Lost in the Library

  • Top Trends: The Irresistible “-ist” List

    When you work at a library, some literary trends aren’t that hard to spot: you tend to trip over them. A while back we started seeing lobsters everywhere, which last year were replaced by tigers. We’ve done whole book displays over covers featuring just feet, or headless women. (One avid reader in Montreal is especially gifted at keeping an… Continue reading

  • Grit, Twang, Soul: Your Southern roots are showing.

    Last night, watching Jim White cruising the fecund, salvation-starved backroads of the deep South in Searching for the Wrong-eyed Jesus, I kept hazily reflecting back on my own Southern childhood. My folks and I came north to Seattle when I was just four years old. From San Francisco. Yet White’s musing, music-filled backroads travelogue is suffused with… Continue reading

  • Who is Fantômas?

    “Fantômas.”                 “What did you say?” “I said: Fantômas.”                 “And what does that mean?” “Nothing…Everything!”                  “But what is it?” “Nobody….and yet, yes, it is somebody!”                  “And what does the somebody do?” “Spreads terror!” A century ago, these words unleashed reign of terror upon the literary world which continues to this day. It was… Continue reading

  • Bigfoot Sighted at the Library

    Many of us look back at the 70’s with fond embarrassment. Feathered hair, down vests, CB radios. This was the decade in which Clint Eastwood co-starred with an Orangutan, and we liked the idea so much that for three years we tuned in to watch Greg Evigan and a truck-driving chimpanzee in BJ and the Bear, a… Continue reading

  • A book I’d overlooked

    Walking around the library I have to deliberately ignore the shelves sometimes, shutting out the siren song of all those stories crying out to be read. Some I’ve always meant to read, but many more are perfect strangers to me: little worlds languishing on the lower shelves, waiting to be opened. One especially beguiling title… Continue reading

  • Lost and Found II

    Following up on a recent post on found objects, here are some other cool lost things found at the library. Ian Phillips’s Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters is loaded with notices of missing dogs, cats, bunnies, birds (including several identically-described cockatoos), and ferrets in photographs or drawings, dashed off in desperation or lovingly detailed by a child’s hand, together with… Continue reading

  • Lost and Found

    One of the most attention-getting displays we have ever done at the Central library was an exhibit of things we’ve found in library books. You’d see even the most harried or preoccupied patrons stop to peer into the Plexiglas case with its odd assortment of scribbled notes, old Polaroids, postcards, ticket stubs and bookmarks ornate… Continue reading