Halloween at the Library

Starting today at the Children's Room.

A man came in asking for Dear Mr. Henshaw / Beverly Cleary ; illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky.

A mother with her two daughters were looking for a PG-rated DVD; they looked at Home Alone 4, but Mum nixed it. The violence was okay, but the plot includes a relationship that clearly she did not approve of.

A father with his son, Joseph, who is in the third grade, asked for a book; recommended Cam Jansen.

It has gotten busy, and I can't keep up, but I've recommended, and as wasked about, Patricia Giff, Barbara Cohen, Robert Munsch. Books on Thanksgiving (on Halloween Day), Magic school bus.

At 3, I repaired upstairs to Reference. Decidedly different in Reference than in Children's. A few people studyuing, 6 Internet PCs in use. A patron I know came over and asked for three books:

 Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society, by Glenn Dynner. An associate professor of religion at Sarah Lawrence College. Growth and development of Hasidic movement in Eastern and East Central Europe. Glenn Dynner draws upon newly discovered Polish archival material and neglected Hebrew testimonies to illuminate Hasidism's dramatic ascendancy in the region of Central Poland during the early nineteenth century. (from Oxford Press)




Blind jump: the story of Shaike Dan, by Amos Ettinger. Found it in Suffolk.

Blind Jump is the story of the amazing exploits of Shaike Dan. During World War II, Shaike Dan volunteered to parachute behind enemy lines in Romania on behalf of British Intelligence. His jump had two objectives: to locate the prison camp where 1,400 Allied Air Force crewman, downed when bombing the Ploesti oil fields in Romania, were being held, and also to find ways to get them out of Romania so that they could go back into action and resume their contribution to the war effort. The second objective was to try to rescue Jews from Eastern Europe and get them to Palestine.

Rome and Jerusalem: the clash of ancient civilizations. Martin Goodman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2007.
933.05 G

Clearly there is a theme running through his requests. He is one of the more interesting patrons I encounter here.

I learned something today

A young woman came over to the Readers Advisory desk, looking for "a Romeo and Juliet film," but all she could tell me was that the actress had "blond hair" and the actor had "black hair." I tried to guess, and offered the film Leo DiCaprio made, but that wasn't it.
    She suggested I use Google Images, and when I did she recognized the cover of the DVD: Shakespeare in Love, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes

I learned something: image searching is indeed now possible to use as a librarian's tool to find requested material.

Virginia?

A student asked for Who's afraid of Virginia Wolff, and saw this pun. Cute?

Making Ignorance Chic

Maureen Dowd takes note of librarians in her column.



The false choice between intellectualism and sexuality in women has persisted through the ages. There was no more poignant victim of it than Marilyn Monroe. She was smart enough to become the most famous Dumb Blonde in history. Photographers loved to get her to pose in tight shorts, a silk robe or a swimsuit with a come-hither look and a weighty book — a history of Goya or James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Heinrich Heine’s poems. A high-brow bunny picture, a variation on the sexy librarian trope.

Running the Books

Running the books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian.
Avi Steinberg.  399 pages. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $26.

[One library has it as Running the Books, another as a Biography.]

Fascinating review, or rather, review of a fascinating book written by a man who was a prison librarian for a couple of years.

Clinging to textbooks

They text their friends all day long. At night, they do research for their term papers on laptops and commune with their parents on Skype. But as they walk the paths of Hamilton College, a poster-perfect liberal arts school in this upstate village, students are still hauling around bulky, old-fashioned textbooks — and loving it.

Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times - Victoria Adesoba, a New York University student, said her decision to buy or rent textbooks depended on the course. She said e-texts tempted her to visit Facebook. 

Smart of her; would that other youngsters, including young librarians, heed that. It is amazing just how addicted people become to electronic gadgets, something I well understand. But at work, one has to act professionally, and Facebooking all the time ain't that.


For all the talk that her generation is the most technologically adept in history, paper-and-ink textbooks do not seem destined for oblivion anytime soon According to the National Association of College Stores, digital books make up just under 3 percent of textbook sales, although the association expects that share to grow to 10 percent to 15 percent by 2012 as more titles are made available as e-books.

He comes next

A man came over to the Information Desk and asked for the book. 3 libraries own it. After he left, I looked at the record a little more closely, noticing the cover and the subject headings more carefully.

Note the fruits; nothing lost or confusing there. The complete title is He comes next : the thinking woman's guide to pleasuring a man.

Subject headings:

	Sex instruction for women.
	Oral sex.
	Male orgasm.

Israeli books

A patron came in today with hold requests for these books:

To the end of the land, David Grossman
The trials of Zion , Alan M. Dershowitz.
The rise of David Levinsky, Abraham Cahan
Bearing the body. Ehud Havazelet.
The Jewish Messiah. Arnon Grunberg.
Fire in the blood.  Irène Némirovsky.
A pigeon and a boy / Meir Shalev.
When the grey beetles took over Baghdad / Mona Yahia.