Blogging@NYPL

You know, there still seems to be that puzzling question among some members of the general public regarding what we librarians do beyond the traditional stereotypes. I mean, how many times have you been asked, “You went to school for this?” My stock response: “Well, it’s not rocket science, it’s library science!” Yes, librarians today do much more than sshhh people and locate books, but really when it comes down to it there is probably no aspect of librarianship more satisfying than the simple act of connecting people with good books.

Did anyone happen to catch this article in the New York Times on Monday on the Seal of New York City? It reminded me of a post that I put up about the city flag which, as I was corrected by Michael Miscione, displays the city seal not the state seal. The article provides a background to the debate and politics surrounding the date on the New York City seal, presently listed as 1625.

The article also mentions helpful resources that we have here in the Milstein Division such as Seal and flag of the city of New York, The encyclopedia of New York City, The island at the center of the world, and Gotham: a History of New York City to 1898. Care to join the debate?

So far, Staten Island trolley tours are filling up
by Staten Island Advance Thursday July 10, 2008, 12:38 PM

Hilton Flores/Staten Island Advance
Tourists and Staten Islanders alike took time yesterday to take the 55-minute tour of the borough, which is free this week.

On a day when the haze turned Manhattan's famous skyline into so many ghostly, jagged silhouettes -- obviating the reason so many tourists hop the ferry to Staten Island before making their typical, quickie U-turn -- a red trolley idling in the downstairs parking lot yesterday beckoned the uninitiated to venture deeper into New York City's best-kept secret.

Some mounted the steps of the vehicle waving fliers with the word "free," while others settled into the slatted-wood seats, marveling at their good fortune in having happened by with time on their hands and adventure on their minds.

In all, about 20 people from as far away as Romania and Scotland and as close as Brooklyn and West Brighton took the inaugural Gray Line "Staten Island Discovery Tour" -- listening to a guide rattle off a well-informed patter as they wended along North Shore thoroughfares past some of the borough's cultural and architectural gems.

"This is not like Manhattan, not like Brooklyn, this is suburban, this is rural; there are cowboys here; there are still some dirt roads," tour guide Ben Maniaci said into a microphone over the whir of the air-conditioner as the tour headed along Richmond Terrace toward Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden.

'A HOME RUN'

"You can be right next to Manhattan, get all the culture you want and come home to this. It's a home run."

One of two guides scheduled to lead the tours when the full-scale, $15-a-ticket, "hop on-hop-off" operation begins in earnest on Monday, the 51-year-old New Jersey resident, history buff and certified tantric healer lived in Dongan Hills as a teen and for the past eight years has led tours with Gray Line through Manhattan.

As riders looked out the trolley's arched windows, they took in Maniaci's perceptive patois, embracing everything from the size and population of the borough (7 by 15 miles, population 450,000 as Maniaci calls it), to Dutch language lessons ("kill" means waterway), to lovingly restored single-family Colonial and Victorian homes, to Staten Island Chuck at the Zoo, to Joni Mitchell's song about Mandolin Brothers in West Brighton, to Washington's boat trip on the Kill van Kull on the way to his 1789 Inauguration.

People from as far as Romania and as close as West Brighton took part in the "Staten Island Discovery Tour" yesterday.

"Look at all the original architectural details on this doorway," he instructed guests. who dutifully snapped photos of the elegant, wrought-iron mystical-looking creatures with light globes on their backs on the way into Snug Harbor -- the former sailors' residence transformed into a bucolic cultural gathering spot, bereft of the heavy foot traffic that prevails in Central Park.

"This is something else; it's a relief from the skyscrapers, the crowding," mused Horia Grusca, a journalist from Bucharest, Romania, who decided on the tour after he and his wife rode the Staten Island Ferry on their first-ever visit to New York City. "It's like a parenthesis."

For 15 years, Pat Austin strolled the Brooklyn Promenade near her apartment in Brooklyn Heights, looking at the Staten Island Ferry and vowing actually to ride it one day; she and her friend decided to make the trip when they heard a radio spot about the free tour.

