At some point in my life, I realized that making lists belongs on my list of top 10 favorite things to do,” says American Libraries Senior Editor George M. Eberhart, “and that’s how I came up with the idea for The Librarian’s Book of Lists.” To be released this summer by ALA Editions, the book is a collection of humorous, serious, and sometimes bizarre lists that Eberhart hopes will be “at least tangentially useful and informative, especially for librarians and book-lovers.”
Best known to readers as the editor of ALA’s weekly e-newsletter, American Libraries Direct and four editions of The Whole Library Handbook, Eberhart says many of the lists featured in his new work were created especially for the book. Here are some of the choicest items to whet your appetite for more:
1. 10 Suggestions for a Library-Related Ben and Jerry’s Flavor.
Book By Its Cover. It looks like plain vanilla, but it’s actually vanilla with white chocolate swirls mixed in.
2. 10 Book Curses.
“May the sword of anathema slay / If anyone steals this book away.”
—Found on the first folio of a 14th-century fragment of Die vier Bücher der Könige.
3. 6 Birds that make Library-Related Sounds.
The Yellow Headed Warbler (Teretistris fernandinae), found only in Cuba, makes a noisy, rasping shhh-shhh-shhh-shhh-shhh. You knew there would be one somewhere.
4. Top 12 Silly reasons to Ban a Book.
It accurately describes the history of life on earth. Juliet Clutton-Brock’s Horse was challenged at the Smith Elementary School in Helena, Montana, in 2004 because a concerned parent said there were “too many questions with evolutionary theory to present it as fact.” She specifically objected to this passage: “It took about 55 million years for the present family of horses, asses, and zebras to evolve from their earliest horse-like ancestor.”
5. 5 Things to Remember When the Media Calls.
Ask questions. Determine the name of the publication or media outlet. Find out the story’s theme, the reporter’s angle, and the deadline. If you do not feel qualified to address the question or are uncomfortable with the approach, say so. Help the reporter find another source.
6. 10 Commandments for Borrowers of Books.
Thou shalt not cut the leaves of a book with a butter-knife, nor decorate the margins with jam in imitation of the old illuminated manuscripts.
7. Stephen Leary’s Top 10 Ways to Exit a Library.
Unnoticed through an obscured window way in the back, and into an awaiting car filled with strange people.
8. Roy Tennant’s Top 10 Things Library Administrators Should Know about Technology.
Technology isn’t as hard as you think it is, at least compared to 10 years ago. Any reasonably competent library technologist can take a server from scratch to fully functioning website in a day. And with services like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), you don’t even need hardware to get a site up and going in no time. You can literally go from nothing to a fully functional LAMP stack (operating system, web server, database, and programming language) and a free content management system (Drupal, for example) in less than a day. Sure, there are some things that are still quite time-consuming and complicated (writing software from scratch), but many of the basic services are easy and fast.
9. 12 Librarians Who Were Poets.
Charles Fletcher Lummis (1859–1928). Los Angeles Public Library, 1905–1910. A Bronco Pegasus (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928).
10. 5 Movies with the Worst Librarian Stereotypes.
Chainsaw Sally (2004). Drab Porterville librarian Sally Diamon (played by April Monique Burril) turns into an insane, cannibalistic, chainsaw-slinging, goth vigilante at night, dealing death to those who threaten her or her cross-dressing brother. She offs one male patron in the library men’s room for being noisy, and brutally executes Tina in the woods for not returning the overdue Atkins for Life diet book.
