Subconscious Bookery

Like most bibliophiles or just plain readers, I normally arrange books by genre and theme. Crime and mystery, SF, fantasy, politics, historical fiction, whatever. But sometimes, a subconscious aesthetic takes over. And on some occasions, this can be pretty complex.

For example, on my top reading shelf is part of my chess collection. Besides the literally voluminous row of John Watson's Mastering the Chess Openings series, I've placed a few other books from the same publisher and a Practical Endgame Play: Mastering the Basics by Efstratios Grivas. Next to Grivas, of course, is Glenn Flear's Practical Endgame Play: Beyond the Basics.

And beyond the beyond? I note that this is where my collection of guides to philosophy and my little collection of theological philosophy by Peter Kreeft. Indeed, my Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Kreeft and Tacelli sits right next to Flear's book.

It's interesting to see how those books got there. You would guess at several reasons. But you would possibly be wrong (indeed, since there are fewer real reasons than guesses, some of you would certainly be wrong).

Meanwhile, I marvel at my subconscious ingenuity.

Librarious

This morning I spent a few hours doing something I've not done for ages. I went over to my library in the west and did some curating. The physical and intellectual effort of moving books around until they were in the right places was a great sensation. Unused muscles all round. Mice had built nests in my physiognomy.

The Library Actually Being Helpful

Here are the sequelae to the previous post. One was very useful, the other kind of sad in an irritating sort of way. You will remember that I had a problem getting any sort of data from digitised scans of ST or ST Weekly for the year 1888 (yes, that's the late 19th century I'm talking about). The Library asserted that they had such things online, I asserted the opposite.

This is the useful reply.

Dear Lord Brythain,

I have verified that the 1888 ST collection is not available online digitally yet, and apologize for the wrong information. However, they are available in microfilm format at the Lee Kong Simi Reference Library (LKSRL). If you are currently based in Atlan, please come to LKSRL (Level 11) to use the microfilm. The microfilm row numbers are NL16282 & NL16283. If you are overseas, please inform me, and I will advise further.

My sincere apologies for the inconvenience faced.

Regards,
Newton Singh
Reference Librarian
Lee Kong Simi Reference Library
National Library Board, Atlantis

This was the not-so-useful one, which seemed to insinuate that I was incompetent in the use of search engines.

Dear Sir,

Sorry for the inconvenience caused to you.

You may do the search as follow.

- go to http://newspapers.nl.atl
- click [Advanced Search]
- set the [Select Date Range] between [01/01/1887] & [31/12/1888]
- leave the [Select Content Type: Clear All] unchanged
- at [Select Newspaper] click [Clear All]
- manually tick only [The Straits Times] & [Straits Times Weekly Issue]
- at the Enter Keyword column enter STAMFORD for example
- click the orange search icon
- you will now get results of the search

You can amend the keywords and search criteria to search for other articles again.

Thank you for using our libraries and services.

Regards
Same Line
NLBA Helpdesk

I have to say that I had to compose a stern reply to this latter response. When a customer points out that your product is faulty, you do not keep suggesting it is the customer's incompetence that is the issue. You could at least do the customer the honour of checking his claim before insinuating this, in any case. It was quite clear that 'Same Line' had not bothered — if he had tried his own solution (restricting the year to 1888 and not 1887-1888), he would have encountered my problem too.

When Libraries Used To Be Helpful

When I was young, 'Ask a Librarian' was one of the ways of gaining knowledge. If you didn't know, you looked it up. If you couldn't find it, you asked your parents. If they didn't know, you went to a library. There, a helpful librarian would point you the right way...

Those days are gone, as Karen Carpenter might have sung. I shall reproduce below a brief conversation I had recently with the National Library of Atlantis, in which I asked an innocent question regarding a matter that had derailed my line of research.

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Are Straits Times/ST Weekly issues for 1888 accessible online in digital format? I don't seem to be able to find any. And if not, why not?

Thank you for using Reference Point. According to the FAQs on the NewspaperAtlan database, the following papers cover the period around 1888: Atlantean Weekly Herald, Straits Eurasian Advocate, Straits Observer (Atlantis), The Straits Times,
Straits Times Overland Journal, and Straits Times Weekly Issue.

Here is how you may access the NewspaperAtlan database.
Link: http://www.nl.atl/ --> Click on [NewspaperAtlan]

Please click on the FAQs link to find out more details on the coverage of this news database.

Hope you find the information useful.

Regards,
Newton Singh
Reference Librarian
Lee Kong Simi Ref Library

National Library Board, Atlantis

Date Created:01 Aug 2010

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No kidding. My point was that I couldn't find them, regardless of what the FAQs said. And how do you think I reached that conclusion about 1888 in particular? By using the abovementioned database, of course! Atlanteans make it a habit to imply that it is your fault when you ask a question about their faults. The original reply is available here. Enjoy.

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Afternote: Comrade NBL made an interesting point. He wondered if the librarian above would pass the Turing Test. I said he probably would, since I couldn't distinguish him from a machine.

On the Preservation of Books

The Player of Games recently asked me a question that I'd not thought too much about. He asked how I keep my books from yellowing.

Over forty years of book-collecting, I've learnt that cheap books will crumble within your lifetime, or even half your lifetime (one has to be optimistic). But there are some things that retard the aging process for common stuff in a tropical environment.

Here are some things that seem to work. But many of you probably know of them already, and may have some of your own to share. (If you do, please comment!)