"To me, Staten Island was always the part between the end of the Verrazano and the Outerbridge Crossing," said the retired teacher, as a slight breeze skipped off the water at Fort Wadsworth and the view of the underbelly of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge seemed to rival the majesty of San Francisco's Golden Gate.

"But this is beautiful, amazing," she said as she lifted her camera and pointed it at the Manhattan skyline. "I'll be back."

--Contributed by Deborah Young

Dawdling away at the reference desk the other day, I put the word “pantsuit” into CATNYP as a word search, wondering what would come up. Well guess what? One item showed up and it was on Hillary Clinton!

Yet over the course of an online perusal of Clinton’s unsuccessful campaign for Democratic Party presidential nominee, I found the word “pantsuit” over and over again, often in a negative context. This brought me back to wondering about the original reception of feminine trousers, especially when made into a formal pant suit or pantsuit.

Even more daunting was the realization that I had actually grown up in the period when women finally won social acceptance for wearing pants. Fashion history surveys and reference books don’t give much space to this topic, except to say that this change occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, with better acceptance in the 1980s when more women than ever entered the workforce.

The blog I mentioned earlier, www.wornthrough.com, is written by Monica Sklar. She’s had a varied career in many aspects of costume, academic and retail, but I particularly salute her, for she’s presently in a Ph.D. program about Apparel and Culture. For those interested in news on costume and fashion history conferences, exhibitions, scholarships, and curatorial and research jobs, including a sprinkling of insights from the field, this is a site to check out.

This giant could learn a thing or two about dapper dressing from Mr. Awesome. (Image from NYPL Digital Gallery.)

Awesome is the title of the newest book by Jack Pendarvis, which has just been published. It is Mr. Pendarvis's first novel, and, as I was reading it this past weekend, I began to suspect that the author might have craft sympathies. Why, you ask? Because handmade habits crop up again and again throughout this riotous tall tale of a self-involved giant who embarks on a cross-country quest for love. The resulting story is bawdy and unsentimental, filled with cannily precise humor that begs to be read aloud, to be performed.

The following handmade bits make appearances in Awesome:
The giant protagonist (giant in stature and ego) plans a visit to "a hub of recreational sewing" in search for a needle in a haystack. He also meets an artisanal cheesemaker who sells craft supplies to "sewing aficionados" on eBay. And throughout, he makes robots, fashions a "mighty wagon" to transport his collection of treasures, and designs his own car. Beekeeping, mosaic repair, "underground knitting culture," homemade zines, and a pair of giant trousers fashioned from some circus tents all have cameo roles in this novel as well.

Mr. Pendarvis's two earlier books, both collections of short stories, are available for borrowing. The Library doesn't yet have Awesome, but I'm confident that we will soon.

To learn more about Jack Pendarvis, visit his blog.

From the start, my goal in this blog was simply to emphasize what I regard as highlights of the library’s collection, specifically in the realm of literature . . . but I’ve begun to wonder if there isn’t another unifying element, or, if you will, a hidden agenda. Whatever else I’m writing about, I always seem to end up trying to convey my profound love of books and reading. This has long been one of my defining characteristics, long before there was a blog (or even an internet). Nabokov, in Lectures on Literature, writes: “Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.” Reading for me has always involved that aesthetic tingle; it has become as essential as eating or breathing. It is, of course, the subterranean stream which led me to become a librarian in the first place instead of, say, a hedge-fund manager. It is probably also the genetic anomaly shared by most of us who work in libraries; if it had been detected at an early age, maybe we could have predicted where we all would end up.

Early last month, the media caught on to a startling development. The Men’s Dress Furnishings Association, formerly the Neckwear Association of America, announced that it was disbanding. This event was seen as the death rattle for the necktie, that universally-donned item of masculine dress.

