Obviously, it should not be a surprise that libraries collect works of fiction, but I have to admit that it seems strange to me. Libraries, in Alex Golub land, are for preserving knowledge and passing down knowledge — the kind of thing thing that normal bookstores don’t do. Why keep a copy of The Scarlet [...]
O is the Library of Congress Call Letter for home economics and cooking. Many researchers are surprised to find O dedicated to such a specific topic. However, cognoscenti such as myself know not just the contents of this call number, but the history behind it. As many of you know, the modernization of the Library [...]
My laptop temporarily melted. I blame the third party power source. Let this be a lesson to you, ebay shoppers. Back with O tomorrow.
Oh the horror. I have a strong sense the M is cantaloupe, even though I have no memory of what is in it. Actually that is not true — I think it is art. But then again that might be N. Or vice versa. I am guess that M is art. I seem to remember [...]
Banana yellow. And just as slippery. The flavor of that ‘banana flavor’ flavoring that tastes nothing like bananas. There is an old saying — that I first heard one winter in college uttered by Jack Palance in his his strange baddie role in the movie Cyborg II — that if you want to dine with [...]
Why do I think that law, as a topic, is a pale, pastel pink? It was when I was at Chicago, taking a course at the law school, that I had this sudden realization that some of the most brilliant thinkers of all time were lawyers. I don’t know why this seemed like a surprise [...]
J is the curvy, lime green, evil twin brother of G and H. It is the strange, shadowy inversion of normal social science — that Library of Congress call letter which most resembles a decorous and well-trimmed suburb beneath whose apparent normality lies the fact that you are the only person left who hasn’t yet [...]
This is, perhaps, the greatest challenge I have faced yet. The darkest hour, the most obscure letter. Have I ever checked out a book from I in my entire life? I can imagine where it must be in Hamilton — all the way along the back wall of the room with the folio collection. Except [...]
H is charcoal grey to me — maybe because it is, in my imagination, the conservative, less fun version of G. G is the section of the library with the section on Carlos Castaneda. H is where you go to learn how to design survey instruments. As the section on both business and sociology H [...]
G is, to me, a deep dark green. It is also my home: the anthropology stacks. In the Regenstein you could always tell when a new subject or academic discipline was starting by the long stretches of identically-jacketed periodicals, one after another, forming a visible block on the shelves like the strings of identically coded [...]
Is orange. Uh… and… this is central and south America, right? Or is it geography? I think the last time I visited this section was for Clendinnen’s Aztecs: An Interpretation. I think. Have I got that right? It could be that this is first time in this series I’ve been totally without a clue. I [...]
Before I started my World of Warcraft research, I would never have known what E was about. Luckily I now know: the US and North America. I don’t know how I managed to get a Ph.D. in a social science without reading anything about the US, which is after all my home country. When I [...]
I visit many call numbers, but D is the only one with an address that I come home to regularly: DU 740 .42: ethnographies of Papua New Guinea. Technically the Ds cover a huge range — Africa, Asia (including South Asia, iirc), and the Pacific. Here in Honolulu, most people head straight for the section [...]
“C,” as the Cookie Monster once said, “is for cookie” (Monster 1969a:204). In fact, this is not true. This light tan, almost khaki letter is for ‘civilization’, the ultimate metadatal memorial to the eurocentric filing system that I call home. I rarely venture to C — the volume which first introduced me to this section [...]
My dearest B, You are the deepest indigo to me. How do your series’d depths hold truth, revelation, mysticism, and logic within the confines of a single letter? You are the home of the long rows of concatenated completed works, alphabetical ranges authors first German, Gadamer bumping against Heidegger. How often have I gotten lost [...]
To me, A is red — the bright red color of that strange collection of buses, mailboxes, office supplies, and doors to certain places that the British paint red despite the fact that, as objects, they have nothing in common. My relation with the LOC developed in three libraries with last names: Hauser, Regenstein, and [...]
In order to keep my blog active (even though most of you are probably reading this through FaceBook) I am going to start what I call the “Library Of Congress Love Letter”. Every day I will extol the virtues of a different Library of Congress call number letter, beginning with A and ending with Z. [...]