BRING OUT YOUR DEAD ....and overdue library books

[ashling]

You Know Who You Are

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/03/london-library-books-taken-in-1950s-found-in-locked-wardrobe


London Library books taken in 1950s found in locked wardrobe

Historical volumes more than 50 years overdue discovered by antiquarian bookseller while clearing a house

Plague, astrology and witchcraft are probably among the last things you might want to find when clearing the house of a relative who has recently died. But a collection of 18th-century tomes on these subjects discovered in Wimbledon by an antiquarian bookseller has been welcomed by the , which will be getting them back more than half a century after they were borrowed from the shelves.

The rare volumes are believed to have been removed from the London Library in the late 1950s. They were found by a book dealer at the back of a locked wardrobe when he was called in by a family to look at the book collection of their deceased relative. Patrick Marrin of Marrin’s Bookshop soon realised that attempts had been made to remove the stamps of the London Library from the volumes

[Snellius]

1. There's some kind of mental illness that involves hoarding books

I knew a guy who worked at the main circulation checkout at the central LA Public Library. Friendly, very talkative guy, a librarian, no less. One day I read in the LA Times that the police raided his small apartment and found thousands of volumes taken from work. No particular topic, piled up to the ceiling, in every room, everywhere to the point you couldn't even walk through. Some people seem to think that you can get knowledge from books without having to read them. By some kind of mental osmosis of just having them around.

[GeoWilliam750]

2. Do you mean that you can't get knowledge from books by osmosis?

So much for sitting around in libraries.....

[Snellius]

3. Actually, I confess, I think you can.

I used to have a pretty big library. Which I miss like old friends. Half of which I wholly read. And I was a librarian. (No I'm not that guy.) But books, because they are physical objects and not just the digital runes we now usually read, take on an intellectual presence, reminders, mental touch stones, that actually influence us just by our curiosity of what we imagine they mean.

There's even some reference about the Bible, of some saint, John I think, who consumed the Bible by eating it.

[NNadir]

4. I still have a large personal library, which my wife would like me to dump.

I can't bring myself to do it.

My whole long life, whenever I went to someone's home the first time, I immediately looked at their bookshelves to understand who they were.

If they had no books, that also told me who they were.

[Snellius]

5. Hold on to them like people you love.

Unless you have to move. Cross country like I did.

There's something about books. About pages. More than the words. Something you can't get from e-readers. Like opening a door. Something unique and whole and physical. When I was a librarian, a woman came in one day who had read the entire series by Diana Gabaldon . Like all 9 volumes or whatever. On her iPhone. She had read the words but came in just so she could see and hold the books. To authenticate the experience. Was it complete? Had she missed any chapters? Like she hadn't really read it until she had held the book. A memento to remember.

[NNadir]

6. Well, I confess that I have a larger electronic library than a paper library.

It's really the only way for me to access important technical books in academic libraries.

I often joke that my thumb drive would have weighed many hundreds of metric tons in former times.

My wife did succeed in getting me to recycle the paper journals to which I used to subscribe. The electronic replacements are in many ways easier to use, particularly when I'm searching for something obscure.

[Snellius]

7. It's true. The kind of research you can do now online is amazing...

for anyone who had to go through obscure, hard-to-find archives like in the old days.

A few years ago I downloaded a file from the Gutenberg Project. On one disc you can carry around with you, anywhere, all the greatest books ever written from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Almost all of human wisdom on one disc. You can put it all in your pocket.

But if the choice is between books or your wife, you made the right choice. Maybe ask her, though, if you could read a book together out loud one evening. Only fair.

[frogmarch]

8. 50+ years ago, when he was in college,

a friend of mine lent a book to his roommate, who promised to mail it to him if he hadn't finished it by the end of the school year. My friend joined the Army after graduation and the two lost touch. He didn't get his book back...until a few months ago, here in his hometown, hundreds of miles from where he'd attended college. He'd gone to a book sale at our little public library and spotted a book for sale with the same title as his. Even the cover looked identical, so he bought it. When he got home and read the inscription, he realized it was his book!