Out of ideas

Dear Slightly Smelly Patron of the Library of Glum,

When I tell you we do not have that particular journal in the library, I do not mean we do have it, but I’m not telling you where. I do not mean we could have it, and it would take me a minute to run down the road to the newsagents with the petty cash biscuit tin and get you a copy – academic journals, after all, cost something like £30 or £40 an issue, and that’s not counting the scientific ones, whose invoices make me faint on a regular basis, and anyway, we order most of them in from specialist suppliers who live in the internet. I do not mean I don’t want you to have it. I do not mean anything at all beyond the stark, basic, ‘we do not have this journal’. If you like, I’ll agree that it’s annoying and that you must be very frustrated. Did that help you feel better? No? In any case, please hush about the damned journal. Standing there complaining at me is having no more useful effect than making me both tetchy and nauseated. Go home and wash instead, and make the world a happier place.

Dear Considerably Less Smelly Patron,

Yes, you do have a library fine on this book. It was due back at the end of October. Yes, you told me you had it renewed, but, please remember, you told me you had it renewed at the beginning of October, which would make it due back at the end of October. Which it was. It is now the end of November. Yes, we do offer a week’s grace on late returns. Indeed. To avoid a fine, therefore, you should have returned or renewed this book in the first week of November. This is the last week of November. No, I am afraid that your having spent August abroad is no reason whatsoever for me to waive this fine. You hadn’t even borrowed the book in the first place in August.

Dear Whatever On Earth You Think You Are,

This is a library. Not your GP’s consulting room. I cannot see anything even beginning to resemble a magic staple in your upper arm. Please put your shirt back on and go away.

Dear Patron Who Is Probably Quite Normal,

The fact you are smiling at me and saying please and thank you does not alter the fact you are now asking me to look something up on the catalogue for you for the seventeenth time this afternoon. Pay attention. Type the author’s surname in the box marked ‘author’. Press return. See? Now you try. What do you mean you can’t find anything? Ah. We discussed this at go five, go eight, and goes eleven to fifteen inclusive. If you spell ‘Austen’, ‘Austin’ one more time I will accidentally delete your library record.

Dear Patron Who Is Being Extremely Reasonable Considering,

Yes, the lift is out of order. Again. Indeed, that makes twice in one week. Yes, we have called the engineer. We have been calling the engineer since ten o’clock this morning. I am well aware you simply can’t get up the stairs and that the lift breakage has basically locked you out of your library. I am deeply annoyed on your behalf, and I would quite like to slap the engineer upside the head. When I have finished slapping the muggins who installed the bloody lift all wrong in the first place. All I can do is offer you a ping-pong bat and a place in the queue.

With all good wishes to you all,

Yours sincerely,

Reed’s headache

Cheerfully, shamelessly, swiped from Charlotte.

1. Do you remember learning to read? How old were you?

Like Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird, I never learnt to read. My mother remembers playing with flash-cards with me when I was two or three, but I simply do not remember not being able to read, or being taught in any way. At six, I had a reading age of twelve, at twelve, of an adult, as an adult, I now have the reading age of a depressed adolescent geek.

2. What do you find most challenging to read?

Currently? Course books on Management and Computing. Dear God, but is writing in English an ability not vouchsafed to anyone who knows what a policy documentation trail is?

3. What are your library habits?

I work in a library. I am studying librarianship. I prowl libraries territorially. I rearrange the shelves if they’ve got out of order even in the local public library. I belong to five libraries. I max out all my library cards on a regular basis. You could say I have boundary issues when it comes to libraries.

4. Have your library habits changed since you were younger?

I grew up a long long way from a library, in a land where libraries were not so much of a big deal. And then, age ten, I went to a school with a library and, oh my, I could read any of it, all of it, take it home if I liked… Hooked. Since then, I have always thrown myself into all and any available libraries with desperate abandon. I don’t think much has altered since that first magical visit. Oh, apart from all the books on HTML now littering the floor around the computer. Never thought that would happen.

5. How has blogging changed your reading life?

I had meant to do more reviews, which meant I started reading more thematically, but, really, I read but I don’t think these days. I do see other people’s reviews and make mental notes, but did I mention lack of thinking? Notes all lost. Carpet fluff in there. Sorry.

6. What percentage of your books do you get from new book stores, second hand book stores, the library, online exchange sites, online retailers, other?

10% new (huge and huge and gigantic and huge bookshop right next door to work. Tempty tempty), 5% second hand, 70% library, 10% online retailers, and I suppose the rest are gifts.

7. How often do you read a book and not review it on your blog? What are your reasons for not blogging about a book?

I rarely blog about my reading because, actually, I am too darn chicken. I always meant to. It was one of the original aims of the blog. But alas I have such a horror of looking shallow, or unperceptive, or dim, or having anyone judge my reading habits. This sounds a little wet, really [A little? A little? - Ed]. I know. But you haven’t grown up being told you are as nothing, as nothing, d’you hear? until you’ve read The Brothers Karamazov. And this at an age when Narnia is so much more… appealing. Nope. Still haven’t read Dostoevsky.

8. What are your pet peeves about the way people treat books?

Writing in books. Even in pencil. Folding paper-backs in half at the spine (which, of course, rips all the pages out of the spine and makes the cover permanently warped). Leaving books lying around for hours, days, open and face-down. Again, screws the spine permanently. Using those metal giant paper-clip-like ornamental book-marks – they always tear a page in the end.

9. Do you ever read for pleasure at work?

Of course not! [Bwahahahah!]

10. When you give people books as gifts, how do you decide what to give them?

I try to think what they like, what they’ve liked in the past, what they have already, and basically spin round and round in the middle of the shop until my brain explodes and I have to go and recover in a coffee-shop. Sometimes I get self-rightous and give books I think they ought to read. I try to control this urge, but, hey, certain people just need telling.