#books librarians love

[in-the-stacks]

We discuss The Goddess Guide to Branding, our MyLibrarian December 2024 Book Club pick, with the author, Jane McCarthy.

https://www.inthestacks.tv/2024/12/author-chat-the-goddess-guide-to-branding

[umitsy]

warnings: slight stalking, obsessive behavior, love obsession

reader's g/n

➻ Yandere calculating librarian! who'd definitely know whenever a person enters or leaves the library he works on.

➻ Yandere calculating librarian! who has memorized the thousands of book decorating the bookshelves.

➻ Yandere calculating librarian! who'd like to anotate about the regulars' schedules & favorite genders.

➻ Yandere calculating librarian! who'd have many pages written about you who he'd unconsciously filled about everything you pick, what you're wearing and which books seemed to had been your favorites.

➻ Yandere calculating librarian! who'd imagine many outcomes to whatever conversation he wants to create with you.

➻ Yandere calculating librarian! who'd certainly be surprised when he realizes his liking for you and finally takes his time to read everything he has on his notebook.

➻ Yandere calculating librarian! who'd tries his best to ignore his mind's bad comments about himself when he gets the courage to talk to you on the counter one time you came to give back and take some other books.

➻ Yandere calculating librarian! whose mind immediately melts when he hears your sweet voice finally saying more than good morning/night and thanks.

➻ Yandere calculating librarian! who'd crave to hear more of you, more about you, or even you reading him a book.

➻ Yandere calculating librarian! who'd tell you the news that to now borrow a book you need to leave more information about yourself. Like where you live, even your favorite color. You'll know if you believe him or not, but if you want to order again or even leave the bookstore, he will ask you to answer increasingly terrifying things.

➹ "𝑴𝒚 𝒎𝒚, 𝒔𝒐 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒊𝒔 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒃𝒍𝒐𝒐𝒅 𝒕𝒚𝒑𝒆? 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈... 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒂𝒎 𝑰 𝒅𝒐𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒃𝒆𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓? 𝒐𝒉 𝒏𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈, 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒏𝒌𝒔 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒂𝒏𝒔𝒘𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒈𝒉, 𝒚𝒐𝒖'𝒓𝒆 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆 𝒕𝒐 𝒈𝒐. 𝑭𝒐𝒓 𝒏𝒐𝒘..."

[ily-beyond-measure-carstairs]

I'm not asking for much. Just wishing I could go to bookstores and museums with a pretty boy and talk about things we love passionately for hours and make each other laugh, waltz to music in a hall.

[fru1typunch]

Here's a little post ranting about the Floridian education system and how it fucked over public school librarians this year, from the adult child of one who spent his whole summer helping his poor mom try and keep up with Desantis's ridiculous requests.

Every school year, the librarian always gets a couple weeks with a "closed" library to take inventory of the school's stock at the end. Normal stuff, y'know, if a bit tedious and boring. Scan every. Single. Thing. See what you have and figure out who last checked out what you should have, that sort of thing.

Well, Ron Desantis, in his genius, decided that concept had to be applied to all the books in the entire school to determine if they're "appropriate" (by his batshit conservative standards).

My mom didn't JUST have to do the usual inventory thing for her own library. She ALSO had to do something similar but far WORSE for her entire school's personal classroom libraries.

The objective of this SCHOOL WIDE requirement was to "approve" every book in the school as "appropriate". Every. Single. Book. In. The. School. Not the school library, no, the SCHOOL. All classrooms.

My mom's an elementary school librarian. There's around 1000 students at her school, give or take, and around 50 or so classroom libraries to sort through. And this was supposed to be done over summer, before the kids came back in the fall. Entirely unpaid.

She had to personally approve around 25,000-30,000 books school wide based on whether or not they're "appropriate for kids" (again, by Desantis standards), entirely unpaid, in about 2 months. Keep in mind these classroom libraries had been pre-existing for many years or even decades in most cases, so it's kinda useless to just now care about whether the books are "appropriate".

Mind you, you can't read that many individual books in under two months and then approve them in the system if you tried, even if most were children's books. She spent every single day of her summer, her only real time off each year, logging into the online portal and manually approving books from 8 in the morning to 8 at night, looking them up and trying to determine if they might be okay by the new standards since she couldn't possibly have the time to read them all and check, and again, entirely unpaid on her own. Teachers were scanning in their classroom's books to the system to be approved by her in real time, so she really never could get very far ahead. At most she'd knock out a few hundred a day, which I think is wildly impressive given the circumstances.

