The Librarian at Play

My lover gave me an early Christmas present. Something he picked up for a penny. The Librarian at Play. A book by Edmund Lester Pearson, printed in 1911. It made me cry. It's such a quirky little thing. I'm almost as fascinated by the cataloging details as I am the actual content. The binding. The repairs. (It was an old library book at S.U.N.Y. Geneseo.)

The index is the most amusing thing. I have the second edition. Here's what it says:

"Since the publication of the first edition of this book two or three readers have pointed out that it needs an index. By the addition of an index, they say, its value as a work of reference would become almost wholly negligible. Impressed by the force of their remarks, I employed expert aid, and the index now printed at the end of the volume is the result. It was prepared by Miss Narcissa Bloom, an honor graduate of the Philander Library School, and it may therefore be relied upon as the flower of modern library science."

Then, here are some of the best entries from the index. My favorite entries are those for genealogists.

Ancestor Worship, see Genealogists. 

Animals, library classification of, impossible, 170. 

Authors, Young, hectic vanity of, 8. 

Children's Librarian, nefarious plot against a, 141. 

Extra-illustrators, see Snippers. 

Feet, Pigs', not in public library, 85. 

Flippancy of librarian, deplored, 300. 

Goat, Wild, see Wild Goat. 

Gray Hairs, cause of, to librarians, see Genealogists. 

Highball, Scotch, as a life-saver, 36. 

Librarian, see also Children's Librarian. 

Misers, clinking habits of, 58. 

Nuisances, see Genealogists. 

Pests, see Genealogists. 

Scotch Highball, see Highball, Scotch. 

Telephones, slowness of, when librarian is waiting in rain, 29. 

Thorns in the Flesh, see Genealogists. 

Wild Goat, see Goat, Wild.

From 1906 to 1920, this author wrote a column called "The Librarian" for the Boston Evening Transcript, a newspaper that died in 1941. Ahead of its time in that way, I suppose, given the current climate for newspapers. (It was ahead of its time in other ways, though. It was the first major American daily to have a female editor in 1842.) I want to go find these columns and read them all now.

I've had to use the OED twice now to look up words and in one case was almost stumped. (You, too, can nerd out with this book. It's really quite humorous. Library stories.)

Anyway, I didn't know about cutting pages. What did that mean? From the book:

"As there were no gauges on the books about the Flemish Renaissance, I had no data to go on, except the fact that although she declared she had 'skimmed through' them all and found them 'very helpful,' she had not, so far, cut any of the pages. I did not mention this to her, as she might have retorted that we ought to have cut them ourselves. Which was quite true."

And it led me to this equally nerdy bit and subsequently here. Interesting to both of us, probably. I guess I'd assumed that cutting somehow meant making a copy of something and I was trying to conjure up what type of technology might be used to do that in 1911. But, no. It's referring to the unbound edges of a book not being cut open yet. How do these things get past me?

I guess I should have just asked him about it. Funny. And all this for a penny.