If you want to get to know someone, and you’re a bookish person like me, one of the first things you do when you visit someone’s house is take a look at their shelves to see what books and media they’ve got and how it’s arranged. If you’re lucky they’ll leave the room for a few moments so can can peruse in peace, but if not, there are ways of scoping things out unobtrusively. And if that doesn’t work, you can just ask them to tell you about their collection, but it’s probably more fun to start by looking things over on your own.

So it should come as no surprise that on a recent trip to Baylor University I found myself walking through the reference stacks. As you probably know, a reference collection is a different creature from a circulating collection. Reference books are the things you’ve got to have on hand at all times–even if they don’t get used very often. Reference books may be of historical significance, or they may be used so often that you’ve decided to hold back one copy for photocopying and note-taking in the building. And librarians are generally a bit more selective with a reference collection, because most books need to earn their keep by circulating. So a book on the shelf tells you one thing, and a book on a reference shelf tells you a little something else.

That morning I wandered through the music books and the art books, cruised through some general business books, and soon arrived at the history section. I looked at books about Georgia, Louisiana (I looked for Huey Long), and then I found the Texas books. This was the education I needed, and here’s a sampling of what I found:

The Alamo and the Texas War for Independence (Nofi)

Der Texanische Unabhängig-Keitskrieg: 1835/36 (Reichstein)

Hood, Bonnet, and Little Brown Jug (Brown)

The Poet President of Texas (Siegel)

Jeff Milton: A Good Man With a Gun (Haley)

If I Can Do it on Horseback (Hendrix)

The Land, the Law, and the Lord: The Life of Pat Neff (Blodgett, with a forward by Governor Ann Richards)

George W. Littlefield–Texan (Haley)

Bill Clements: Texian to His Toenails (Barta)

Cannibals and Condos (Maril)

Flaming Feuds of Colorado County (Reese)

This Stubborn Soil (Owens)

The Texas Rangers (Webb, 4 copies)

Gunpowder Justice: A Reassessment of the Texas Rangers (Samoa)

The Howling of the Coyotes (Wallace)

I’ll Die Before I Run (Sonnichsen)

I Married a Cowboy (Reeves)

and

The Thorny Rose of Texas: An Intimate Portrait of Governor Ann Richards (Shropshire)

I sense that my love of storytelling and my appreciation for colorful characters will be well-satisfied in Texas. It’s certainly going to be an adventure. I’ll keep you posted.

It is a sad fact but true, that books are being published faster than libraries are being built. R.R. Bowker reports that can u buy isotretinoin over the counter were published in 2006. That’s 33 books per hour 24/7, 365 days a year. And that’s a lot of books.

Now, it is also true that most folks like to read the new stuff, but don’t necessarily want to buy it. There are a lot of titles that you’d never want to read more than once, and even more that you’ll find you never want to finish—you only want to look at them for a few days just to see what all the fuss is about.

But libraries struggle to satisfy public demand in this kind of market, because even in libraries it’s all about real estate. There’s only so much space. You can think of it like a grocery store—how many of these do we have to sell (or check out) before we switch to a different product?

How many new copies of Harry Potter or The Appeal or In Defense of Food do we need to have on the shelf? How long should folks have to wait to read a bestseller? And what about those titles that the schools are always assigning: To Kill a Mockingbird? The Scarlet Letter? If the schools aren’t buying enough copies for all their students (and I assure you they are not), how much responsibility does the taxpayer-funded public library have to fill the gap? How much shelf space do these books get?

And what about titles that everybody should read at least once in their lives? Would you want your library to be without Charlotte’s Web? Or Make Way for Ducklings? Or Hamlet or even Homer’s Odyssey? How many times do those books need to check out yearly in order to justify the space they occupy?

Currently my library is undergoing renovation, and as we packed up for the big move, we looked at most every book to see if it should be weeded. Here are the rules: If it’s water-damaged, it goes. If there are unknown substances on the pages (Is that peanut butter? mud?), it goes. If the spine is broken, it goes. If it hasn’t been checked out in three years, it’s probably history.

