Books in Bookstore Settings

The dream of having a little bookstore of one's own is so common and so enticing that novels about bookstore owners is a sub-genre of its own. These books are popular with the library staff:

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson mentioned in this blogpost


The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin reviewed in this blogpost.

Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley  You can download this charming 1917 novel for free online http://manybooks.net/titles/morleychetext04prnsw10.html

Reading about bookstores is closely linked to other bookish dreams such as:
So you want to own your own little library? Well just get one from...
The Little Free Library

Do you dream of delivering books by donkey?  Take a look at this video of the
Biblioburro

You can follow the Biblioburro and Little Free Library on Facebook to keep up with your bookish day dreams.

Have your friends emailed you the slideshow of beautiful libraries worldwide to drool over, or do they just send those things to librarians? Well here is the slide show
http://mentalfloss.com/article/51788/62-worlds-most-beautiful-libraries


The Berkeley Heights Public Library has a Pinterest account where we indulge in library dreaming. Follow us here https://www.pinterest.com/berkeleyheights/

And finally, pictured here is the temporary library location of the Berkeley Heights Public Library where we will be open to the public until our dream library is built at the new Berkeley Heights Municipal Complex on Park Avenue. Stay tuned for details of our move. Until then, happy book dreams.

Consumer Reports & People magazine on your iPad/PC

If I had to name the two most in-demand magazines here at the library, it would be Consumer Reports and People magazine.  In fact, we have to keep the latest issue of People behind the circulation desk to safeguard it from a persistent thief.  And we often get calls or visits from residents looking for Consumer Reports, whose independent ratings are the mainstay of residents shopping for a new appliance or device or car.







It's very easy to swipe through a digital version of People or Consumer Reports now, even if the library is closed. Simply download the Flipster app from the app store.

If you'd rather read the magazine on your computer, go to the library website and click All Things E (E for electronic), then click on Flipster.

Either way, you will need your library barcode number handy once you open up Flipster.

Life and Death at the Library

Strains of bagpipe music filled the library this Saturday afternoon. A bagpiper was playing for guests leaving a wedding at the church next door. The library has also witnessed many funerals next door, also with bagpipe accompaniment.  When a library regular goes on to that great library in the sky, his or her obituary is printed out for the staff to reminisce over. 

Earlier today a pair of filmmakers identified themselves and said they hoped to film a short interview in the library at some future time, a time when the library is busy. I pointed this out and one said "But libraries are generally quiet, aren't they?" If only the bagpipes had started up then, but it was morning, and bagpipes in the morning means a funeral, so it was all for the best.

Now I can hear children's voices downstairs in the children's department. "Daddy! Can we have theeeeeeese?  Can we take them HOME?" I help an obstetrician download an audiobook while chatting about the c-section rate.  Someone from children's calls upstairs and says "Run this through your memory bank: a picture book told from the ants' point of view." This turns out to be Two Bad Ants.

Someone wonders where the Bill O'Reilly audiobooks are. As I'm busy with another patron, I give him the Dewey Decimal numbers and direct him "past the pink flamingo," a phrase that gives me endless satisfaction whenever I get to use it.  People are preparing for trips and vacations, which means they are willing to drive here from other towns to check out a copy of Fates and Furies and they need to be able to watch their Hoopla videos while offline.

Happy reading and have a good trip.

Desk Set: News Librarians then and now

In the 1957 movie Desk Set starring Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, computer engineer Richard Sumner played by Mr. Tracy, plans to automate the TV network library run by Ms. Hepburn's librarian Bunny Watson. The librarian thinks her excellent memory can beat the computer's 'brain' in any fact-finding contest. In the end of course, Tracy and Hepburn fall in love and the computer does not replace the librarians, but only serves to supplement their brainpower.

