of making "Dune" since he was a teenager; he tried to make his move as "close to the dream as possibel, and it was very difficult, becaus the dreams of a teenager are very totalitarian.  I was not expecting would be so difficult to please that guy!

COMMENT

Denis Villeneuve says that he has dreamed of making Frank Herbert's novel "Dune" into a movie since he was a teenager.  The cover art of the edition at the public library evoked an aesthetic for the movie of his imagination.  The inspiration of the life-changing book is explicitly tied to the book as a physical object.  Villeneuve bought his own  copy of the same edition to keep as as a kind of  talisman.

The Donor and the Borrower

 Robert Kolker, "The Donor and the Borrower, New York Times Magazine, Oct 10, 2021, p.24-

Last year as the pandemic set in, Dorland attended three different online events that featured Larson as a panelist. The third one, in August, was a Cambridge Public Library event featuring many of the Chunky Monkeys, gathering online to discuss what makes for a good writing group.  "I know virtually all of them," Dorland said.  "It was just like seeing friends."

Larson, while on camera, learned that Dorland's name was on the attendees list, and her heart leapt into her throat.  Larson's life had moved on in so many ways.  She'd published another story.  She and her husband had just had their baby. Now Larson was with her friends, talking about the imporatance of community. And there was Dorland, the woman who'd branded her a plagiarist, watching her.  "It really just freaks me out," Larson said.  "At times, I've felt kind of stalked."

COMMENT

This is from an article that appeared online under the title "Bad Art  Friend." In the article, Dorland has been "mean girled" out of the Chunky Monkeys. The article avoids taking sides in the plagiarism issue, but I've been in Dorland's shoes, listening to a bad boss present at a library conference about how to have "difficult conversations" after she had had a difficult conversation with me and let me down badly.  I went to the presentation and I made sure she saw me in the audience.  I did not, of course, make a scene, but I did privately hope she was freaked out.  It must have been infuriating for Dorland to see her former "friends" boasting about what a great, supportive community they had.   

Public events like this are, well, public.  Librarians can't really know who will show up or what their relationship is with the presenters.  

Finding the Mother Tree

 Suzanne Simard, "Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest," Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. 

I spent the day writing up my planting reports before mailing my envelope of yellow needles to the government lab to have the nutrition levels analyzed and checking the office for reference volumes about mushrooms.  There were plenty of resources about logging, but books on biology were scarce as hen's teeth.  I called the town library, glad to learn that there was a mushroom reference guide on their shelves.  [p. 24]

...

I collected the mushroom book and filed my report on the plantation but vowed to keep my observations quiet and do my homework.  I often feared I'd been hired into the men's club as a token of changing times, and my goose would be cooked if I came up with a half-baked idea about how mushrooms or pink or yellow quilts of fungus on roots affected seedling growth. [p.24]

...

Then I discovered what I was looking for.  After days of searching journals in the university library, I happened upon a new article by a young Swedish researcher, Kristina Arnebrant, who'd just found that shared mycorrhizal fungal species could link alder with pine, delivering nitrogen directly.  I sped through the pages, stunned. [p.121]

...

I dashed out of the stacks and called Robyn from a phone in the foyer.  [p.121]

COMMENT

Simard describes instances where library materials offered answers to her forest observations.  The book is an excellent account of the progress of scientific research, describing a process of observation, literature research  and review and experimental design.  However, by the last chapter Simard says that the scientific method is too limited to fully understand the complexity of the world.  She writes

 I'd been taught in the university to take apart the ecosystem, to reduce it into its parts, to study the trees and plants and soils in isolation, so that I could look at the forest objectively.  This dissection, this control and categorization and cauterization were supposed to bring clarity, credibility, and validation to any findings.  When I followed these steps of taking the system apart to look at the pieces, I was able to publish my results, and I soon learned that it was almost impossible for a study of the diversity and connectivity of a whole ecosystem to get into print. [p. 283]

Simard finds that her "discoveries" were already part of indigenous knowledge, but of course there was no published record of this knowledge and even if there had been, forresters wouldn't have read it.   

 

 

 

Yale Says Its Vinland Map, Once Called a Medieval Treasure, is Fake

 

Alan Yuhas, Yale Says Its Vinland Map, Once Called a Medieval Treasure, is Fake, New York Times, Sept. 30, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/us/yale-vinland-map-fake.html

“The Vinland Map is a fake,” Raymond Clemens, the curator of early books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, said in a statement this month. “There is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest.”

The university said that a team of conservators and scientists, analyzing the elements in the map’s lines and text, found high levels of a titanium compound used in inks that were first produced in the 1920s. Mr. Clemens said the team hoped to publish an article in a scientific journal. Ars Technica, Smithsonian Magazine and Gizmodo, among other news outlets, reported the conclusion this month.

...

Mr. Clemens said the map would remain in Yale’s collection, calling it a “historical object in and of itself” and “a great example of a forgery that had an international impact.”

COMMENT

A map that was supposedly made in 1440 was determined to be a forgery after many years of debate over whether it was authentic.  The archivist notes that the map is still worth keeping in the library collection as an example of a clever forgery. 

 

 

My Brother Will was a Force of Nature

 Pat Bagley, "My Brother Will was a Force of Nature," Salt Lake Tribune, p B1, B6.

Will could be irascible.  He would pound the table to make a point, an action that sound technicians at KUER dubbed "Bagleying the table."  Injustices 150 years old were fresh wounds to him.  The folks at the Church History Library came to dread his demand for documents and called him Gimli amongst themselves.

COMMENT

Will Bagley was a historian who wrote about the LDS Church.  The librarians probably loved helping him with his extreme research projects, but they also probably really did call him Gimli.