The Invention of Wings

 Sue Monk Kidd, "The Invention of Wings," Penguin Books,  2014. 

Acknowledgements
...
The following institutions, which along with Historic Charleston Foundation and Drayton Hall, served as resources: The Charlesong Museum, the Charleston Library Society, the College of Charleston's Addlestone Library and the Avery Research Center, the Charleston County Public Library, the South Caroliniana Library, the Aiken-Rhett House Museum, the Nathanial Russel House Museum, the Charles Pinckney House, the Old Slave Mart, Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, Lowcountry Africana, Middleton Place and Boone Hall Plantation. [p. 371]
...

Jaqueline Coleburn, rare book cataloger at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., for her enormous assistance in providing me with a treasure trove of letters, newspapers, Anti-Slavery Convention proceedings and other documents related to Sarah and Angelina Grimke and early-nineteenth-century history. [p.371]

COMMENT

To write her historical novel, Kidd made use of a resources from a wide variety of cultural institutions including museums, historical societies and libraries.  She mentions one librarian by name who was especially helpful to locate historical materials that contribute to the historical accuracy of a fictionalized story. 

The Radical Feminism of a 17th-Century Priest

 Judith Shulevitz,  "The Radical Feminism of a 17th-Century Priest,"  September 2021, Atlantic pp. 94-101.

I stumbled upon Poulain at the Barnard library in 2016.  I was reading up on feminists of the past because I felt stifled by the feminism of the present, particularly the kind just then embodied by Hilary Clinton, whose presidential campaign leaned hard on the notion that she would shatter the glass ceiling -- never mind that most American women were just trying to get by.  I wasn't struggling to get by, but I wasn't soaring either. 
...

Fully forgotten by the 19th century, Poulain took a long time to resurface.  In 1902, a young French graduate student named Henri Pieron pulled Poulain's dusty books of the shelves of the French National Library, apparently by chance (the copy of On the Equality of the Two Sexes had likely never been opened, since the pages were uncut).  Pieron recognized the significance of his find: He was something of a radical himself, and precociously well read in philosophy.  In a pioneering essay, he described the experience or reading Poulain: "Sometimes the astonishment is such that you feel the need to return to the first page and make sure that the Roman numerals really do say 1673."

COMMENT

A radical feminist book from 1673 is re-discovered twice-- once by the author who feels that there is something missing from "glass ceiling" feminism, and once in 1902.  Shulevitz says that instead of crediting Poulain's ideas, other writers simply adopted them with their own modifications.  Returning to the original source re-introduces caregiving as a feminist issue and one that had been utterly  left out of much contemporary feminism until COVID exposed the lack of support for mothers and other caregivers.  

 Kelly Jensen, "Anti-Critical Race Theory Parents fight The Hate U Give," book Rion, August 10, 2021. https://bookriot.com/the-hate-u-give-challenge/?fbclid=IwAR3xZMSlv3isO98FaNDjN_BxJ_A3708MG1uTShFYKHpVh_Y6mR5fUUEqZdQ

In most parts of the US, if public schools aren’t back in session, they will be soon. If fights about masking or not masking during a global pandemic and rise of the COVID-Delta variant weren’t enough, nor were protests against access to inclusive sexual education material, now teachers and librarians have to fight a third front. Opponents to Critical Race Theory (CRT) are flooding school and library board meetings, hoping to squash use of titles that explore anti-racism. Angie Thomas’s award-winning debut The Hate U Give is one such title under the spotlight by anti-anti-racism activists in Putnam County, New York.

...

The Hate U Give is no stranger to criticism, having been on the American Library Association’s most challenged list since its publication in 2017. Reasons for its continual challenge include it being “‘pervasively vulgar’ and because of drug use, profanity, and offensive language.” 

COMMENT

Librarians are in the role of defending a book from angry parents and maintaining a list of banned books.  Without saying it in so many words,, the article makes it clear that the censors have not read "The Hate U Give" but then again, censors almost never seem to have actually read the books they object to. 
 

