In honor of Library Card Sign-Up Month, the American Library Association’s “At Your Library” public awareness campaign is sponsoring a Flickr pool of images of people with their library cards. John Waters has a big one — perhaps to go along with his supposed statement about people who don’t have any books, which has been making the rounds on Facebook. You can also see the cards of a stuffed gorilla, an orange shark, and the Karate Kid. Thanks, Jessamyn West!

John Farrier apparently knows the importance of assessment in libraries! Here he critiques fictional pony librarian Twilight Sparkle’s skills at the reference interview and more. Thanks, BoingBoing!

Niiiiiiiiiice: Robert Crais’s garage door, painted to look like bookshelves. Thanks, BoingBoing!

Something else I like about this shenanigan: the fact that Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing says he doesn’t have a Facebook account so he can’t confirm the Facebook appearance of this image. I am getting a bit peeved at the Facebookiness of everything. If I can possibly help it I try not to link to Facebook stuff, but sometimes people — and institutions! —  upload images there and nowhere else. That seems like a mistake, to me. Use your own website! Don’t depend on Facebook for everything! You never know what Facebook is going to do in the future with your stuff or you.

The mysterious book sculptor has struck again! So far, only a few of the fifty flowers she made have been found in Charlotte Square in Edinburgh. Each has a tag bearing a fragment of the Oscar Wilde quote from De Profundis: “…freedom, books, flowers and the moon.” (The full quote is “With freedom, books, flowers and the moon, who could not be happy?”)

This shenanigan started in 2011 and I hope it continues for years to come. There’s a book about it now, and an exhibition touring Scotland.

Thanks, Sarah Milteer!

We knew about some of the mini-libraries in NYC and elsewhere in the U.S., and we knew that red telephone booths in the U.K. were sprouting libraries as early as 2009, but it seems the phenomenon is growing. The Netherlands has a portable children’s library in a shipping container, and Bulgaria has a library on a trolley. Thanks, Sarah Milteer!

According to Jill Lepore’s excellent book The Mansion of Happiness: The History of Life and Death (2012), 19th century New York public libraries had different rules for girls and boys. To use the Astor Library, for example, you had to be fourteen years old … and male. Do you know what this means, shenanigan connoisseurs? This means that any girl who used the Astor Library was committing a shenanigan! I am working on finding out more about this cockamamie rule, but I had to tell you right away about all the presumable shenanigans that must have taken place in the late 19th century in New York. Girls with fake mustaches? Girls in drag? Presumably girls and women were, at some age, allowed in the Astor, but I don’t yet know the exact age requirement for them. I’m working on it; check back in a week. Now, in the 21st century, the NYPL rules state that all children from the age of zero upward are eligible for library cards. I like the idea of a newborn baby having a library card.

Thanks, Jill Lepore, and, by way of Lepore’s footnotes, thank you also to Miriam Braverman and her book Youth, Society, and the Public Library (1979).

Addendum, August 13: Braverman’s book doesn’t discuss the Astor Library. The factoid about boys fourteen and up appears in another source Lepore cites, Frances Clarke Sayers’s Anne Carroll Moore: A Biography (1972). Beginning in 1896, Moore was a children’s librarian in New York City; for better or for worse, she had long-lasting national influence on the profession. Unfortunately, Sayers’s biography doesn’t contain any added information about the age requirements for boys and girls at NYC libraries.  I would like to think the Astor Library allowed all girls in, regardless of age, though that’s not what Sayers implies. The librarian of the Astor in 1854, when the rule about boys fourteen and up was in place, was not impressed with the books the “young fry” chose to read; he described their choices (Scott, Cooper, Dickens, Punch, and the Illustrated News) as “trashy” (Sayers, p. 106). Circa 1868, both girls and boys under the age of sixteen in Washington Heights could pay five cents a week to use the library there (Sayers, p. 110). As far as I can tell, boys and girls had equal access to children’s libraries in NYC in Moore’s time. I’ll keep working on it.

Victoria’s Kitchen, a London bakery, made these bookish treats for a customer’s 60th birthday. Each of the books shaped her life in some way. Thanks, Juliet Cook, Kathleen Kirk, and Hooked on Books!