Even with all that work, she couldn't open her library for nearly a month into the new school year this August because she spent every school day finishing that approval thing for the classroom libraries for teachers. At least by that point she got paid for it. She was also way behind on getting her library ready for the school year, she really hadn't had time to prepare like normal. It was a crazy stressful time for her all around, moreso than back-to-school time normally is each year.

I helped as much as I knew how to, which mostly just meant looking books up for her or texting back and forth with my friends that work at Barnes and Noble or Books A Million asking if they could skim through certain books that might pose a threat at times, and coming up to the school with her sometimes while she worked on approving books and I worked on preparing her library for "business" again.

My mom was upset because she didn't have time for a real summer vacation, the most she got to do was occasionally visit the beach a few hours away for a day trip. (On one of the beach days, she even took her blessed laptop with her to work on it in the car ride over.) She was in the thick of it neck deep all on her own for months with hardly any time off and no pay to show for it.

It's frustrating because if she were to have approved a book that a parent later complains about, it could mean bad news for her. Again, no way in hell would she have been able to both read every single book, determine if she thought it was okay by Desantis's standards, and then approve every single book within the system. She did her best, but she's still nervous someone will complain.

All this conservative bullshit around books is hurting so many kinds of librarians and educators in so many ways, so just take a moment sometime soon to appreciate your local librarians and public school teachers putting up with this crap. They could use the love. Maybe some strong alcohol. And a big wad of cash, they do a lot of shit unpaid.

And do vote these assholes out of office that are making these poor librarians' and teachers' jobs harder with no additional support or pay.

[david-tennant-in-chairs]

The sweater says "collects comic books" and the face says "collects phone numbers"

The Guardian Weekend (2006)

Transcript:

Hi, I'm David-in-my-pants," says the very boyish, handsome 34-year-old striding towards me, arm extended, wearing, as promised, his underpants. Perhaps the train journey from London to Cardiff was worth it after all.

"I just don't have the courage of my convictions about my fashion decisions-I think I need some guidance there," he adds in his charming Scottish accent, his eyes all characteristically puppyish and pleading. Yes, the trip is definitely worth it so far.

This fashion insecurity is a bit surprising, though, seeing as it comes from David Tennant, the tenth and latest Dr Who (he's in Cardiff filming the newseries) and, according to the Pink Paper, "the sexiest man in the universe" (Tennant claimed, sweetly, that he was "somewhat surprised" by that accolade.)

When playing the title role in the BBC's widely acclaimed Casanova, Tennant wore flouncy blouses with aplomb; and his outfit for Dr Who English tweeds paired with scruffy Converse - has already received plaudits from the fashion press. "It's not a million miles from what I usually wear," he says, "so I now have to be careful if people see me out and about looking too much like Dr. Who, that would be pretty naff."

The Converse were inspired by Tennant himself - he's been devoted to the brand for more than 20 years - so when I tell him that David Cameron wears them, too, he reels back into the sofa, aghast "No!" he whispers. "You`ve just ruined them for me.

He insists that becoming a recognised face has not changed his style, but has made him more conscious that he shouldn't wear something more than once because people comment on it. This, naturally, means constant wardrobe updates, which rather goes against a Presbyterian upbringing "that would never permit any conspicuous consumption."

Tennant's teenage years were a swamp of fashion mistakes, he says, citing in particular a pink jumper that we wore for years until someone told him that it was, well, terrible. And at 15 he sported a paisley shirt, skinny tie and cropped jacket combo that "properly expressed myself" - unfortunately, his tracksuit-wearing peers disagreed and punched him in the face. "Yeah, that didn't work out too well."

He is, he says repeatedly, not a shopper. "I do that typical male thing of finding one thing and doing it to death, like Paul Smith suits." He recently discovered H&M, he adds, enunciating each of the letters carefully, as if tentatively speaking in a new language. "Plain T-shirts for only a tuppence."

Yet despite all of this he seems at ease during the shoot. He particularly likes a tan jumper, which prompts him to stroke his hands over his chest in a most distracting manner. "I love this - what is it?"

Burberry, comes the answer.

[booksinmythorax]

So you're an adult who wants to start reading for fun, but you don't know where to start

I'm a librarian, and I hear at least once a week from people who sheepishly tell me that they'd love to start reading for fun (for the first time or after a long break). Here's my best advice broken down into bullet points, but start here: there is no shame in being a beginner.

