Melvil Dewey / Harvey Weinstein

(Original grid, before my modification, from CNN; portrait of Dewey from the Library of Congress)

Goddammit. According to this article by Erin Blakemore, the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System benefited from a system he didn’t invent, the system of patriarchy, in the exact same way that Harvey Weinstein does. That is, he was a serial sexual harasser of women, taking advantage of his professional position to, well, take advantage of the women he met through that profession. “Shenanigans” isn’t a strong enough word to describe this behavior.

Thanks (or more like the opposite of thanks), David Weinstock.

gingerbread cuneiform tablets!

Turn to the ancient libraries for your holiday baking this year and try Farrell Monaco’s gingerbread cuneiform tablets.

Thanks, Andrea Krupp!

streamer shenanigan

At some unknown library, during some sort of party for perhaps some sort of holiday, some unknown staffers figured out that they could run a streamer through the electrical outlet in the floor of one floor to the ceiling of the floor below.

But apparently they got in a little trouble for doing it and aren’t supposed to do it any more or tell anyone it can be done.

Thanks, anonymous person who told me about this and provided pics!

…like … how to become a jellyfish … in the world of business…

“Reading Outside the Box” is a web series starring Mr. Peter, a children’s librarian. In each episode, he unboxes a box of books and talks about them, whether he actually knows anything about them or not. In this episode, he and another children’s librarian, Miss Abby, made me laugh like six times.

Thanks, Peter!

Please do not let Max into the library.

Library unknown. May not even be real. I don’t know.

Thanks, Diane Westerfield!

Doctor Strange library shenanigan

Doctor Strange steals a bunch of forbidden books from the library in the (fictional) city of Kamar- Taj while Wong, the librarian, listens to Beyonce. (Strange, teasing Wong for using only one name, has recommended he listen to that artist; he’s also mentioned Bono, Adele, and others.)

social media shenanigans

The librarians at Martinborough Library in Wellington, New Zealand posed for some excellent “Game of Tomes” photographs. Thanks, Esau Katz!

Also, this happened on Facebook. Thanks, Sarah Milteer!

 

“Book Spine Poetry Trash”

The Los Angeles Public Library and the Houston Public Library are expressing their baseball rivalry via an excellent “book spine poetry trash” battle.

Thanks, Dan Rather!

I tried to find a book spine to express my own feelings about this, but there don’t seem to be any books titled “Indifferent” or “I Don’t Care” or “Sports Rivalries Are Meaningless.”

Keeping Up with the Librarians

So, in case you haven’t heard, librarians at Invercargill City Libraries in New Zealand did a “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” parody photo and put it on their Facebook page with this text: “It has been 10 years since the Kardashians first graced our screens. To celebrate, our social media team decided to have a totally impromptu, definitely not planned, photo-shoot. — with Sandra Rought, Marge Colley Miller, Christine Landrum, Marc Moore, Tl Thorn, Shaun Stephanoff, Gail Groeneveld, Emma Whatmore, Stephen Leung, Elaine O’Shea, Sue Watson Hess, Anette Norström and Sandra Dee.”

For more information, see this Buzzfeed post, and for once, you can actually read the comments — lots of people saying they’d rather watch this show than the one it’s parodying.

Thanks, Sue Spengler and others!

 

loud eating in Tutt Library

The best thing about this shenanigan, to me, isn’t that it takes place at my own library (I’m in charge of Special Collections at Colorado College). No, the best thing about it is that my new library director, JoAnn Jacoby, sent this link to the whole library staff saying it had gotten almost 4 million hits on youtube, whereas this other video — of JoAnn talking about libraries — has gotten — well — somewhat fewer (99 as of this moment).