 

The Books that Changed My Life Weren't Very Good

 Danika Ellis "The Books that Changed My Life Weren't Very Good," Book Riot  April 209, 2021. https://bookriot.com/books-that-changed-my-life/?fbclid=IwAR0pNwY-CRmK11x3nfG83MySaefkwDiZOCgKpHWyNXdJ9tmq6PGATuKIoGg

I keep a giant list of books I want to read — actually, I keep three: ones available through the library, through inter-library loan, and ones I’d have to buy to read. These have been steadily growing for decades now, and there are thousands of books on them. I also almost never consult them?? They seem to exist just so I can believe that one day I will read them all.

...

I requested the book, and when I began reading it, my mind was blown. Here was a completely different way of understanding desire and identity. Diamond laid out the incredible complexity of the biological components of sexual attraction, and the book included multiple accounts of women who had gone through the same journey as I had. It rewrote my relationship to my queerness, my identity, my understanding of the basic building blocks of desire. It’s also…not a perfect read. It’s cissexist and has a small sample size. It can be incredibly dry. But it changed my life.

COMMENT

To this writer, the library represents aspirational reading. One day she requests a book on the list from the library (Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire by Lisa M. Diamond) and discovers insights about human sexuality that are relevant to her own identity.

I Haven't Read Books by Cis-Het White Men for Years: I don't Miss Anything

 

Tika Viteri, I Haven't Read Books by Cis-Het White Men for Years: I don't Miss Anything. BookRiot.com July 9, 2021. https://bookriot.com/not-reading-cis-het-white-men/?fbclid=IwAR0D9yjnahMHdbJzZMZCdzyZrVQiP73IJ466wMthgZfzxExbflYwl25BUEo 

I’m one of those annoying people who taught themselves to read at age 3 (word up to Matilda Wormwood) and attempted to hide books under my pillow at night. The summer I was 5, my brother was born and I was bored, so I toddled my pre-K self half a mile down to the local library and tried to convince the librarian that she could, in fact, give me my own library card without my mom’s signature. She wasn’t having it, so I walked all the way back home, then back to the library with the completed application in hand. Someone from the local bar called my mother to let her know I was just walking around downtown by myself, and my mom said, “It’s ok, she’s going to the library.” It was a different time.

COMMENT

 I had a similar experience.  When I was 5 I wanted to get a library card for the school library, but the librarian refused to believe that a 5 year old could read.  She made me come in with my mother and read aloud from a book.  The book included the word "orphan" which I did not know and pronounced as three syllables:  "or-pa-han".   The librarian did not tell me I was pronouncing the word wrong until I had read the whole book and I nursed a grudge against her until I went to a different school. 

Can You Please Help Me Get Out of Prison

 Emily Bazelon, "Can You Please Help Me Get Out of Prison?", New York Times Magazine, July 4, 2021, pp 27-33, 47, 49.

It started with an email I received from a retired librarian in Oregon  "Dear Ms Bazelon, Karen Oehler write in July 2019.  "I correspond with an inmate, Yutico Briley, at Dixon," a prison in Jackson, La.  For a couple of years, Oehler and Briley had been writing to each other through a support program for incarcerated people. 

...

Briley mentioned that one of his favorite books was "Exodus,' the 1950's novel by Leon Uris about the founding of the state of Israel, which he borrowed from the prison library cart.  I remembered the paperback copy I checked out from the library when I was growing up.  "One of my faviore things to read about is history," he wrote,. "The book I read is old, and the pages crch when you flip them."

...

I went to law school and passed the bar, but I've never practiced law.  I decided, though I had never intervened like this before, to call a few innocence lawyers on Briley's behalf.  I wasn't sure why -- he was one prisoner among millions.  Was it because I wasn't really planning on writing about him?  Because Briley saw himself in the young men in my book?  Because he mentioned the novel "Exodus"?  I didn't know.  But hen that's often true of relationships and of stories.  One spark catches.  Maybe others follow

COMMENT

What a great library story!  Yes, there are lawyers involved, but Briley's innocence wouldn't have been  established without libraries --first, because of a retired librarian who is still involved in social justice work, and secondly, by his choice of reading that happened to establish a bond with Bazelon.  At age 19, Briley was sentenced to 60 years without possibility of parole.   He spent eight and a half years in prison before a new D.A. was elected in New Orleans who campaigned on a promise to re-examine wrongful convictions.

