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Odd 'Regulars' In Libraries

I bought a copy of Godfrey Winn's autobiography The Positive Hour in a second hand bookshop some years ago. It was an old library copy and what really swayed me to buy it was that in the chapters where Winn was describing his friendship with Vivien Leigh a previous reader had gone out of their way to write
some very damning remarks about her in the margins, calling her a dope fiend amongst other remarks. Like I said, it was one of the reasons I bought it, cant help being fascinated who this pathological Leigh hater/book defacer was...
 
Librarians--I salute you. You staff your desks no matter what. We once heard a guy ranting loudly at the local history/genealogy desk about how he was descended from Teutonic knights. At length.
I'm sure lots of people are descended from Teutonic knights. They put it about a bit, back in the day.
 
This actually made me think of these regulars being aliens... like in Men in Black.

That's kind of insensitive, but that was my first thought, ha.
 
the public needs to know!
I sure hope she's not searching the net for folks talking about this incident (though I have to admit, I always thought she was a nerdy-cutie so maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing to be harshly disciplined by her!)! That having been said, the puppet was named Ms. Bun, and was a bunny hand puppet. I don't know exactly how it was intended, but I suspect it was a joke carried out way too far for the other people at the typical unit meeting, but she played the whole thing straight faced as if it was Ms. Bun in the meeting.
 
ha! Ms Bun! :)

If you are going to do something it is best to do it with conviction! :glee:
 
We've been getting handwritten 4 page "magazines" on spiral-bound notebook paper that somebody is selling for $1 that features stories about this guy who wanted to have a record store but couldn't afford it so he looked in the window, and he went to a bar once to see a band and thought they were okay.

We've got another guy who is obsessed with architecture books, and he tries to slink through the library so that nobody will see him even though he's about 6' 3" and about 350 lbs. If he sees other people he starts to try to move away as best he can.

We found a used condom pressed in-between the pages of a book.

All in a day's work!
 
We've been getting handwritten 4 page "magazines" on spiral-bound notebook paper that somebody is selling for $1 that features stories about this guy who wanted to have a record store but couldn't afford it so he looked in the window, and he went to a bar once to see a band and thought they were okay.

You mean these "mags" have been showing up mysteriously in libraries? Or have you identified the culprit?
 
Re: the magazines: It might be somebody selling them on the street for money, or it might be somebody who is hiding them in the stacks. There is no identified culprit yet.

Re: the wacker: it was "deposited" in a very expensive physics book.
 
We've been getting
We've got another
We found a

I accuse you, @MrRING of openly-being a member of the library fraternity.

For this, I thank you, on many levels.

However, in the specific context of why I'm typing this, right now, I wonder if you would be willing to answer a number of fairly-deep, searching and inevitably-biased questions about (not just your profession)....well, libraries.

Especially regarding the here-and-now, but also about the there-and-when.

I was going to start a new thread for this inquisitorial process, and maybe this tangent will be modified by moderators into just exactly that.

Feel free to decline. But ideally you won't (even though in some ways you might perhaps wish to deflect). And you've probably guessed the more-obvious of my questions, already.
 
Shockingly enough, I'm merely a non-MLIS life-long library staff member of a university library, not a member of the mighty MLIS-holding crew. I literally can't imagine what you might ask, but I'll game to try. I started working in libraries in 1989, and except for about 3 years I've worked in them since then. My serial number is 341-10-678, and rank is Collections Support Specialist.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Whole soaked collections being hand dried with fans. A windshield wiper hidden behind books as well as a long-dead bouquet of flowers. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... time to shelve.
 
Oh, I don't think I mentioned the tenacious foot fetishist here yet. We had a guy who was walking around the library for a period of roughly two years, filming women with bare feet, and uploading the "foot"-age to YouTube. I initially thought something was going on, because there were sets of books moved out of the way where the only reason they were moved and stacked up were so somebody could clandestinely view people, but at the time I thought that it was just a peeper, not a filmer. This behavior was reported to the police and they came and looked but did nothing because it was too abstract a concept apparently and there was no proof of villainy, just my hunch.

