[PW] Amusing/Interesting Reference Requests

[Dayle Irwin]

Oh, my, a trip down memory lane!
I am retired from a medium-sized public library, and I have had
some doozies in the past 30 years.  
A few:
The elderly couple who were looking for the photograph of the
Last Supper.  NOT the painting, NOT a photograph of the painting--
the only thing that would do would be a picture of the ORIGINAL
picture.  After all, there must have been one or how could anyone have
done a painting of it?

The high school couple doing a paper on Red China, who insisted 
that China was not the same country.  They finally settled for a 1956 
(yes, I know that it should have been weeded long before) book that
had "Red China" in the title.

We also had an "interesting" reference librarian.  Spelling was not his
forte, and neither were many other things!  Spelling was such a problem
that he could not use the card catalog--he would watch and direct while the
patron did it--and when we got computers, well.........It was ugly.
One evening I was at the Reference desk with him when a couple and their
young son approached.  The boy asked for a book on dragons.  The librarian
looked at them, and, stalling, said, "Real ones?"
The parents' eyes got big, so did the boy's.  I got up, walked out from behind
the desk, and all the way to the other end of the building to the fiction help desk,
shared this with the librarian sitting there before I totally lost it.
Then I went back and pulled the lovely books we had with pictures of fantasy
dragons.  The child was pleased.  I don't know if his parents ever brought him back, though.

I have more--think about the one where a student asked me how someone could die
of the immaculate conception.  Long long long story in between, as she twirled her
hair, umed, etc.  This also involved someone dying of syphilis.  (yeah, isn't that great?).
I finally asked to see the book.  It said that this person "...died at the hospital of the
Immaculate Conception."  Again--ROLF

We had a patron who kept asking for the book that listed the people who went to Hell.
Same librarian as above wouldn't even look for this.  Kept yelling at the patron--who was
definitely living in a different reality, anyway--to get out and stop bothering him.  There really
is a book about the people in hell.  Loved that, too.

They go on and on.  I had a sociology professor that I visited after a few years on this job.
He thought we should all keep index cards on our desks and write this stuff down.  Great
book material.  I never did that.  Too bad.

I have loved reading these.


Dayle Irwin
decatur68 at earthlink.net