Invasive Species

 Rebecca Mead. "Invasive Species"  New Yorker July 2021, pp. 20-24.

In the late nineteen-eighties, Finnish researchers, led by a zoologist named Pekka Niemela, gained unusual access to a rare manuscript in the collection of the Vatican Library, "De Arte Venandi cum Avibus," or "On the Art of Hunting with Birds." The book, attributed to Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was made between 1241 and 1244. The Vatican's manuscript, which is in two volumes, was compiled by Frederick's son Manfred more than a decade later, after the original work was lost during the Battle of Parma.  The manuscript passed though the hands of several eminent noblemen and intellectuals before entering the papal collection in 1622. [p.23]

...

Thanks to the intercession of Simo Orma, an academic at the Finnish Institute in Rome, Niemela and a zoologist were granted permission to see the manuscript, under the watchful eye of the head librarian.  The scholars concluded that the four images were of the same bird, and, by examining the remains of pigment on the ancient pages, they ascertained the original creature's coloring.  They could also make an educated guess at the cockatoo's gender: female, as indicated by reddish flecks in the iris of its eye.  [24]

COMMENT

 The presence of an Australasian cockatoo in a one-of-a-kind ancient book reveals historic trade connections.  The picture was detailed enough so that researchers could determine the color of the actual bird, something that they probably could not have learned from a digital image.   Since the Vatican Library is not public, researchers needed special permission to see the book.

Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight

 David Gessner, Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight: Sheltering with Thoreau in the age of Crisis. Torrey House Press, 2021.

If  you look at Emerson's journals, which I have held in my hands at Houghton Library, the thoughts are so fully formed, and the script so neat, that they  intimidate.  Not mine.  Early on I started calling my journals "swill bins," where anything goes including snippets of weather, Dear Diary bad moods, caricatures and cartoons, early drafts of essays and books and sketches of birds. [p. 28]

The next morning, before driving to a radio interview, I visited the Houghton Library at Harvard, where, after applying for an inter-library permit and filling out my special request form, I was handed two of Emerson's journals.  It was starting to see Emerson's actual works on the actual pages and I just sat there for a moment staring at the scrawled longhand and relishing the fact that these were the same books in which he had kept the ledger of his life.  [p.36]

COMMENT

     Here, library red tape seems to create a sense of ceremony as an author pays a visit to the journal of a writer he deeply admires.  Gessner compares his own scattered thoughts to Emerson and find's his own to be sloppy by comparrison.

 

Ken Sleight, an inspiration for ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang,’ loses personal archive in Utah wildfire

 Zak Podmore, "Ken Sleight, an inspiration for ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang,’ loses personal archive in Utah wildfire" Salt Lake Tribune, June 16, 2021,  https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/06/16/ken-sleight-an/

Not a scrap of paper from Sleight’s boxes survived the blaze. Metal filing cabinets melted in the heat and the roof of the steel hut warped. The lettering was peeling from road signs in the ranch named after Abbey’s work — Desert Solitaire, Seldom Seen, Abbey Road — and great swaths of trees were burned. Four homes in Pack Creek Ranch were destroyed, and five others were damaged. Six outbuildings, including Sleight’s hut, were lost, according to Utah Wildfire Info.

Sleight’s nearby home and the rental cabins scattered throughout the ranch, which he bought with his wife, Jane, in the mid-1980s, were spared from the fire. But the loss of other homes in the neighborhood and the historical material that Sleight hoped to use for a book project and to donate to a university archives is devastating.

COMMENT

 A wildfire sparked by a campfire destroyed the historical archive collected by Ken Slight, a long-time environmental activist in southern Utah.   Slight, who was working on a book, had intended to donate the material to a University archives, but instead, due to a careless camper a valuable trove of regional memory went up in smoke.   Librarians could never assemble such a collections of records, letters and photographs associated with a person who is deeply involved in his community.  The archive would have been utterly unique. 