Sometimes it just kills you to weed a book that you know is terrific and no longer in print. You think, could I have displayed this book better? Why didn’t the publisher give it a more attractive cover? (It never had a chance.) And why is this one out of print when everyone loves it so much it’s checked out over 200 times? These are noble books that laid down their lives for the patrons of the public library.

For folks who care about the character of a library collection, these are difficult issues. E-books and buy isotretinoin in australia and buy isotretinoin for cheap will help, but in the meantime you can do your part. Take a look around your library. If there’s a little-known title that you feel deserves to be kept in the collection—even if you’re not going to re-read it:

Save a book, check it out. And treat it gently.

About this time last year I was finishing up my first-ever job in retail. I was looking to pick up a few holiday dollars, the libraries weren’t hiring, and, as retail goes, a bookstore is the place to be. It was, however, a learning experience for a librarian with a degree in art history. I am firmly convinced that everyone in America should have to work retail at least once in their life. Community service is good too, but you learn things on the other side of the register that you won’t learn anywhere else.

So here’s a letter I sent out to some friends while I was still trying to get hired.

——

Yesterday I applied for some part-time/temporary/seasonal hours (could it be any more provisional?) at the local bookstore. I gave them a copy of my resume at the store, but the application itself was filled out online. Such an application! After all the usual stuff about work experience and “Are you a convicted felon?” and “When are you available?” there was a 37 page personality test. Five questions per page. By the end of it, I was really wondering.

There were the usual kinds of “I work best as part of a team.” (Strongly agree/agree/disagree/strongly disagree) and the “I feel confident about my ability to learn new skills” (Strongly agree/agree/disagree/strongly disagree) questions—asked repeatedly in slightly different forms to check for consistency and strength of feeling. But then there were some strange questions–

“It is wrong to fake being polite.”      (Strongly agree/agree/disagree/strongly disagree)

Now, how can you fake being polite? You are or you aren’t. You either say the words or you don’t. What you feel while you say them is irrelevant. If I am polite to a customer who disgusts me, my disgust doesn’t diminish my politeness or make it inauthentic. WHO THOUGHT UP THIS QUESTION?! Do they even know what polite means? What did they think they were asking?

And what about “I always finish my work no matter what.” Have these people ever had a real life? What if they’re locking the front door and closing the store? What if someone falls down and cuts their head open and there’s blood gushing? What if terrorists come in the front door with uzis? Should I finish stocking the displays before I put my hands in the air? What is this “no matter what” talk?

And then, right in the middle of a bunch of innocuous job behavior questions they come out with

“It is so annoying when judges let guilty criminals go free.” (Strongly agree/agree/disagree/strongly disagree)

I just answered the questions and clicked on submit. I hope they think my high school grade average was sufficient.

I’ll keep you posted.

Camo is the new Tie Dye. It’s everywhere: camo print shirts, camo print pants, camo backpacks, camo bedsheets (do these disguise the bedroom or just the clutter?), even camo Easter eggs (for X-treme hunts!), Camo comes in Forest, Desert or Urban Jungle, Blue or Pink, Brown or Green, Black and Grey.

But here’s my question: what does it mean? When I was a kid, folks who went hunting, or soldiers, or little boys who dreamed they were soldiers wore camoflauge. Now everybody wears it—on fashions that don’t look remotely like hunting gear or army surplus. Hard Rock Barbie wears camo (“Hard Rock’s Barbie® Pink steals the spotlight in a pink camouflage ensemble with skull and crossbone motif. She’s not your mama’s Barbie®!”) Babies can be fashionable in their “camonesies.” Even your dog can get a camo tank top.

Fabric patterns and prints are like wearable fonts-they convey a mood, an attitude. Is this communication a Comic Sans MS moment, or is Times New Roman more appropriate? How would you have to feel to wear a Houndstooth Check? Argyle? A Burberry Plaid?

