Bookride.com has put together a nice collection of boring book covers for the amusement of all. Thanks, BoingBoing!

Biblioburro is a traveling library in Colombia set up by Luis Soriano in 1990. You can read the CNN article from 2010, a NYT article from 2008, the Wikipedia entry, or a children’s book. Or maybe you’d like to watch a YouTube video. PBS will broadcast a program on it tonight (July 19). Thanks, Dina Wood!

My friend Kris has written to tell me of a possibly library shenanigan on page 40 of Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (Roger Fisher and William Ury, 1991).

Kris tells me: The point of the story is about how negotiations are generally not zero-sum, but can be about giving both people everything they want, because you focus on their interests, rather than on their position in the negotiation.  So here’s the story:

Consider the story of two men quarreling in a library. One wants the window open and the other wants it closed. They bicker back and forth about how much to leave it open: a crack, halfway, three quarters of the way. No solution satisfies them both. Enter the librarian. She asks one why he wants the window open: “To get some fresh air.” She asks the other why he wants it closed: “To avoid the draft.” After thinking a minute, she opens wide a window in the next room, bringing in fresh air without a draft.

I think it is really interesting that the one who fixes a problem is not only a librarian, but also the only woman in the story. But this interest is overshadowed by the fact that they are in a LIBRARY with windows that OPEN. I am pretty sure I have never been in a library with windows that open, but I am willing to concede that this might have been very common in The Olden Timey Days.

Thanks, Kris Kanthak!

This postcard from ripple(s), made for William Corbett’s poem “Remembering Michael Gizzi,” which is about the Woodberry Poetry Room at the library of Harvard University, seems to me to count as a library shenanigan.

Addendum, April 2014: The Dayton Metro Library in Dayton, Ohio encouraged its patrons to make poems out of spine titles. Thanks, Dina Wood, for letting me know!