-Think about what you do enjoy and start from there. So you're not a book person. Do you like movies? Television? Podcasts? Music? Tabletop games? Video games? What other media do you like and what does it have in common? Make a little list and Venn diagram that shit.

Maybe you're into stories about fucked-up families (Sharp Objects, Succession) or found families (lots of realplay TTRPG podcasts, Leverage, Avatar: The Last Airbender) or fucked-up found families (various Batman media, Steven Universe, The Good Place). Maybe you mainly watch or listen to stuff for the romance (Taylor Swift music, The Best Man, Heartstopper) or the sci-fi horror (The Magnus Archives, M3gan, Nope) or the romantic sci-fi horror (Welcome to Night Vale). And hey, maybe you're not a fictional media person at all. What do you like? What do you want to know about? World history? True crime? Home improvement? Birdwatching? Gardening? Various animals and their behavior? Human psychology? Cooking? If it's a thing, there are books about it. Start there.

Think about why you started to dislike reading. Did an adult snatch a book you thought looked cool out of your hands and say "Don't read that, it's below your reading level/above your reading level/a comic, not a real book"? Did school give you an endless parade of miserable, bleak books and tell you they were universal stories about the human condition? Or did it maybe only give you stories with saccharine, unearned happy endings, or only show you stories about straight cis wealthy abled white kids, or keep you from reading entire books at all in favor of endlessly dissecting tiny passages out of context? (For some vindication, check out "How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading" by John Holt.) Did you have an older sibling or a friend who was better at reading? Did adults put you in competition with that other kid and make you feel like shit about it? Were you in a situation where you were good at reading in one language, or even more than one, but required to read in another that you were still learning? Did this make you feel like you were "behind schedule" or like you shouldn't read at all? Or was reading just harder for you than it seemed for other people? Did reading give you headaches? Did the letters or numbers seem to float around on the page? Was it hard for you to focus for long enough to get through a whole book? Did you need to learn to read differently than the kids around you could? Did adults punish you for this instead of helping you? (Look, I'm not a doctor, but if any of these apply to you, consider going to an optometrist, a psychologist, and/or a psychiatrist to talk about these things if they're persistent and interfere with your life.) Or maybe you're burned out on reading. Maybe you did an advanced degree in literature or writing or history or some other reading-heavy discipline and you're just tired. Maybe your professors or classmates got snobby about what constituted "literary" works and their good opinion didn't line up with what you actually enjoy. You get to be sad and angry about these things, if they happened to you. They're also clues to how to move forward if you'd like to read more, or enjoy reading more.

Give yourself permission to read whatever you want, in whatever way you want. Wanna start with young adult books? Middle grade books? Awesome. Many of them have stories that are sophisticated and complex. Starting with re-reading the first books you enjoyed reading could help jog your memory about why you initially found it fun. Hell, even picture books are a good start. Have you read a picture book lately? Those things are getting cooler every day. Comics and graphic novels? Those count as reading. Many of them are published for adults, though again, the ones published for a middle-grade or young adult audience are often complex and moving. If you're an anime fan, give manga a shot. The source material for many anime go deeper into the characters and stories, especially now that anime seasons are often truncated to 12 episodes for entire series. (The right-to-left thing is easier to get used to than you think, too.) Romance novels and mystery thrillers and science fiction and fantasy? Those count as reading. Many of the things you might have liked about the books you read as a child or a teenager are present in adult "genre" fiction, and many of the things you might despise about adult "literary" fiction (god, I hate that word, but that's another post) may be absent from those titles. E-books and audiobooks definitely count as reading, and they're often more accessible than paper books for some people. Anybody who tries to genre- or format-shame you is a dick and not worth talking to.

Go to your local library. All right, shameless self-promotion here, I'll admit it. But I promise you, if you walk into a library and say "I'm an adult, I stopped reading a while ago, and I'd like to start back up again but I need suggestions," you will make someone's day. I get asked for my opinion about books approximately once a month. I get asked how to use the printer approximately eighty-five times a day. I love helping with the printer and I'm saying that unironically, but my colleagues and I absolutely adore "readers' advisory" questions. If you come with the answers to the above questions about your preferred genres, formats, and reasons you'd like to read, it'll help the process, but most of us are trained to ask follow-up questions to get you the best possible book match. Do not apologize. You are not bothering us. It is literally part of our job. We want people to know that reading is fun, and you are a people.