I predicted the death of the necktie in “A Rakish History of Men’s Wear.” My prediction was based on the variety of research I did for the exhibition, where I found various opinions, academic and industrial, that seemed to confirm a move away from regular wear. The general consensus centered on the growth of the casual sportswear industry for men, and the eternal quest for physical comfort. In terms of quantifying the necktie’s loss of popularity, however, I’ve found myself more at a loss. Until now—I recently went shopping for my husband at Lord & Taylor and discovered that the store’s square footage of sales space for ties had greatly diminished...

Men have been wearing something distinctive around their necks since at least Tudor times. From starched linen ruffs, tight neck collars, and intricately-tied cravats, to the four-in-hand and Windsor tie, neckwear was an essential part of male dress. Yet garments can become defunct over time. A good example can be found in breeches, those trousers worn to just below the knee. The French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars allowed men to discover that long pants were more comfortable and effective, but breeches survived to almost the middle of the 19th century. They were worn mostly by older men, and still appeared at royal court events, before fading away. Today, we see a vestige of the breeches garment used in sportswear.

Will the necktie survive? The situation reminds me of Yoda’s statement in The Empire Strikes Back: “Very difficult. Future always in motion…”

John Cage
Nine Films
Every Monday in August at 6PM
Jefferson Market Library
425 Avenue of the Americas at 10th Street
NY, NY 10011
1-212-243-4334

The schedule:

My last couple of posts have dealt with places of respite in the big city, namely Bryant Park and municipal pools, both highly appreciated during New York City summers. Today’s post deals with a summer activity which takes people out of the city; specifically, to Long Island, that skinny piece of land which juts out of New York state like a fish tale, or perhaps more like a lobster claw. To the south of the island is the Atlantic and to the north is the Long Island Sound, referred to by some as America's Mediterranean.

Nineteenth Century French Bottlemakers (Image from NYPL Digital Gallery)

Bastille Day is just around the corner, and its arrival has led me to think more about the Paris depicted in a book that I recently read. Nancy Mitford's Don't Tell Alfred is set in mid-20th century Paris. This tale follows the misadventures of an unseasoned English ambassadress and her awful and entertaining relatives--from her Teddy Boy sons to her swooning niece/secretary, and from her mother (known as The Bolter) to her uncle Davey (a voracious consumer of medical treatments).

Now, there's a craft angle coming, I promise. Chapter 14 opens with Davey's arrival in Paris. He invites his niece (our intrepid ambassadress) to join him on an errand that will introduce her to a corner of Paris she'd not been before.

"I want to see if the man in the rue de Saintonge who used to blow glass is still there. I last saw him forty years ago -- Paris being what it is I'm quite sure we shall find him.
'Where is the rue de Saintonge?'
'I'll take you. It's a beautiful walk from here.'
It was indeed a beautiful walk. . . .
The rue de Saintonge itself is inhabited by artisans. Its seventeenth-century houses, built originally for aristocrats and well-to-do burgesses, have not been pulled down (except for one block where the Department de la Seine has perpetrated a horror) but they have been pulled about, chopped and rechopped, parcelled and reparcelled by the people who have lived and worked in them during the last two hundred years. Here are the trades which flourish in this street:
Workers in morocco, fur, india rubber, gold, silver, and jewels; makers of buttons, keys, ribbons, watches, wigs, shoes, artificial flowers and glass domes; importer of sponges; repairer of sewing-machines; great printer of letters; mender of motor-cars; printer; midwife. There may be many more hidden away; these put out signs for the passer-by to read."

What Mitford describes in this scene is the tangle of shops hidden within Paris's third arrondissement, a quarter long known for its resident population of artisans and craftspeople. This neighborhood was not on most tourists' itineraries in this time.

NYPL has hundreds of guides to Paris (classified under Paris (France) Guidebooks), both new and old. These guides all provide a wealth of information on how the city's topography and architecture have been altered; how cultural stereotypes have--or perhaps have not--changed; what features of cuisine were worthy of recommendation; and how tourism's audience itself changed over time. Old travel books, just like new ones, reveal as much about the reader's expectations as they do about the people described within.

