I volunteered in a library while in highschool, and was totally amazed by the weird life of librarians. All I remember about the librarian I mostly worked with is that she was a book-protector-wrap-Nazi. She got really angry if even a quarter inch of excess wrap was wasted. Also, one of my friends (also volunteering) accidentally ripped opened a packet of salt into a book, and she was made to go through page by page with a special brush, as shaking the book off was aparently a big no-no.
You asked. This is going to be long - and I'm leaving shit out.
No lie, librarians are a pretty odd bunch. Not
necessarily in a bad way, but to really Be in the Business, so to speak, you need to have the Library Science degree (I think the ratio of time / money spent on required qualifications versus salary for librarians is probably the worst in civilization,
ever, except for the garbagemen in "Men at Work"), which means that most of the people you come across at libraries are exactly the sort of people who decided a long time ago that libraries are where they want to spend pretty much the majority of their waking lifespan. A lot of these people are kind of unhappy that way too many library patrons have been trained by our capitalist, customer-service culture to be selgiraffe and impatient and basically sort of infantile (I use the word "infantile" in its literal sense, i.e. babies go
apeshit when their needs aren't met for a
moment) shitheads about Getting What They Want. Tread accordingly.
I understand / can explain the book-protector-wrap-Nazism because, like so many specialty library supplies,
the shit is expensive. (Freaking out over a quarter-inch is excessive, though, and sounds like someone is frustrated and indulging in a little bit of authoritarian release.) You would not
believe how much seemingly ordinary stuff costs, probably because it's a small market.
As far as the salt incident - that spun me out for a second, because I've never seen one of those "special brushes"; perhaps because they cost $6K each and are made with materials from the Moon - you have to understand that we're expecting any given library book to be handled, literally, hundreds and hundreds of times. (Read cover-to-cover, no. But there is one
hell of a lot of handling going on.) The expectation is that, too, ordinary people don't necessarily have the same reverence for Materials that we do - it sounds almost like an elitist opinion, really; I can hear y'all saying "I take
extra special care of my library books!" because I'm sure that you do, but generally, people just don't give a shit about what happens to "free stuff".
So, yeah, she could have shaken the salt out of the book, but look - if
one page goes missing from a book, we have to retire it. Them's the rules. And there's no guarantee that we'll replace the book, even if it's still in print; I wish I could tell you otherwise, but sometimes a book gets withdrawn due to damage and we look at the statistics and we look at the budget and if a fifty-dollar book only circulated five times in its, I don't know, three years in our collection, the reasoning is that it's not cost-effective to replace it. So there you go - that book is now unavailable to the community (and, in the inter-library loan sense, there is one less copy available to the world).
Don't fuck*ng get me started on people who steal books. I think it's nice, RKB, that you thought about donating a copy, but here's another sad fact - not every book that gets donated to the library gets added to the collection. I'm sorry that your librarian is a miserable asshole who put you off. Are you not allowed, in general, to browse the stacks for books solo? Because that is kind of insane.
Ark, does your library have inter-library loans? Maybe the can have the book shipped to you from some other library, or there's always Amazon.
For a book like Franny & Zooey, I wouldn't really recommend an ILL. It's a paperback and really fairly ubiquitous; you could probably pick it up in a used bookshop for the price of an ILL fee.
Poll
1 (4.3%)
Author
Topic: August TOUAMB Book o' the Month Poll (Read 9196 times)