[avintmich]

I've been gone for a long time, so a little spoiler for the new work ;)

[californiastatelibrary]

"A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world. It's a place with librarians in it." — @neil-gaiman

Celebrate Love Your Library Month by going to the library this week! Or, if you can't make it in person, use the Palace or Libby apps to access free online content with your library card!

[entermyrealm]

𝘭𝘶𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘯𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘳𝘺

[nexus-nebulae]

i love seeing deaf characters in media just like. there in the background as normal people. but why is it Always a deaf librarian. deaf people can do more than that. learn more from General Amaya

[rotten-dog-teeth]

I need to say something, as an archivist.

Please look after your books. Please. Don't throw them in the bin, don't tear pages out, don't screw them up. If you don't want them anymore, either sell them, or donate them, whether it be to a charity shop, a library, or a school or university.

I rescue old books and look after them. I've just been sorting through the most recent lot that I've gotten, and there were books in there - that the original owners wanted to just throw away - that had survived over 100 years, and predated the first (1st) world war.

That in itself, is amazing. Because what most people don't know/realise, is that so many books did not survive the world wars, especially the second (2nd) one. Not only were countless libraries destroyed in bombings, but so many books were burned and eradicated under the Nazi regime.

This is still an issue today, with book burnings and bannings still taking place, such as in the USA; as well as countries being bombed and seiged, destroying so many books containing records of those people's history, culture and lives, such as in Palestine.

I've found books that were printed the year the second (2nd) world war ended, first (1st) editions filled with documents from the war, detailing everything that happened, every action that was taken, everywhere they went, every letter that was exchanged, every soldier that was felled. Documents that would have otherwise been destroyed, if not during the war by the opposition, then by the people who wrote it in the first place, to try to hide certain aspects of the war to paint themselves in a better light, or cover up certains tragedies or mistakes. These are pivotal resources for historians, especially books for time periods less written about/well-documented.

So often, I see books that are on their last legs, falling apart, and most people's reactions are to just throw them in the bin. This breaks my heart. Not only are you destroying a record of something so human - whether that be stories told to children to help them sleep at night, records of a huge historical event that meant the world to the people of that time, poems written by someone painfully in love so long ago - but snuffing out the life that book lived.

Every book I rescue, I check for two (2) things: print date, and notes.

The print date is simple - it tells me how old the book is. But the notes are what I mean by the life of the book. So many books I find have hand-written notes in them, and they give you little hints of the life they've lived. Here are some real notes I've found in books:

"Peter, Chemistry department of [X] university" in a german-english dictionary of chemistry terminology. This book was a gift to a university student, he was studying chemistry, and probably either working with a German team, or maybe leaving home after university to go to Germany, or some other german speaking country. These kinds of books are really specific, and at the time of print (roughly the 50s or 60s if I remember correctly), you couldn't just search for it online (something a good portion of us have never known) - you had to find a specialist book shop or find one that could track it down for you. Whoever got this book, cared about the person they gave it to, and went through the effort of finding this specific book for Peter before he left home. I would guess maybe a family member. Maybe they never saw him again.

"For our 50th anniversary - Annie & Frank" in a little homemade books of recipes. This book had been put together over several years, presumeably over the course of this couple's marriage - 50 years. This book was probably an anniversary gift from one of the two (2) partners to the other. So many recipes, lovingly collected and kept over decades. Probably having been cooked for eachother a hundred times over. These people probably had such fond memories of being sat at the dinner table - maybe just the two (2) of them, maybe with family, friends, and other company - eating the warm, homemade meals from these recipes. Making and sharing food with someone is often a very intimate and loving thing to do. I like to think they loved eachother so very much.

[A double-sided A4 love letter] found in a book of poetry. The letter was faded, and most of it was indistinguishable, but there were little bits that I could read, and they were lovely. This was written more recently (it contained more modern dialect), but was still so precious all the same. I wonder what that book lived through. A spark. An anxious confession. A romance. Perhaps a break-up too. Maybe that's why the book ended up in the donations. I imagine that the recipient of the love letter and poetry forgot the letter was even in there. The book was probably a gift from their partner - maybe specially picked, perhaps because the recipient liked poetry, or that specific poet at least - and that's probably why they used the letter as a bookmark in it. I still think about those people sometimes, where they ended up. Where are they now?