I always loved Desk Set because in a strange life-imitates-art way, I was a librarian in a newspaper library before automation arrived. In the early 1980's I worked at the National Bureau of the Baltimore Sun. The bureau had offices in the National Press Building in Washington, DC and covered all the Washington news, every Federal agency from the White House to Congress to the Supreme Court. The reporters had incredible memories for their beats, but their filing systems seemed to be somewhat haphazard, consisting of piles of paper scraps and floppy discs surrounding their desks and weighed down by coffee cups. The bureau had a small library consisting of a few thousand books, a dozen or so regional newspapers and a wall of filing cabinets filled with clippings from those newspapers. The librarian maintained the clip files and created an index card file to search it. But mostly the librarian was expected to know every little thing off the top of her head - and quickly - because daily deadlines make reporters very anxious. When a reporter's brain or 'filing system' could not come up with the facts, he or she would run to the library demanding the information as soon as possible, preferably yesterday. Computerized news databases like Lexis Nexis were just coming on the scene at that point and the Sun did not yet have access to it. I had files on Congressional Budgets, Supreme Court cases, defense system tests, the invasion of Granada, the ongoing trial of John Hinckley and so on. Most importantly, I kept byline files for each correspondent. These files answered the frequent question,
"WHERE IS THAT COLUMN I FILED A WHILE AGO ABOUT YOU KNOW.... DO YOU HAVE IT?!!!"
An office filled with people fueled by lots of caffeine meant lots of fast talking and occasional  odd behavior, but I'm not telling. Well ok, there was the time a reporter flung all my files and books off my desk in a fit of pique. I stared at him speechless. He apologized and picked everything up like a small child. There was the reporter who would nap on the piled editions of newspapers on the library table display. There were the reporters who looked through my lunch bag to make sure I was not eating too much during my pregnancy. (Research, anyone?) There was the White House correspondent who told me what he thought about President Reagan's hair (Dyed? Probably.) There was the famous TV reporter who stole the library window. (Long story.) There was the copy boy who did not want to work in the library tearing articles for me because he thought he was destined for better things than that. I hope he found his Watergate by now.

But now, I don't know where all those old clipping files have gone or where people's memories have gone either. Newspaper research is so much easier using online research databases. Berkeley Heights Public Library has more newspapers online than I ever dreamed of back at the Sun. My clipping files could never compete with the resources listed on the library's Newspaper and Magazine Databases page. With a Berkeley Heights Library card, any patron can click their way through the entire New York Times back to 1857, The Star Ledger from 1989 to the current edition, the Independent Press back to 2006. Decades of the big regional papers I used to skim every morning, coffee cup in hand, like the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post and USA Today can be found in the Proquest National Newspapers Expanded database. Our Ebsco databases indexes and provides full-text of thousands of magazines and research journals. It really is incredible and easier than scrabbling around in the newspaper morgue or calling in favors from other news librarians. Although that was fun too.

New York Times online from BHPL Website

Parnassus on Wheels

"Oh, you're a librarian..," they say.
Followed inevitably by,
"You must read a lot."
Or,
"I'd like to read all day at my job..." wistfully.
"Ha ha, yes, so would I," is my not so clever rejoinder that is always ignored.
How did I get to this librarian place? It might have been in seventh grade when Mrs. Quinn, my English teacher, assigned a 1917 book by Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels, which begins: 

CHAPTER ONE


I wonder if there isn't a lot of bunkum in higher education? I never
found that people who were learned in logarithms and other kinds of
poetry were any quicker in washing dishes or darning socks. I've
done a good deal of reading when I could, and I don't want to "admit
impediments" to the love of books, but I've also seen lots of good,
practical folk spoiled by too much fine print. Reading sonnets
always gives me hiccups, too.

I never expected to be an author! But I do think there are some
amusing things about the story of Andrew and myself and how books
broke up our placid life. When John Gutenberg, whose real name (so
the Professor says) was John Gooseflesh, borrowed that money to set
up his printing press he launched a lot of troubles on the world.

