A Feast in the Famine

Let’s face it, times are tough and libraries often do not get the respect they deserve when it comes to budgets.  At the same time, we are trying to see to it that our library has all the resources that it needs to fulfill the student and faculty needs.  We have a difficult challenge – to keep the library supplied and fully staffed while dealing with, often significantly, less funding.  I can see an increased loss of hair in my near future.

This is where creativity comes in handy.  The other day, I heard that a local used book vendor had bought a collection of art books.  Our art library is in urgent need of art resources.  On a whim, I called the vendor to see if he would be willing to donate some books to the library.  Not only was he willing, but he allowed me to hand pick the books that he would donate.  I found some real treasures.  Granted, some of them were older, but there were some real classics in there as well.   In times like these, it is necessary to be proactive and imaginative.

A disorder of bibliothecal proportions

I have discovered that I have a vice, an addiction or a disorder. I do not remember ever having read about it in a psychological or religious text. I have not found it in medical references, nor have I found a twelve-step treatment for it, if I ever would want treatment for it. Nevertheless, I do most positively suffer from library gluttony.

I work at one library, visit another, and always have more books checked out than I could ever read. I walk the stacks seeing all of the great tomes, and I have to take some of them home with me. In the back of my mind, I know that I am checking out more than I can possible read,  but I cannot resist. I walk up to the circulation desk with an armful of books that will one day throw my back out. In this way, a good part of my life is taken up with binging on checkouts, leading to occasional purging trips to the library with armloads of books. Call me an addict, dysfunctional, or obsessed. Perhaps I am a little of all of these things.

At the moment, sitting on my desk is a stack of musty old books from the mid-nineteenth century. I may take some of them home some time. I will probably never read more than a few pages of them. Still, it feels good having them on my desk. They call to me. I am trying to resist, honestly I am.

Nicholas Basbanes on The Written Word

“Over time, communications across the generations has typically come by way of the written word, carried out in a striking variety of ways and recorded on an astonishingly rich medley of surfaces, the impulse always being to make contact and to give an account of ourselves – which, it turns out is the point of the exercise.”

Nicholas A. Basbanes from a Splendor of Letters: The permanence of Books in an Impermanent World.

Basbanes is a journalist who wrote a nationally syndicated column on books and authors. He also is the author of several books on books and book collecting.

Girolamo Tiraboschi

I first encountered the name Tiraboschi while reading a biographical work about Corregio in the book Among the Gread Masters of Painting: Scenes in the Lives of Famous Painters by Walter Rowlands. Aways eager to learn more about librarians who have made significant contrigbutions to society, I found the following information about him.

Girolamo Tiraboschi was an Italian schollar, Jesuit and librarian. He served for a time as the professor of rhetoric and belles-letters at the Bera in Milan. He was then appointed by Duke of Modena, Francesco III, to take charge of the Biblioteca Estense. During his tenure as the librarian, he added many acquisitions and created a catalog for the collection. His opus magnum is the Storia Della Literature Italiana, a history of arts and letters and many other contributions of his native land. He also wrote a biographical work of writers born in Modena and many other articles on history and criticism.


Ford, Jeremiah. "Girolamo Tiraboschi." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 14. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. 21 Apr. 2010 .