Cool zones: Salt Lake County offers facilities to those seeking relief from the heat

Alyssa Roberts, "Cool zones: Salt Lake County offers facilities to those seeking relief from the heat", 2KUTV,  June 13, 2021. https://kutv.com/news/local/cool-zones-salt-lake-county-offers-facilities-to-those-seeking-relief-from-the-heat?fbclid=IwAR24Yy-uP5DL7_PCQ4TaoQe8KTE3b80DH28S9sp4JJ9_d_bsRGsmSB-Wswc

SALT LAKE CITY (KUTV) — With record-breaking high temperatures in the Salt Lake Valley this summer, Salt Lake County is reminding the public that its senior centers, libraries, and recreational facilities are open to anyone seeking relief from the heat.

COMMENT

Global climate change means that people will be exposed to extreme heat.  Libraries are a place to go for a cool zone.  Use of libraries as a cold shelter was a plot point in the movie "The Public" (2018).

He Made Affection Feel Simple

 Denny Agassi, "He Made Affection Feel Simple" (Modern Love) New York Times June 13, 2021, p.ST6

Although my interest was piqued by Jack's picture, it was his gentleness that drew me in.  Our sporadic small talk was harmless, spanning two months.  I brushed him off, but as I commuted to school and spent hours in the library, he was persistent.

COMMENT

For a commuter student, the library is a place of refuge during the day.  The Modern Love column has been a surprisingly rich source of library stories since safe spaces  are important for initiating  romantic encounters. In this love story, the contemplative library space is where a young trans woman  fantasizes about a man she met on Tinder.  

For a Romance Novelist, a Love Worth Writing About

 Alix Strauss, "For a Romance Novelist, a Love Worth Writing About," (Vows) New York Times, June 6, 2021, p. ST10. 

In March 201, during a visit to the Major Hillard Library in Chesapeake, Va., Kimberlee Stevenson  picked up a copy of "Until I Saw You Smile" by J.J. Murray, a romance writer known for his multiracial story lines and characters.

"I finished the novel in three days," said Ms. Stevenson, 38, the owner of a literary website where she blogs about romance novels and a youth contractor specialist for the Hampton Roads Workforce Council, which offers employment services.  "I thought it was great and I like to meet the authors, so I  sent him a friend request on Facebook."

COMMENT

Reader, she married him.  

Oh, Dewey, Where Would You Put Me?

 Jess deCourcy Hinds, "Oh, Dewey, Where Would You Put Me?" (Modern Love) New York Times, June 6, 2021, p.ST5.

I was busy starting a new library from scratch for a public school in Queens. Wondering is Stefan would support my career, I joked to him that my weekends were "booked."  He smiled and offered to help.  Our first excursion took us to a deceased professor's estate in western Massachusetts, where we spent 14 hours loading 3,000 dusty books into a fleet of U-hauls to bring to the new library. 

...

My school library grew, and I cataloged thousands of volumes in Dewey.  Melvil Dewey, creator of the  1876 classification system, was no hero, having withdrawn from the American Library Association after numerous accusations of sexual harassment. He was forced out of the New York State Library for racism and anti-Semitism. 

...

Before I moved in with Stefan, I donated books that reminded me of my exes to my school library.  I donated film books from my filmmaker and actress girlfriend of almost four years, and the nautical books from my boatbuilder boyfriend who lived in a lighthouse.  I let go of old heartbreak by setting my exes books free among thousands of other volumes in my library to circulate.  Every few years, I bump into them like old friends and reflect on how loving this man and woman prepared me to love Stefan, who knew my story from the beginning and always accepted me.  

COMMENT

This tale of Modern Love is by a bisexual woman who wonders where she fits into "queer"  after marrying a man.  She describes building and cataloging a school library based on book donations.  This used to be a common way to build libraries, but in the digital age, many libraries decided that older print books weren't worth the trouble.  This particular librarian, however, finds personal value in donations that represent memories of past lovers.  Since her home bookshelves are no longer an appropriate place to preserve such memories, she keeps the memories safe in the library.  This access to books that are part of one's past is an important function of library collections.   You never know when it might be time to revisit something you thought you'd never read again. 

User Manuals

 Louis Menand, "User Manuals: Charting a  Nation's Soul through its Best Sellers," New Yorker, June 7, 2021 pp. 76-81.

These sales figures are way beyond the range of even the most acclaimed fiction  Some of the books, such as "The Old Farmer's Almanac" and Emily Post's "Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home," which was first published in 1922, are continually updated and reissued, and still maintain market share.  McHugh says that "Etiquette" used to be the second-most stolen book from the library after the Bible  which presumably is taken by people unfamiliar with the Ten Commandments). 