Roughly a year after the book moving was reported, I noticed a young guy in a porkpie hat obviously filming a spectacularly barelegged lady without her knowledge (in a stairwell bench, this guy was behind her filming like the photographer at the end of Austin Powers). I reported it to the cops but other than going up there they did nothing because he had stopped filming. When next I caught him I confronted the guy, but he didn't particular seem to care and other than stopping filming when he saw me, it did nothing to dissuade him. I reported it again to the campus police a few time, but gave up.

Finally a guard who had witnessed one of my earlier reports saw the guy doing the same thing, and remembered my story. He didn't have the authority to arrest the guy, nor could he convince campus police that it was happening either. In the meantime the foot maniac was getting bolder, and he spent all day wandering around the library, looking for comely twinkletoes for his camera, even doing things like sitting in the floor beside people filming their feet but pretending to just watch his phone. This final few months of outrageous boldness finally gave enough opportunities for the guard to finally convince the campus police to take it seriously. The perp was caught and confronted, and then he confessed and the hundreds of videos he had uploaded were discovered as well as the cache of images on his phone. I remember the police said he was particular fond of "hot Indian feet" as that was one of his most frequent headings for his cinema verite. YouTube agreed to remove the footage, the student was expelled, and the general public was never informed it happened.
 
Never be spoken of in front of my lady, as Herself is a librarian (must ask her). But my "oddity " in libraries is a tendency to reshelve the biographies of Margaret Thatcher , or books approving of her political theory, a few shelves away, alongside whatever they've got on Mussolini, Hitler and fascism in general... This reminds me of Adrian Mole, who had a thing against Jane Austen and persisted in reshelving her with the rest of the lightweight chick-lit.
 
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Bad form, AgProv, from the library POV - it's best Herself never find out! :glum:

We get challenges from time to time various material, and my take (which is the average librarian take) is that the bad has to be with the good - if we lose the bad, then we might very well forget the past, and that is surest path to repeating it. We had a challenge not long ago to our tiny collection of "Holocaust Denial" literature in the middle of a ton of books about everything that is wrong with Holocaust Denial. The patron wanted them all removed, and it was up to my boss (who happened to be Jewish) to tell the fellow why academically they needed to be kept.

If you want to gently protest their existence, just shelve them backwards, so at least somebody searching for them could find them in the appropriate spot. But the best practice is to let them stand on the shelf warts and all to the scrutiny of time.
 
We've had a phenomenon of somebody tearing either plugs from the tops of books, or every page from the books. I surmised they were tearing them like they were whittling, something to pass the time. Well, I was wrong: we started to find parts of books that were partially chewed and then spit out. Our conclusion: they are eating them when they find books whose pages tear and chew in a pleasing way.

This is still going on, and it's over 100 books affected so far. We've found 3 chewed masses of pages so far.

Damaged books 1a.jpg
Damaged books 2b.jpg
 
I was getting some very strange looks and comments from the local library manager
till I told him the books I was ordering "Lightening Boys, Hunter Boys, Vulcan Boys"
and one or two more were about the pilots of cold war fast jets.
You can soon get into trouble in a library.
 
We've had a phenomenon of somebody tearing either plugs from the tops of books, or every page from the books. I surmised they were tearing them like they were whittling, something to pass the time. Well, I was wrong: we started to find parts of books that were partially chewed and then spit out. Our conclusion: they are eating them when they find books whose pages tear and chew in a pleasing way.

This is still going on, and it's over 100 books affected so far. We've found 3 chewed masses of pages so far.

View attachment 21569View attachment 21570
Bibliophagy.. I thank the gods that hasn't happened here at my library..yet..:worry:
 
Depends on the subject matter! :p
People did used to eat spells written on paper, wash mead over runes, water over hieroglyphs etc. and drink up the knowledge that way, but eating books without any hot sauce? Bizarre.
 
Before the COVID shutdown, we had what my co-worker called "The Seeding" where somebody fully used a condom and left it as a display for the world to see his triumph. We have a photo of it!
The Seeding.jpg
 
I've been getting these odd photocopies notes for years around the library... there are some variations in what they say (the Dreamer one was new to me for instance) but they are usually these same kind of statements, always photocopied, never the handwritten version.

Notes.jpg
 
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