Today the neighborhood around Paris's third arrondissement has changed dramatically, and Davey wouldn't be so lucky as to find his old friend the glassblower still in residence. But there remains a creative community present there. If you have been to this corner of Paris, I'd love to learn your take on what the artisan community is like today.

Here’s a scene that plays out in all my “Researching Costume and Fashion History” classes:

PAB: What’s the number one problem with the Internet?
Pause. Finally someone speaks out tentatively…
Student: You can’t trust everything you read on it?
PAB: Yes! Quality Control!

When I first agreed to do a blog on fashion and design history, with special reference to that fact that everything old is new again, I knew I would have a problem right away. While the Internet is full of material, much of it is commercially-related or new in topic. The simple truth is that authoritative reference sources just haven’t made it online yet, and when new ones are made they may or may not get on the Web. Most historical reference tools and resources are still in book format. The reference publishing industry is pushing more and more titles online, but this is a fairly recent development.

But there really aren’t that many really impeccable sources to link you up with for some of the topics I choose to cover. Heather was right to remind me that Wikipedia isn’t terribly reliable or accurate; I tend to use it as a link, however, because it comes up early in the Google search engine optimization. The fact is that I’ll link you somewhere appropriate when I can, but otherwise you’ll find that I just keep on referring you to good old-fashioned books.

My correspondent Heather Vaughan turns out to a fashion historian, at www.fashionhistorian.net and she reports that she usually does a Wednesday post in the blog www.wornthrough.com. Check out her commentaries for another perspective on fashion issues.

And speaking of books, one of the best reference sets we have is found at the Art Reading Room (Room 300) desk: Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion. Now, if only tools like this would be put online as soon as they’re published. Sigh.

WaFoo will be performing at the Tottenville Branch Library, 7430 Amboy Road, Staten Island, NY 10307, phone number 718-984-0945 this coming Saturday, July 12 at 2:30PM.

WaFoo, literally meaning "wind of Japan" or simply "Japanese style," is a group of talented musicians who have performed in many different countries across the world. WaFoo blends Japanese philosophy into a variety of music styles to create a lyrical, aesthetic and delightful sound to help regain energy for body and soul.

"WaFoo's amalgam of jazz and traditional elements is very, very easy to love."--Michael Fressola, Arts Editor for the Staten Island Advance.

WaFoo will also be performing at other Staten Island branches during the summer months. For more info you can check www.WaFoo.info

New York Public Library is a business but a business like no other. The library’s sole purpose is to transact in materials not money. Ours is a business based on trust. We lend. The library has millions of dollars in materials and we trust that the people who borrow these materials will return what they take. We hope in as good as condition as possible. Naturally there is wear, that is expected.

But there are people who use the library for other reasons. They want to destroy, deface and degrade. Our premise of trust is broken often by people who for selfish reasons harm what we offer simply because they can. Unless we catch them, the destruction continues. Sometimes we are lucky. Sometimes we can catch the person who covets the picture within a book and will willingly, guiltlessly slice it right out of the page. Vandalism of materials is a wordless crime and most of the time these wanton acts go unsolved, unpunished.

I work on the 3rd floor in the Language and Literature department at the Mid-Manhattan Library. The floor is often crowded with people on any given day. The aisles are often occupied with people browsing the shelves. For the most part everyone looks as they should, even the ones we know to be homeless. They too have a need for the library and it isn’t just to be in a safe environment. The ones I have observed seem to have an insatiable need to read and they do. I don’t peg them as wanting to hurt the library. Sadly there is another sinister element who occupies the floor and probably the others floors as well. They are people who look like you and I, but their motives are different from the rest of us at the library. They are out to destroy what many of us feel is sacred, trust.

