So true! I made several of the librarians at
UCSD very angry because I
insisted on checking out books that they had decided
to send off to store
or dump because no one read them. One refused to
check out Grammatica
Celtica to me
because in was in Latin about Irish grammar and no one read
Latin or cared about Celtic grammar. I was loud
enough in my objections
that another librarian intervened; however, when I had
to turn it back in,
they dumped it immediately and would not say
where. I had offered to buy
the book (it was only one volume of a two-vol. set
(the other had been lost),
but they had refused to sell it to me. The
university libraries can be just
as bads as public libraries. At least the public
libraries sell books in
open sales in lieu of disposing of books furtively.
Scott Catledge
-----Original Message-----
From:
Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 3:28 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [EPNL] In defence of
At 08:09 20/09/2010, Richard Coates wrote:
>
>language was stimulated by the holdings of the
Grimsby Public
>Library Service, including books by Pei, Ernest
Weekley, Simeon
>Potter, Anthony Burgess and similar unfashionable
writers whose work
>in making philology and linguistics accessible to
an English
>teenager I wouldn't dream of denigrating. The
library also held
>"Teach Yourself Samoan" and
>shelves. Anyone know such a rich public library in
a small town?
The problem is that today public libraries do not hold
such books for
long, but sell them off, even if they had them in the
first
place. In the early 1970s I read a lot of old
books from Morningside
library (
looked in the library a couple of years ago and all
those books were
cleared away of course. If we know what we want
these days the
internet makes it much easier to find, but the days of
serendipitous
browsing of dusty shelves in unfrequented corners of
local libraries are over.
Trevor
Trevor Ogden
Abingdon, Oxfordshire