Library discovers stash of beer and gum hidden behind books for 30 years

[moortaktheundea]

It seems less odd when you think of the role of gum in sports, baseball cards and comics history. There are also the weird WW2 promotional tie ins and the history of technical innovation (bar code scanners). As far as ephemera collecting goes it is probably one of the more understandable ones.

[semiotix]

We called that “carreling” at the library I worked at. As a student worker I tended toward leniency, but the professional staff generally felt it should be punishable by death. Not because it kept other patrons from using the books (meh) but it screwed up the stats. You were using that book, but it didn’t get scanned in as “in use” when us worker drones put it away. Anathema!

[semiotix]

@mjlonsda

There was a real elitist attitude towards the “snails” (students-not-actually-in-law-school) that irritated me then and still irritates me today.

Ha! I wish I’d known about that in grad school. It would have made it even more satisfying to camp out in the disproportionately luxurious law library.

[Archisonic]

@semiotix

at the library I worked at.

If you came up with some spiffy uniforms, I’d much rather direct my ‘thank you for your service’ to librarians while I walked thru the airport.

[cjankelson]

Much better than their last-gasp alternative, “A beer is a beer is a beer is a beer… until you’ve tasted Hamm’s” . That one sucked.

[cjankelson]

@robertmckenna

I mean it looked like I partied like Mad Men rather than the pretty much exact opposite which is what I am.

That’s what you want us to think.

[L0ki]

@robertmckenna

I’m a librarian and what we try to find is stashed books, usually law because everyone else aren’t such dicks

Roger that. In our law library, some shit took to ripping out whole chspters or articles from the key texts.

[LutherBlisset]

Using rarely read books to hide something? Yeah. Rings a bell.

[robertmckenna]

Oh yeah, our hatred for them knows no bounds. Fuck the stats or whatever, it’s all about getting the people access. That’s the actual job.

[semiotix]

Thanks, but I was just a work-study grunt, the library equivalent of a draftee. Not that it was a bad job, but I don’t have the rock-star glamour of the lifers.

[Thrax]

At my last job there was a bottle of gin hidden behind one of the legal texts in the library, the theory being that if you needed that text you really needed the gin.

We tried dating the gin based on the design of the bottle and our best guess was the 1950s. When I left the job, I put a newer bottle of gin next to the old one as a public service.