Today’s Saturday Stumper
“‘Your library is your ’: Erasmus.”
“The Department of Everything”
In “The Department of Everything,” Stephen Akey writes about working in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library.
Who uses libraries most?
From the Washington Post Department of Data.
University library or storage room?
“A university library without academic librarians is called a storage room.”
Firing the librarians
Western Illinois University fires its librarians.
Librarians and teachers (Project 2025)
Look out.
The British Library was hacked
“How ironic that the most quaintly analog form of research possible, using physical books in a physical library, has been devastated by the hijacking of a digital system”: Carolyn Dever tells the story of the Halloween ransomware attack of the British Library.
E.M. Forster on books on Frasier
Words in Niles’s library.
Elvis, not to be found
The Elvis shrine at the UIUC library appears to be no more.
Little libraries
In Santa Barbara, California, the artist Douglas Lochner has created six little libraries in the shape of punctuation marks and typographical symbols.
First!
Illinois bans book bans.
Books UnBanned
Books UnBanned offers readers between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one, anywhere in the United States, a year’s free access to the Brooklyn Public Library’s e-books and audiobooks.
Don’t like a library book?
From Take action for libraries, a handy step-by-step guide: “What do I do if I don't like a book at the library?”
“And behold!”
From Steven Millhauser’s Portrait of a Romantic.
Games and books
Video games, all day. But we still have a library.
NYPL
An NYC tax photo, with the library looking like an urban Emerald City.
“That’s our slogan”
A great line from from the Only Murders in the Building episode “Hello, Darkness.”
A Brooklyn public library
A few years ago, when I was asking my mom for memories of her Brooklyn childhood, I wrote this down: “As a girl, Mom walked to the Boro Park library on Saturday mornings. It was on 13th Avenue, toward the higher street numbers.” And there it was, between 52nd and 53rd Streets.
Banned books, free
For a limited time, the New York Public Library is making four often-banned books available to borrow in digital form anywhere in the United States.
The keepers
Archibald MacLeish’s “Of the Librarian’s Profession” (1940): When wars are made against the [human] spirit and its works, the keeping of these records is itself a kind of warfare. The keepers, whether they so wish or not, cannot be neutral.
“By Dillon His Self”
Dillon Helbig, writer and illustrator, placed his work on a shelf in his public library.
Signatures in unexpected places
Elvis, Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger: signatures found on due-date slips and in library books.
Richard Macksey’s library
I recognized the name , but I’d never seen the library: 51,000 books.
A notebook and a pencil
When Gary Paulsen was a teenager, a librarian gave him a library card, then a book a month, then a book a week, and then a Scripto notebook and a no. 2 pencil.
Martin Radtke and the NYPL
“Inscribed here are the words of an immigrant whose life was transformed by the Library and whose estate now enriches it.”
The joys of browsing
Recently updated
Charge! Now with photocharger news from the Brooklyn Eagle, 1952.
Recently updated
Charge! Now with a link to a film from the Brooklyn Public Library that shows the Remington Rand photocharger in action.
Additional reverie
Perry Mason, Paul Drake, and the Remington Rand Photocharger.
Charge!
In search of lost library technology: the Remington Rand Photocharger.