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!

Sometimes we librarians get instant messages from sexy robots while we we’re at the reference desk. Here’s one way of dealing with it. Thanks, Steve Lawson!

The clever librarians at Miller Library at McPherson College in McPherson, Kansas have made a guide to the library disguised as a comic book, Library of the Living Dead. The library guide part is fairly straightforward, but there’s a nice action-filled story to put the information in context (sort of). My favorite part is probably when the zombies get extra excited about librarian brains. Unfortunately, the Miller Library uses the Dewey Decimal system (most academic libraries use Library of Congress). Here’s the announcement, and here’s the comic. Thanks, BoingBoing!

When NewSouthBooks had the great idea of replacing the n-word in Huckleberry Finn with “slave,” Gabriel Diani and Etta Devine though that wasn’t going far enough. They figure it would be even better to remove race altogether from the novel. So now Jim will be a robot.

One note from defensive librarian me: the video states “Librarians, like the sexy one in this picture, have been banning the book from their libraries for over a century.” To be more exact, school libraries usually have been the site of the battle against Huck Finn, and school librarians have usually argued against banning the book. But yeah … we’re sexy.

I suspect this video was filmed in a bookstore, not a library, but the endless shelves of books are true eye candy!

Thanks, David Weinstock and BoingBoing!

This seems to be legitimate even though the blog posting is from April 1. The NYPL is hosting an all night scavenger hunt on May 20, 2011 as part of its Find the Future game. (Watch the trailer!) 500 lucky guests will search for historical objects such as Charles Dickens’s letter opener (pictured), with a handle made from the paw of his pet cat Bob. Thanks, Dina Wood!

Several libraries sponsor edible book contests, usually on or around April 1. The image at left shows a Goodnight Moon Pie from the Duke University Libraries Edible Book Festival of 2010. The International Edible Book Festival folks claim that at least 23 countries have held such festivals. The Pikes Peak Library District and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs had some great entries in their 2010 festival.

Colorado College Humanities Liaison Librarian Steve Lawson writes: “On a very busy Sunday of third week [end of fifth block, February 2011], a student asked me about these “reserved” signs on a few tables in the second floor atrium. The library was full of people studying, even sitting on the floor, but these two tables were open with their reserve signs. This was either a pretty good prank or an excellent psychology experiment: you can’t reserve the tables in the main second floor reading area.” Thanks, Steve Lawson!