No Sense Makes Sense

It's weird how some days at the Do-Nothing Desk the questions run in streaks. As reported, I'd kind of been on a really helpful roll there for a couple weeks, and last week was pretty fun as I got a long run of good old fashioned reference questions like the longest river, the population of Dallas and Cincinnati, the date of the land run, and when was Price Tower built. I hope today is not the trendsetter as we had at least three of what I call AFLACs. You know the AFLAC commercials where people are trying to think of the name and the duck keeps squawking out, "AFLAC!" These are ones where you're trying to give them the answer and they just don't get it no matter how you explain it to them. My first question of the day was a guy who came to the desk and his opening salvo is, "Where can I find out how many books were published?" I sputter, "Uh, uh, do you mean, ever? Like since the printing press?" "No," he says, "just for a year." Inside I say whew, Bowker Annual can handle that. But I press on and he says, no, he wants to know how many of one title were published. Ok, I think, CBI can handle that.We don't have it, but it can be located if the year is right. So I press on, what year? What book? 1987 he says and The Hobbit. 50th annviersary edition. Ok, I say, that may be hard to find out, thinking a book like that will have had a billion printings. Why do you need it, maybe there's another way of going about it. Eureka! He wanted to know what it was worth. So I gave him a book collectors' price guide, but told him that old axiom, "It's only worth what someone will pay for it." If you want to know the market price, let me look it up in Alibris or ABE and get a retail price. "Oh! Onliiiine," he says. "They don't know anything." Well, I said, the collectors stores are disappearing, everyone's online now. He wouldn't have it. I didn't know what I was talking about. So he takes his collectors' guide and saunters off with it, hoping it had the answer. It didn't.

Then the Grandmother of Europe had this really funny one where every step of her reference interview got a broader and broader response. "Where are the novels? You know, like memoirs?" "Uh, well, do you mean nonfiction, like true stories," GOE asks. "Yeah." "OK, well whose memoirs do you want?" "Just anyone," he says. "Where's the general section?" "They're all over. By subject," GOE counters. "Is there a particular type of person you want to read about?" "An American," is the reply. "OK, an American who did what kind of work; or when did they live?" GOE is really stretched now. She gets no answer. "20th Century maybe? You know, the 1900s," she tries again. He finally nods tacit approval and the best she can do is take him to 973.9 and let him browse with a promise of more help if he needs it.

After work, the Killer wanted to show me her folder for the year. Mercifully, her teachers keep the best work throughout the year and provide a nice folder at the end so you don't have to keep every little drawing and fingerpainting and risk scarring them by having to throw it out later. The best item was from her first day of school. It was a little train which each child would put up on a bulletin board. Hers said: My name is: Super Giant Killer. My favorite color is: Blue. I like to: Be left alone. Oh, man, I died laughing.

She and I also started a new project. She wanted to create what I guess you might call a natural history of Pluto. I'm not sure what you would call it. First we had to draw a Pluto globe and then I was supposed to draw the continents and oceans and she started in on the flora and fauna. Oh, and she also did the minerals. She had a list of all the properties of each plant and rock and what continent they could be found on, etc. She had just read a book on Pluto and I guess she figured what was good for us was good for Pluto. I didn't have the heart to bring up that it's a cold and dark rock. It was fun, though. And further proof that a monkey could've written Lord of the Rings. Maybe I'll scan in some of our work sometime.