The Dictionary of Literary Biography is a massive reference work. It occupies one side of a set of book shelves, consisting of many bays. It is a comprehensive and vital resource and consulted often. My colleagues and I have discovered the DLB to be not only a well used source for researchers, but by others whose sole purpose is to vandalize. For the criminal whose intent is harm, the DLB is a tableau waiting to receive its dastardly due.

The damage to the books is not outwardly noticeable. But if you are the unlucky one who happens to take one of the hurt books, the crime suddenly becomes horribly real. Upon opening the book you will discover the pages have been mangled, aggressively mangled. Page after page you discover the damage that has been put upon the book. Whatever the original purpose for consulting the DLB, or any other book that has suffered the same fate, is replaced with shock, sadness and frustration. The pages from the bottom are mashed and bent, scarred for life. The words that once laid smoothly across the clean white page are bent, buckled and ugly. Pages that soundlessly turned now make crinkled and sometimes tearing sounds. The damage done to these books and others is from the bottom up. Short, sharp jabs thrust into the pages and hundreds of pages are ruined. The brutality suffered by these book is violent and it is wrenching. I surmise the object must be something like a screwdriver. The destruction up these books and many others is awful. What is worse is the assault and destruction on our notion of trust, for those who work at the library and for those use the library.

Fortunately the DLB can also be found as an online database at the NYPL website. An NYPL library card is needed to access this database.

A tiny article from The NYTimes from 1875

A class project by Sandra Hart for the University of Alberta's MLS program

A blog entry by Tom Cremers from Google Groups - Museum Security, titled Theft and Vandalism: A Real Threat to Preservation

I’m hoping you may remember my post last month on the term “fashion victim.” I had a reply from Heather, who went out and did some proper research on where the phrase came from. She’d been rightfully suspicious that the term arose as recently as a comment by the designer Oscar de la Renta, and her doubts proved correct.

Heather’s research took her back as far as 1828. She searched journals in ProQuest and found references in a fiction piece in 1853, a racist cartoon in Harpers Bazaar dating to 1883, and newspaper mentions from the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1913 and then in the 1970s. The term appears regularly in literature from the 1970s on. I followed her trail, and found the same results; then I realized that I couldn’t spare the time this summer for a really serious expanded search into Newspapers Index and other periodical databases.

My apologies for not following this well-laid ground. Perhaps someone will take this subject up seriously for an academic paper or project? I did find something online, however, that indicates that being considered a fashion victim is still quite unwelcome, and this was addressed to men! As is this illustration in the Digital Gallery called “The Victim of Fashion,” dating to 1880. Anyway, I’ve learned my lesson, and will be careful about quoting dubious attributions in the future. More in my next post…

Do not set foot in my office. That’s dad’s rule. But the phone’d rung twenty-five times. So I went in. But the person on the other end didn’t answer.

The last six steps I took in one death-defying bound. We crossed the crossroads by Black Swan and went into the woods. The lake in the woods was epic. Granddad’s Omega’d never once gone wrong in four decades. In less than a fortnight, I’d killed it.

Powdery moonlight lit the attic room through the snowflake-lace curtain.
Her windpipe bulges as her soul squeezes out of her heart.
A silent roaring hangs here.
Not going anywhere.

You should see me on Cape Cod. I’ve been visiting every summer for about twenty years now and my routine is well-established. No sooner do we drive across the Bourne Bridge than the worry lines disappear and I shed ten years, almost as if the laws of time and gravity had been erased. By this point in the trip I’ve left my job so far behind it’s not so much in another state as on another planet. This is followed by a week or two of standing on the National Seashore staring out at the sweep and majesty of the Atlantic; floating like a big hairless seal in the bath-warm bay; and meandering through red maple swamps, around salt ponds, and across the tidal flats, where every quahog or razor clam shell must be picked up and examined. The chance sighting of a great blue heron, a cormorant, or even a piping plover is enough to set me rhapsodizing about Nature’s grand design. On Cape Cod, my only real concerns are which restaurant to go to for dinner and where my next ice cream is coming from.