COMMENT 

Perhaps it's a stretch to say that stealing books is a use for libraries, but theft of library books is pretty frequently mentioned in library stories. However, it's not clear whether or not Jess McHugh (author of "Americanon") fact-checked this claim since online sources say that after the Bible it's the Guinness Book of World Records and books about conspiracy theories and the occult.  At one college library where I worked we deliberately left the magnetic anti-theft strip out of copies of a guide about sexual wellness and replaced it as needed. 

I'm not sure how to categorize this one.  Maybe "Life Changing Book"?

Guiding Stars

 Rachel Syme, "Guiding Stars: How "Who? Wekkly" Explains the New celebrity," New Yorker, June 7, 2021, pp. 80-81. 

The exchange was a case study in the limits of girl-boss culture, and in order to get to the heart of the scandal, Finger and Weber close-read excerpts from Hollis's audiobook and pored over her subsequent apology,  "I haven't read the book," Finger said, with a grin in his voce  "But I can search in the book on google Books and then find the accompanying passage on my audiobook from the library, so I just searched to see if she's ever talked about being relatable, and guess what, she has.  This obsessive rabbit-hole quality can make the show feel almost manic, but it also provides something of  a public service.  If fame can seem like a mystery, Finger and Weber operate like Columbo, casually collecting clues and weighing evidence until they crack the case. 

COMMENT

Here it is!  The first example I've run across that describes an authentic  contemporary Google-based research strategy that interacts with library resources.   The podcasters have a show that features people who are not exactly famous.  in the article they describe researching a mommy blogger (Rachel Hollis) who alienated fans when she admitted to having a housekeeper, and then said that she had never claimed to be relatable.  The podcasters use Google Books and an audiobook from the library to fact-check her claim.  

Woman in the Woods

 

Sandra Steingraber, "Woman in the Woods, Orion Summer 2021, pp. 54-63.

She finds in the woods a fully intact 2.5-acre deer exclosure constructed by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in 1937.  There are sapling and understory pine trees growing inside the fence.  In the biological station library, she finds a cache of old species inventories that researchers and students conducted within and around the enclosure with data going back over several decades.  She learns the techniques of dendrochronology and reconstructs the history of the forest the forest thought tree ring analysis.
....

Off to the right, a truck with an official state license plate drives away down a rutted lane.  It seems that the park naturalist, cleaning out his office at the end of the season, unearthed some correspondence from years past and thought the grad student from Michigan might find something of interest, so he threw the boxes n the back of the pickup and drove them over to her campsite.
...

There is a small library cart of paperbacks.  Only one book per cell.  [Washtenaw County Jail]....
There is ransacking and chaos.  All around the women, bedding , books, letters, bars of soap, pencils, toothbrushes fly though the air.  Who has it?  Who has the blue makeup?  No makeup is ever found, But tucked inside the pages of a library book in the cart one of the men in blue gloves finds the shard of a mirror.  The library cart is removed.  No more books. Everybody back in their cells. Clean up the mess. 

COMMENT

A PhD student finds that The Park library has one version of landscape history; the hidden correspondence contains an entirely different and far more frightening story revealing that the study are was a testing area for Agent Orange and that ecological data was falsified in order to promote use of the herbicide. 

Steingraber becomes a reporter for the student newspaper.  She is singled out for police harassment, apparently for writing editorials against military testing,  and ends up spending 12 days in jail.  In jail  the guards again misuse authority as a tactic of intimidation.  As a punishment for having (or not having) forbidden makeup, the library books are taken away. 

The jail cell is described as a "bookless room" -- the suppression of information whether through secrecy or violence is a crime against humanity.  

Ruth Freitag, Librarian to the Stars, Dies at 96

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/books/ruth-freitag-dead.html"Ruth Freitag, Librarian to the Stars, Dies at 96," New York Times, May 21, 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/books/ruth-freitag-dead.html

Ruth Freitag, a reference librarian at the Library of Congress for nearly a half-century, was unknown to the general public. But she was, in more ways than one, a librarian to the stars.

...