People are talking all the time—even when they don’t speak a word. So what does it mean when a nation moves from tie dye to camo?

I love dinosaurs—and not just because huge creatures roaming the earth is one of God’s coolest ideas ever.  Or because their variety and strangeness is endlessly fascinating.  Or because the story of their discovery is filled with colorful people and tremendous drama.  I love dinosaurs because they are a nearly perfect occasion for learning to love learning. 

Think about it.  Dinosaurs can motivate small children to master very big words.   Three and four-year olds have no difficulty at all with carnivore or herbivore or parasaurolophus or pachycephalosaurus.  They relish the challenge of specific knowledge.  They love being an expert.  And then, before you know it, they start to think about etymology:  “Did you know that “Rex” means “King?” And “–saurus means “lizard” and there are lots of “sauruses” to learn about, but there’s also velociraptor the “swift thief” and oviraptor the “egg thief” and did you ever wonder why they’re called raptors the same way eagles and hawks are?”  

I love dinosaurs because they open the door to lots of other fields:  animal behavior, biology, zoology, taxonomy, genetics, geology, fossilization, history, biography, climate change, and technical drawing.  With dinosaurs you can talk about how animals’ teeth are related to their diet.  You can talk about how some dinosaurs lived as solitary creatures and others organized into groups.  You can look at the layers of earth you see at a nearby construction site and think about the age of the planet. You can even talk about astronomy when you get to the part about giant meteors crashing into the Yucatan.  Dinosaurs lead children to ask, “How do we know that?” and the answer “Because of what we’ve learned about other things and applied to this field of inquiry” brings home the all-important notion that things are connected.  If you want to fully understand something, you’re going to need to learn about a lot of other things too.  If all you know is Victorian poetry, then you don’t really know Victorian poetry.

I love dinosaurs because our understanding of them is changing all the time.  You can read stories about new discoveries and new theories almost every month. When you study dinosaurs you learn that science is not a static thing.  What you “know” today may be modified, refined, or discarded in time, and a good scientist is not afraid to have his or her ideas challenged and tested. 

And I love dinosaurs because they remind us that we are not the only creatures to walk the earth.  Dinosaurs can keep us humble.  If something that big and powerful was once here and is now gone, then why should we think we’re always going to be here?  Why should we think that nothing’s going to change?  Why should we take this life and this planet for granted? 

With very little provocation I could go on a rant about how the industrial model has created a mind-numbing system of American Public education, but I’ll settle for a small kvetch. We all know that teachers have very little opportunity for personal creativity in the curriculum these days given the great number of standardized tests that students are taking—be they for Accelerated Reading or Standards of Learning or Benchmarks or Advanced Placement or SAT. It’s a ridiculous way to try to educate people, and what causes me the most anguish is way we effectively quench every spark of curiosity in all but the most resilient students.

The isotretinoin with out a prescription, but in my experience, people will read if they want what’s in the book: a story, pictures, or information. Can we encourage kids (and grownups) to want to know more? I can only imagine how difficult it must be for a dedicated, concerned teacher to try to keep curiosity burning in a system that presents education as twelve years of conveyor-belt classes laden with prepackaged knowledge satisfying some unnamed test writer who’s not even your teacher.

It’s a mess.

But what is the practical effect of the lack of curiosity? Why do we need the average person to be curious? Why would we want people asking questions all the time? Isn’t it enough just to make sure everyone masters some core information?

A recent article in the Pay COD for isotretinoin without prescription told the story of a man who endured a six-year headache and spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to find the answer to his medical problem. In the end, it was the patient’s persistence and his own research that resolved the case. Here’s the last paragraph of the article:

Lee Nelson said the experience has radically altered his view of doctors. “I’m very thankful I had the [financial] resources and the gray matter to do what I did,” he said. “But I think that a lot of physicians have lost their intellectual curiosity and don’t want to work with a patient.”