Those are just some of them, and I hope you understand why I care so much about these little bundles of paper and ink. They tell a story, not just in what's printed, but in their age, their condition, in the little notes people leave behind. Even simply the fact that some books' pages are so thin and smooth from being flicked through and read by an adoring reader so many times that the page corners have been worn thin by stroking fingers.

You may feel like nobody cares about that one book you have sitting in the corner of your room, and that "there are thousands of those books, this one doesn't matter", or that it's "ruined" because of that little message your mum wrote on the front page when she got it for you, but what you don't realise is that future historians and archivists are begging you to look after it, and make sure it's given to a good home. It may end up being the last surviving copy of that book. That little message could tell them so much that you don't even notice right now.

It breaks my heart finding old books with pages missing, which may never be recovered - the contents lost to time forever. Finding books whose spines are falling apart and pages are moulded from dampness - having been neglected for years. Finding books whose pages are worn and faded, yellowed and bent - just left to rot.

It fustrates me when I find books that have been poorly or just outright incorrectly handled. You can tell if a book's from a school library, because it has tape all over the cover, hiding the face of the book with a permanent dust jacket, because apparently they decided it ought to stay hidden; because it has check-out pages glued over the print date, because the day somebody borrowed it is more important than the book's birthday. I love libraries, and they're so important, but sometimes I wish some of them took better care of their books.

This is my plea to the people, and love letter to the books.

Please. I love you.

[in-the-stacks]

A video book review of Other People's Words by Leslie Savisky. Reviewed by Michelle Zaffino for In the Stacks.

https://www.inthestacks.tv/2024/12/in-the-stacks-229-other-peoples-words

[tiffanyachings]

there’s nothing like wearing an unseen university shirt out and about to attract every single discworld fan within a five mile radius

[home-ward]

Source

Take care of yourself. Give yourself time to check in and ask why you might be tired or physically unwell. It’s tempting to be the type of person who can do it all, but we also need to rest when necessary.

Go for walks. The summer is ending and the weather is perfect for taking long walks while listening to music or podcasts.

Create a skincare routine, but don’t go crazy. The meditation of putting on products is like alchemy to me, but I think we could always strip back how much we’re using on our skin.

Get enough sleep. I could stay on Pinterest or tumblr all night in bed, but I find that I feel much better when I put my phone away early and get to sleep.

Fall in love with tea. I used to be a coffee drinker, but tea feels so much better for me and can be cozy in the cooler months.

Keep your gut and skin healthy. This means explicating, hydrating, cleansing, protecting, and adding food with antioxidants into your diet.

Make your goal a healthy lifestyle. You can manage this through regular exercise, sleeping in when you need to, and managing stress with mindful coping mechanisms.

Other little things: do your nails yourself, take pleasure in hygiene, organize your wardrobe, take care of yourself.

[wizardysseus]

it's hard for me to describe the dread i feel about my job as a librarian—a job i love, which brings me so much joy—because people perceive book banning as a local issue, or an issue of certain states, but it operates on a much broader level, too. if you love your library, you should know what's happening in libraries and how much worse it could get.

yes, on the local level, it matters that you know who is on your library board and what they stand for, even though you might have only indirect control over who those people are. (my library board, for instance, is not voted in but appointed by the mayor, a position that doesn't technically run on partisan lines but in practice absolutely does.) your library board is probably who makes the final call when a book is challenged about whether to remove it from the hands of the people. and if the board is not committed to serving the community the library serves, they can take the freedom to read and access certain information away from people. which is, as you probably know, fascist.

and if you care about your local library, you should care about preventing conservatives from taking positions of power at every level, obviously including the national level. project 2025 explicitly seeks to shut down public institutions and criminalize librarians who distribute "pornographic" material — that is, queer and especially trans books. we have also seen a push to destroy works by authors of color banned for "teaching critical race theory," which means speaking to racism at all.

maybe there's no guarantee that a democrat being president means your local library won't be gutted. but there is every sign that if trump is reelected, public schools and libraries will be defunded, queer literature will be classed as pornography, and librarians will registered as sex offenders. that affects me as a librarian and a queer person, but i'm white and present female in a field that is still overwhelmingly white and female. we have no shortage of work to do within libraries to change that, but punishing queer librarians and librarians of color will only set us back and make librarianship more hostile, if it remains a viable profession at all. and all of this rebounds for the worst on our most marginalized communities.

i care about our rights, and i care whether you vote.

i recommend book riot's literary activism newsletter to learn more.

[mermaid-ish]

learn more here!!!