Oh, and I also read.

Whenever I travel anywhere, I like to immerse myself in books which are either about that particular location or which use it as a setting and provide lots of local color, as they always add resonance to my trip. Cape Cod literature is especially fertile ground, from native Wampanoag creation myths, through accounts of the Puritans and Pilgrims and the Old Colony, to stories of fishermen and whalers and the hardships they endured, to a vast range of other travel and nature writing. You can find a universe of such material at the New York Public Library, which might not be the same as hunting for the same books in little bookstores on Cape Cod and then reading them on the beach, but at least you’re spared distractions like having to reapply suntan lotion.

The quintessential Cape Cod book is Henry David Thoreau’s 1865 account of his three trips to the “bare and bended arm of Massachusetts.” His observations of the Cape’s shifting landscape, its inhabitants, and its multitude of natural phenomena are as rich and compelling as ever. Thoreau’s prose can surge and soar, exactly like the ocean he is describing:

Before the land rose out of the sea, and became dry land, chaos reigned; and between high and low water-mark, where she is partially disrobed and rising, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures can inhabit.

I never tired of watching a wave form, the whitecaps mirrored in the curve of translucent greens or blues beneath, before they piled up on the shore in foaming masses, then spread out with a sibilant murmur across the sand.

As we looked off, and saw the water growing darker and darker and deeper and deeper the farther we looked, till it was awful to consider, and it appeared to have no relation to the friendly land, either as shore or bottom,--of what use is a bottom if it is out of sight, if it is two or three miles from the surface, and you are to be drowned so long before you get to it. . .

The vision of a world stripped to its essentials is what makes the book as fascinating today as it was in the middle of the nineteenth century. Although any readily available paperback can provide the same reading experience, a number of worthy editions of Cape Cod in the library’s collection provide an extra dimension. The first edition of any book is usually of interest because it is the one an author has seen into print, but Thoreau died three years before Cape Cod was released, leaving the job of assembling the essays previously published in Putnam’s and the Atlantic Monthly to his sister, Sophia, and his friend, William Ellery Channing, the Transcendentalist poet. There is a copy of the first edition in the Rare Books room, but this title page was reproduced from the collected works, which includes almost two hundred pages of historical and textual notes.

Another edition features photographs taken by Herbert Wendell Gleason less than fifty years after the first publication, visually interpreting the various scenes described by Thoreau, such as this image of the surf rolling over a sand ridge in Wellfleet, and dated October 21, 1903.

A volume published in 1985 employs a wide range of contemporary photographs and historical illustrations to point out how much has changed, and at the same time how little has actually changed. Still, this photograph of a Provincetown boy atop a whale’s head, taken on Provincetown Beach about 1860, is not a scene you are likely to encounter today.

Although there is a dark side to Cape Cod today—tacky tourist shops, miniature golf courses, waterfront homes owned by horrible people who are not me—I’m still anxious to get back. Every year around this time I begin to feel the urge again, like Ishmael’s need to go to sea at the beginning of Moby Dick. I’ll be leaving for Cape Cod on July 21st, and don’t even think of trying to find me--at least not until August 4th. Although I still haven’t been able to retire to Cape Cod, it’s certainly on my mind. Give me a few more years and my business card, instead of “Humanities Bibliographer,” might read “Old Salt.” And you’ll probably find me on the pier, chomping my pipe, and looking something like this:

It doesn’t happen too often, but there are some books that fall into the category known as “books I cannot read on the subway.”

More often then not these are books that make me laugh out loud, or at the very least give me watering eyes and one of those uncontrollable grins that can’t be wiped off my face. I get very subconscious and don’t want people on the subway car staring at me wondering “Is he laughing or crying?” or “Why does he have a big silly grin on his face?” or “He’s crazy.”

One of the books in this category was Jonathan Lethem’s, Motherless Brooklyn, where my fits of laughter were similar to the main character’s comical Tourette’s Syndrome outbursts. I started that book on the subway but had to finish it in the confines of my own home. Another writer whose work I can no longer enjoy during my commute to and from work is George Saunders.