When people stop being intellectually curious, when they stop asking questions, then the doctors only see what they are looking to see, and the car mechanic will never hear that sound you’re describing, and the librarian will do one or two searches with a couple of keywords and say, “I’m sorry. We don’t have any information on that topic.”

We need ordinary people to be curious and to pay attention to the details of life. We need bank employees who will ask questions about isotretinoin buy onlineand nursing home attendants who will notice when a resident seems depressed or unwell or in need of new glasses and not chalk it up to being “old.” We need each other to be curious, attentive, and creative. It’s not just something for a few intellectuals or artistic types. Asking questions and paying attention—being curious—make a difference, for all of us, every day.

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The desk where I work at the library is a teaching place as well as a finding place. Parents push their children forward, “Now tell the librarian what you need.” And I ask them, “What can I do for you today?” And so the children learn to articulate their questions, to explain assignments, to interact with an adult, and to be bold. Sometimes they are tiny children who want a picture stamped on their hands. Sometimes they are children who are just learning English and who have come to practice on the friendly children’s librarians. Sometimes they are cranky children who resent their parents and their teachers and every other grownup who participates in the Worldwide Adult Conspiracy. And almost always they are children who are learning the proper use of please and thank-you.

We’ve been running a game in the library this week. Our library elf, Eugene, hides in the children’s section and young people who find him get a small treat. The 2- and 3- and 4-year olds come running out of storytime to search for the elf and collect their prize. Such excitement! Any fear they may have felt at approaching the desk disappears in their triumph.

“I found the elf! I found the elf!” one little girl exclaimed.

“And what do you say?” prompted her mother as she picked a lollipop out of the basket.

“Yum!”

I love toys.  There are toy people and there are game people in this world, and their minds and temperaments are not the same.  I am most definitely a toy person.  I resonate strongly with Pixar people in this regard.  And now that my kids are older and I have no one but myself to buy toys for,  it’s all I can do to keep from buying way more than I can ever justify—even as a children’s librarian. 

It’s just that toys can be so brilliant: little gems of human wit and invention that you can pick up and do something with.  How cool is that!?!   I love paintings, but let’s face it—you can’t play with a painting except in your mind.  And books?  I’m all about books, but I do have a special fondness for truly imaginative toy books.  (For example, Amanda Leslie’s Play Kitten Play. 10 Animal Fingerwiggles.)

I suspect that the toy urge is kin to the “making-faces-at-babies” urge (another impulse I regularly indulge).  You do something silly with your face and you get a reaction—not unlike “What happens if I push this button?” really.  Simple and gratifying.   

So let’s take a break.   I’ll stop talking and you stop reading and let’s all go find something cool to play with.

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It’s inevitable.  You’re teaching an introductory course in (pick one) art history, poetry, music, film, or literature and a student will ask, “Aren’t you reading too much into all this?  Do you really think artists are that deliberate?”  It’s a sort of skepticism left over from society’s head-on collision with modern art, and folks’ lingering suspicion that  they’re being conned.  (I had a teacher once who referred to it as the “My-Dog-Could-Do-Better School of Art History.”)  You try to tell the student, “Yeah.  It’s all there.  They really do think about this stuff.”  But it was Tyra Banks and host of middle-school girls who gave me the metaphor I needed.

Take a look a celebrity walking the red carpet on Oscar Night.  How many choices do you think she made when getting ready?

Was it just the dress?  (You mean this old thing?!)

Did she just put on whatever underwear happened to be clean?  (Or did she consider the possibility of wardrobe malfunctions and plan accordingly?)

Did she open her jewelry box and pull out…whatever? (Necklace? Bracelet? Earrings?)

What about the shoes?  (Could there be more to it than “black or brown?” )

Any thought given to makeup?

And why would anyone care about all that?

As with fashion, you want your art to look “put together,” and that means thinking about it, and making choices.  And once you make those choices, someone’s going to judge them, and interpret them, and maybe be inspired by them.