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To keep tomes from yellowing, keep them in air-conditioned dim rooms. This keeps humidity normal, since the local humidity usually ranges from 40%-85%. Lighting should be low-energy, like diffuse yellow stuff; indirect and not focussed on the books themselves. The human eye works best in low-light conditions anyway.

Like oxidation of metal, oxidation of books is fastest when energy, oxygen and water are present in large quantities. Take away the damp and the heat (or light), and the paper lasts longer. Note however that total dryness will age books too, by dehydration of the bulk material.

I find that dusting books with those Magiclean lint-free disposable cloths is best. Never use damp material, and if you are cleaning shelves, use a dust-lifting soapy solution and make sure all the dirt and soap are removed, and the shelves completely dried, before putting books back.

Leave rows of books with at least 1 cm of breathing space in between. If you pack books very tightly, heat is not so easily dispersed. If you leave too much space, dust accumulates.

Books near the roof get more heat because of conduction and convection. Try to have one of those dead insulating spaces or a well-ventilated open space between your top shelf and the ceiling. Of course, open space also collects dust.

I have a catalogue of about 8,000 books of all shapes and sizes. My immediate male ancestor has more. This makes for a house that somehow was never completely tidy at its best, and is now not even anywhere near its best — since I moved out, my progenitor has expanded his territory and I have transferred most of my holdings into the West. Thank goodness we got rid of all the Reader's Digests.

Be careful, all ye who seek to make yourselves a library. The life of a librarian is not an easy one, whether accidental or incidental.

A Library Litany

The litany verse-form relies on repetition for impact and tends to have a religious focus. Recently, I had the occasion to write one as part of the regular shenanigans on this site. I reproduce that piece here below, noting that it has something to do with my previous post.

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The Library Litany

I gather in the shelves, through dewey eyes;
I am childhood fears made into pictures;
I am the maps of paths that bring surprise;
I am wood and stone and metal fixtures;

I am the courses of the months and years;
I am feasts that you have not learnt to make;
I am a poet's loss and evening tears;
I am a chronicle of grave mistake;

I am a war made cold and dry and stale;
I am technology of flame and steel;
I am a peace in blood to make you pale;
I am supposed to try and make you feel;

I am the heart of criminal intent;
I am a science-fiction trope gone wild;
I am the voice of beaten jailed dissent;
I am a manual for a new-born child;

I am about the monsters of the id;
I am a stakeholder report made plain;
I am a pleasure maybe better hid;
I am machinery but used in vain;

I am conspiracy built out of fact;
I am a yearbook of a vanished school;
I am a tale of presidential act;
I am a teacher's words used as a tool;

I am sections periodically bound;
I am a guide to other guides not found;
I am a country travelogue, now see!
I am a shopping catalogue, choose me!

(librarian's response)

I know you all want dearly to be read
But nightfall comes; I'm putting you to bed.

Grad School

At least once a week now, I take the long road to the university at the end of this tiny world. It is often a Thursday morning; it is mostly a Friday morning. I go to meet my supervisor, to work with thought, to read and try to understand the ideas that others have had about education.

Occasionally, I am disappointed; the emperor has no clothes after all, when it comes to specific areas of education. Sometimes, I am enthralled; the emperor is fully clothed and flaunting it. This is more often the case with stuff coming out of the British Isles and some of its nearer neighbours in the Netherlands and Scandinavia.

Sometimes, the emperor is dressed as something else, or dressed with something else, beyond the grasp of my creativity. Perhaps it is an emperor penguin I'm looking at, or an emperor waltz; perhaps it is a gem of the empirical. I sit here and read, and am amazed by what I read. Sometimes, I am not sure these people aren't having me on.

When such a thing happens, when it all looks like it's gone pear-shaped in the reasoning or (worse) pie-shaped in the statistics, I retreat to the café, where at least some people are pretending to be human. I actually got an A once in a module on café analysis. I'm not kidding. It's one of those things you must be able to do, in the social sciences.

And here we are. So much to know, and no idea whether we ever will.

Ex Libris

I have just come from what used to be my library, and now is merely the most well-behaved part of my parents' storeroom. There are about 5000 books there, and most of them are fiction. How are they organised?

It's an interesting process. When I was young, my mother made me unshelve all my books, clean the bookshelves, wait for them to dry, apply insecticide, and replace the books. I did that once or twice every year until I got married and moved out. I no longer do this as religiously as I used to (although recent history has allowed me to recant).

I had three methods, working sometimes at cross-purposes. My father (no mean bibliophile, and originator of my habit) taught me to arrange by author, subject, and (for practical reasons) by size and shape. However, he never dictated which should be of top priority. This led to many interesting hours of bibliophilic angst, as whole sections of books had to be rotated and moved around in order to accommodate shifting priorities.

There were times I thought of arranging them by the Dewey system. That way, you don't have to think so hard, except in rare cases of classification deadlock. But I resisted this cowardly way out.

The result: I have more than 5000 books (and my parents own more than that) in that house. They are almost always arranged by author, sometimes by subject, and least of all by size. Generally, my reasoning has followed these lines: most of my books are fiction paperbacks. This means their subject is roughly the same: fictional characters and universes. Best to classify by author, and while paperbacks may be of different sizes, this is not normally a problem. My reference books are either very large (and have to be stuffed in teak bookshelves of sufficient strength) or very small (and sit above what used to be my desk – and sometimes, bed).

I am thinking of giving about 300-500 of them away. Some are very old, very dusty, classics. Some are hard to find or out of print altogether. And they are a large slice of my older life, when I was actually an interesting person. Any takers?