I was out doing some more shelf reading this morning (I’m in the tiresome process of trying to automate this old library and shelf reading is an essential task). I’m in the Dewey collection. Most of you who have attended college and/or are regular patrons of your local library know that most libraries classify using Library of Congress call numbers. Dewey is, typically, the “older” part of the collection, that part of the collection that most people avoid like the plague, mostly because the material there is old and out dated. Some (like me) avoid it because the numbers are just too frightening, making the organization itself cumbersome. For example, one book out there has the following call number:

629.134354
W642f

That number actually comes before this number:

629.138
S561s2

See, the organizational structure follows the rules of alphabetization, not of numerical value. You treat each number individually, just like you take each letter in a word individually, moving letter by letter. Thus, in Dewey, 134354 comes before 138, because 8 (in the third position) is greater than 4.

Ouch.

But dammit, that’s not even what I wanted to tell you! Argh! I wanted, rather, to quote for you some interesting passages I came across in some of the older items I’ve been charged with examining. The first is from a book called HOMOSEXUALITY: Disease or Way of Life? by Edmund Bergler, M.D. He writes:

“Homosexuality is neither a biologically determined destiny, nor incomprehensible ill luck. It is an unfavorable unconscious solution of a conflict that faces every child” (31).

Those are the author’s italics, too. This book was published in 1956. I’ll have to remember to tell all my gay friends that they just haven’t found the proper solution to their childhood conflicts yet, and until they do, they will continue to battle with this “unfavorable” and “unconscious” solution.

Another funny passage I found comes from a book called Bleeding Hearts: A Solution to the Automobile Tragedy by Katherine Allen, published in 1941. In it, she quotes H.I. Phillips of the Houston Chronicle who has some very strong feelings about BWI (bicycling while intoxicated):

“It is high time that our cities deal firmly with the growing menace of the careless bicyclist and the motorcyclist. Next to the college student who runs amuck by horse and buggy, the intoxicated cyclist is the greatest threat to public safety. Hardly a day passes that our newspapers do not display the headlines, ‘Hit and run bicyclist injures four more today and the police scour the city …’” (271).

You crazy college students and your buggies! What’s wrongwith you??? Don’t you realize that you are the number one menace to public safety??? And you drunk bikers! I’m onto you … I’m watching you. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep both hands on the handlebars and both feet on the pedals. I mean it. Because the next person you try to mow down on the sidewalk just might be me. And I’ll be ready. Oh, yes … I’ll be ready.

Okay, I’m done. I just thought those two books were pretty hilarious. And it made me stop to wonder what a 32 year old librarian shelf reading in the year 2050 might find insane about our current age. “Personal Finance for Dummies?? What the hell were they thinking? Didn’t they realize that finance should always be handled by trained professionals?? God, no wonder they screwed up the planet! Finance was eating their brains!”