New Curb Appeal

If you have ever been stuck in school traffic in front of the library, you may have noticed we used to be shrubbery-challenged. However, today John Gallic, a local landscaper who grew up using the library, volunteered his services and donated the shrubs and a stone border out front. Thank you, John, BHPL is now beautiful.

My Favorite Book

Every time I get asked what my favorite book is, I get a little tongue-tied. How can you just narrow it to one? On the other hand, I'm a librarian, I ought to have a favorite book. So I've been thinking about it.

Favoriting a book is a process that takes years. If a year passes and I can't remember what reading the book felt like, then it's out. (This seems to kick out the vast majority of books that I read, mysteries and nonfiction.) Last year I read a couple of books that have potential (The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond and Crow Lake by Mary Lawson), but I need to wait a few years and see if I keep thinking about them off and on.

Your favorite book should have the same effect on you the second time you read it. I'm a little worried that rereading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is going to spoil it, because I already know what happens at the end.

Then there are all the books you can't admit to loving, at least to anyone over the age of 16, which for me are the Abhorsen series by Garth Nix and How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff. Also, if you love humonguous classics like Ulysses by James Joyce, you might want to keep that to yourself (it just depends on who's asking).

The only book I've read that meets all those criteria is .... The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. That's my answer and I'm sticking with it.

Lightbulb Jokes

I was reading High Season by Jon Loomis this weekend, a tale of a homicide detective who has moved to Cape Cod to avoid, well, homicides, which give him panic attacks and nightmares. There are a lot of lightbulb jokes (with real estate developers and cross dressers in the punchlines) told about Provincetown, MA in the book.

This led me on a search for New Jersey lightbulb jokes. The only one I could find online seems to involve disposing of the witness who saw the lightbulb get changed, so I came up with this one: How many people does it take to invent a lightbulb in New Jersey?

You would think the answer would be one, but according to American National Biography, Edison didn't even invent the lightbulb. He invented the first commercially practical incandescent lighting system, not the lightbulb, and he had a lot of people helping him at his lab.

Here are a few library lightbulb jokes which were collected by LIS News:

Q. How many librarians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. Usually 645.5. Sometimes 808.882.
(Dewey Decimal numbers for home repair and humor.)

Q. How many reference librarians does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Well, what kind of light bulb were you thinking about?

Break out the piano . . .

Today's weather is little drab, so I'm adding some color to the blog with some of BHPL's books about the 1960s.

Songs of the 1960s is just one of many, many books of sheet music for piano, guitar and voice that BHPL owns. If you never progressed past the color-coded books that you bought from your piano teacher, maybe you should give it another try with songs you actually like.

I had to add the Portable Sixties Reader to my collage if only for the the button that says "Books Must Go". And the Smokey the Bear Sutra inside.

The paintings in Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s will alternately give you a headache and a deep sense of calm (that's what the Rothko-ish paintings in the book do for me, at least).

A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World is by Marcia Tucker, who arrived at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969 as its curator of painting and sculpture. (I have a special place in my heart for the Whitney, ever since I waited in line for my 20 seconds of solitude in the Fireflies on the Water installation).

Spaced Out is about hippie architecture. Think communes.

In honor of my parents, who always point out that there were plenty of non-hippies in the sixties, I've got Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, inventor of the COBOL programming language and coiner of the phrase "to debug" (when she took a moth out of a computer).

Library Video Nominated for a Dewey Award

If there were an award for library videos, I would call it the Dewey and I would nominate Enchanted Summer for the 398.2 category (folk and fairy tales in Dewey Decimal parlance.) I can say this without being immodest because Ellen, my fellow blogger, made the video. It was a major undertaking to produce two minutes of film. Now I know why it takes hours and hours to produce a couple of minutes in moviemaking. For every minute of video shot, there are 7031 minutes of editing involved, plus incalculable amounts of time spent cursing Microsoft MovieMaker. And, being librarians who are professionally sworn to uphold copyright laws, we had to purchase the music and get permissions for it, rather than just putting any old thing we had lying around as backround music, which I'm pretty sure is what most YouTube posters do. So that took time. We had to work around the Butterfly's nap time and observe Butterfly child labor laws. Ellen filmed the Butterfly and edited all the footage and synchronized the soundtrack and did all sorts of technical stuff, as we movie people call it. Not that I wasn't involved also: I stood around trying to stay out of the way while looking helpful. I also was in charge of keeping the Butterfly's wings straight between takes. However there is no category in the credits for Wing Arranger (maybe that's what a Key Grip does?) That's ok, I'm just honored to be part of the process and it's an honor to be nominated even though I'm the one who made up the award and nominated us for it. Upcoming: nominations for library videos in other Dewey categories.
Possible nominees: click here