David Sedaris’ entire body of work fits into this category. I recently flew to Colorado and in the Dallas airport I bought his new collection of essays When You Are Engulfed in Flames. I read the first few on the plane and had to put the book away when the flight attendant asked if I was ok. I challenge anyone to read his description of using a Stadium Pal while keeping a straight face.

They say laughter is the best medicine. David Sedaris is an overdose. I finished his book on the privacy of a porch with Pikes Peak in the distance, tears running down my face, my laughter echoing in the valley.

It’s almost the Fourth of July. Always a day for patriotism, it also serves as a time when we think about the wars that helped create this nation. And this year, we have a war that is ongoing, one that provokes many mixed feelings. A look in CATNYP reveals a spate of writing on the subject—under the subject heading Iraq War, 2003 are 383 entries alone, plus dozens of subdivisions. The available literature on the war covers a wide range of concerns, from the haunting Baghdad Journal: an artist in occupied Iraq to books on returning war wounded and those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Speaking of those wounded, their numbers are and will continue to be (until the conflict ends) large. When I was a child I was unaccountably frightened by amputees. Such fear faded with time, and was cured by the return of a childhood friend from Vietnam minus a hand and a leg. Since the war in Iraq started, sources report that more than 29,000 people have been wounded. An enormous number of soldiers, male and female, have lost body parts while on active duty.

Such a great number of wounded soldiers, especially when they return to civilian life, will definitely have an impact on our society. Their experiences and stories may well eliminate the shock and fear that so impressed me as a child. If we have increased contact with those things that once inspired fear, it is more than likely that this anxiety will be replaced by worthier emotions. I think our returning wounded soldiers will become a great source of positive inspiration. Receiving two metal replacement knees and spending two weeks in a rehab hospital back in 2006 taught me a lot about personal challenge. Imagine what our returned wounded soldiers can teach us all about courage, compassion, healing, and the fine art of getting by.

This holiday, let’s set a firm fashion, and vow to celebrate and look out for the welfare of these real American heroes. Remember, also, that our main and branch libraries will have a lot of information, online and printed, that can help us track their progress.

p.s. Their caregivers are heroes, too!

My last posting could have been subtitled “Do we own fashion or does it own us?” While I frequently dwell on fashion as a social force, it’s good to remember that fashion is also a huge industry. When I was young and employed for a year at the Fashion Institute of Technology Library, I remember thinking that I’d love to see something that might reveal the business workings of the fashion industry as a whole.

Such a publication came out in 2007. Providing case studies from the clothing trade and the fashion design syndicate, Veronica Manlow’s Designing clothes: culture and organization of the fashion industry, is precisely the sort of book I’d wished I had access to years ago.

p.s. American politics are intruding onto the runways! Donatella Versace was quoted as saying that her fall men’s collection had been inspired by Barak Obama. For a glimpse of the future, check out the Fall 2008 Milan Fashion Week.

I’m a more-or-less rational person. Anything with even a whiff of mysticism strikes me as a great yawn. And I believe dead is dead. Case closed. La commedia è finita.

Curiously, I’m also a fan of ghost stories. Contradictory? Maybe it’s that I’ve been working at New York Public Library for so long, I’ve come to feel like a ghost myself, haunting its marble corridors.

Not to split genre hairs, but I’m not so enamored of horror stories--or movies, for that matter--particularly not modern ones, whose main purpose seems to be to dispatch as many people (frequently teenage girls) as gruesomely as possible. If I wanted to be horrified, I’d read the newspaper. I much prefer the quiet suggestiveness of the classic ghost story, whether it takes a fusty antiquarian approach or a cool modern one--as long as it’s based on the notion that the most frightening possibility is what might be lurking in the shadows. The minute we find out that the shadows contain some drooling, rat-faced thing with tentacles is when the giggles start.