You can read the entire book on the Internet Archives  or The Gutenberg Project. You can even download it to a Kindle or other portable electronic device from there. The Project Gutenberg Project reviews it nicely here. So I'll just say it's the story of a woman who takes off in a mobile bookshop, an old-fashioned bookmobile/caravan to get a taste of freedom from the drudgery and responsibility of working on her farm with her rather pretentious brother, a budding author. It is written with tongue firmly in cheek in a rather old-fashioned style. I don't think I liked reading it at the age of twelve or so, but maybe it planted the seed of an idea in my mind. I still think it would be fun to drive a bookmobile around neighborhoods and a horse-driven one would be even better. If you like that idea, take a look at some of the modern incarnations of that dream.

My copy of the book looks like this

Biblioburro which you can follow on Facebook
FabLab in the Netherlands
Mobile libraries on Pinterest

Which side of the turkey has the most feathers?

Which side of the turkey has the most feathers?
drum roll please....
.
.
.
the outside.
:-(

But wait, there's more! Here again, as promised, we have our traditional Thanksgiving shaggy dog story, the almost true, ok, not at all true, story of the library parrot at Thanksgiving, first posted in 2010

The Library Parrot at Thanksgiving

Some libraries have library cats as recounted in Dewey, the Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, or aquariums in the children's room like the one at the New Providence Library down the road; one library where I worked had a Guinea Pig in a cage on the big oak library table in the reading room. The G.P was low on entertainment value as he hid in his cardboard tube most of the time during daylight hours. By far, the most remarkable library pet I've ever heard of was a parrot: Decimal.

Decimal, the parrot had a bad attitude and an even worse vocabulary. Every word out of the bird's mouth was rude, obnoxious and laced with profanity. Decimal swore like a sailor and could peel the wallpaper off the wall at thirty paces with his salty vocabulary. The library staff tried and tried to change Decimal's attitude by consistently saying only polite words, playing soft music and modeling proper library behavior in an attempt to "clean up" the bird's vocabulary, but to no avail. Decimal continued to offend everyone, including the library's patrons. The library Board of Trustees had received many complaints about the parrot's behavior and the Director felt pressured to rehabilitate Decimal or give him away.

One day, the Library Director was fed up and yelled at the parrot. "If you don't clean up your act, you're gone, I mean it, gone to that perch in the sky!" The parrot yelled back. The Director shook the parrot and the parrot got angrier and even ruder. "@!!??""**!!!"
In desperation, the Director grabbed the bird and put him in the freezer in the staff kitchen. For a few minutes the parrot squawked and kicked and screamed.
Then suddenly there was total quiet. Not a peep was heard for over a minute. Fearing that he'd hurt the parrot, the Director quickly opened the door to the freezer. The parrot calmly stepped out and said,
"I believe I may have offended you with my rude language and actions.
I'm sincerely remorseful for my inappropriate transgressions and I fully
intend to do everything I can to correct my rude and unforgivable
behavior."
The library staff was stunned at the change in the bird's attitude and wondered what had made such a dramatic change in Decimal's behavior, but before anyone could ask the reason, the bird continued, "May I ask what the turkey did?"

HAPPY THANKSGIVING and this year: HAPPY HANUKKAH also!
Thanks to my college roomate for sending me the email that is the basis for this story.

Posted by Berkeley Heights Public Library at 11/23/2010 06:11:00 PM

Libraries on Pinterest

The Berkeley Heights Public Library has a Pinterest account where we post pictures of books to read, local history images from our archives, summer reading selections and book art among other topics. Just posted: the two images above that were made from photographs taken around the library and then made into posters using free photo-editing software Picasa. We hope you enjoy a glimpse at the inside world of libraries. Check out our Pinterest boards at
http://www.pinterest.com/berkeleyheights/boards/

Pinterest boards created and contributed to by librarians around the world can be found here:
http://www.pinterest.com/ofallonlibrary/the-librarians-list/

http://www.pinterest.com/somerslibrary/what-are-you-reading/

To download Picasa to your own computer:    http://picasa.google.com/ Picasa is a great way to start editing your photographs without purchasing expensive software.

Related post about the library's summer reading program using Pinterest
 http://bhplnjbookgroup.blogspot.com/2013/06/summer-reading-suggestions-on-pinterest.html