In a way, Ms. Freitag was her own analog version of Google, providing answers to a wide array of queries from writers and researchers in astonishing depth and detail decades before computers and the internet transformed the research process.

“Ruth was known for her ability to find a needle in a haystack,” Ms. Carter said.

Her strong suit was compiling epic bibliographic guides and resources. Her notable subjects included the star of Bethlehem, the flat earth theory and women in astronomy. But her crowning achievement was her illustrated, annotated, 3,235-entry bibliography on Halley’s comet, replete with citations of books, journals, charts and pamphlets, as well as references in fiction, music, cartoons and paintings. It was indexed and bound and published by the Library of Congress in 1984, just in time for the celebrated comet’s last pass-by of Earth in 1986. Even the Halley’s Comet Society in London called Ms. Freitag for information.

“These bibliographies would take months and even years to do,” said Jennifer Harbster, head of the science reference section at the Library of Congress. “It wasn’t like you just found a title and put it in your bibliography. She would annotate it all.”

COMMENT

  Ruth Freitag's job is described as knowing more about how to find scientific information than Isaac Asimov or Carl Sagan.  She answered reference questions and complied annotated bibliographies. Sometimes she helped with things like copy editing that were probably outside of her job description. The obituary notes that authors frequently thanked her for her help in the forewords to their books (always a good place to look for library stories). 

The obituary writer implies that Freitag's skills have been rendered obsolete by Google, but Google won't annotate or evaluate anything for you.  As the Internet has become a source of disinformation, propaganda  and unsubstantiated lies, perhaps the skill of compiling epic bibliographies is due for a revival.

 

Publishing Trade Show Replaces BookExpo

Elizabeth A. Harris,  "Publishing Trade Show Replaces BookExpo." New York Times May 17, 2021, p. C2. 

The Book Show, which will be held virtually May 25-27, is aimed at librarians, independent booksellers and book buyers from major chain stores. It is intended to help publishers push their biggest fall titles, which is when many of the biggest books of the year are released in advance of the crucial holiday shopping season.

COMMENT

    Librarians are part of the target audience for a Book Show held by the publishing industry.   The article implies that librarians have a role in helping sell predicted best sellers, but they also have a role in promoting "sleepers" that deserve more promotion than they got. 

How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning

 

Daniel Markovitz "How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning", Atlantic, May 6, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/marriage-college-status-meritocracy/618795/

Changes in the weightings so tiny that they are obviously arbitrary make material differences in the rankings. In this year’s law-school report, U.S. News issued multiple corrections—for example, eliminating a 0.25 percent weight for the “credit-bearing hours of instruction provided by law librarians to full-time equivalent law students” (whatever that is) and increasing the weighting of the bar-passage rate by 0.25 percent. These maneuvers altered the rank of 35 law schools, including nine in the top 30.

COMMENT

     This article about the fierce competition to get into elite colleges cites library instruction as a particularly absurd measure of excellence.   Apparently, law students are no longer expected to know how to do their research. 

Rereading Lolita

 Ian Frazier, "Rereading Lolita" New Yorker, December 14, 2020 pp. 30-35.

As an unformed kid, I envied his self-assurance and Olympian disdain. I tried to imitate the style, dropping into conversations half-cribbed Nabokov-like phrases (“I scorn the philistine postcoital cigarette”). Once I happened upon a slim volume of his in the New York Public Library which no one I’ve met has heard of. It contained a line that I treasured like a rare archeological find. Published in 1947, the book is a short anthology of verse by three Russian poets—Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev—with Nabokov’s translations, accompanied by introductions in which he explains each poet to an American audience. In the introduction to Pushkin, he describes the poet’s end, when he received a fatal wound in a duel with the French ballroom roué Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d’Anthès, the alleged lover of his wife. About the later career of this pomaded zero who killed Russia’s greatest poet, Nabokov adds that d’Anthès went back to France, got elected to some office or other, “and lived to the incredible and unnecessary age of 90."

COMMENT

     It seems that Ian Frazier learned to write by imitating Nabokov.   While searching the library for all things Nabokov he finds a neglected volume of translated poems and actually reads the introduction (something not everyone does).  There he finds a perfect putdown for a historical nobody -- Hidden Treasure luring in plain sight.