My Gracious Host mentioned the Limerick Trick the other day, giving me a title and an author for a book that I only vaguely remembered. In fact, the only things that I remembered about the books was the magic chemistry set and the use of the word constitutional to describe a walk for exercise. Given only those bits of information, I hadn’t been able to find the books until Jed came to my assistance. Given the author, I was able to find out that none of the four libraries I frequent had a copy of any of the books.
For the record, those four libraries are the academic library that employs me, which has a fairly good but not spectacular collection of children’s books (for those students studying education, primarily); the local public library system, which has a very good collection of children’s books, although the adult collection is a trifle weak; the library in the local elementary (K-5) school, which is not a library but a Media Center, and has very few books; and the library in Temple Beth Bolshoi, which is not a library but a Learning Center, but which has a lot of books (for a synagogue), but concerns itself with books about Judaism and Jews (and Israel) (and the Hebrew language), and so couldn’t be expected to have a random children’s book that has no connection with its collection.
I decided to ILL the first book through the local public. This was tremendously efficient, despite or perhaps because of my making the children’s librarian do the request rather than doing it myself. They emailed me an arrival notice in a few days, and The Lemonade Trick was waiting for me at the desk the next time I dropped by. I should write a Puff Piece about ILL, which is, when you think about it, one of the most remarkably wonderful social structures ever. I mean, libraries are already wonderful things, where you can go and read books, and even borrow books, without paying any money. Many librarians (I would say most, but the most I can say is almost all I’ve met and chatted with) are interesting and wonderful people with a simply tremendous passion for disseminating books and/or information. The idea that all these little libraries can and do work together to, um, leverage their assets (is that right?) and make even more books available to even more people is… well, if I ever start to think that people just suck, remind me about ILL.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
[Edited the title, because I screwed up: this note was reporting on The Lemonade Trick, the first one in the series, and this other note was reporting on The Limerick Trick, a different book altogether. apple polly loggies, -V.]
ILL is one of my favorite things ever. National book-sharing!
Periodically I just stop while helping someone fill out an ILL form and contemplate how wonderful it all is.
YAY ILL!
Have you any books in Yiddish that you have no use for? My wife is learning Hebrew and Yiddish simultaneously. Show off…
No, not any. I can’t read Yiddish at all, and I can’t really understand spoken/sung Yiddish, other than a handful of phrases and whatever my college German left me with. Now that I think about it, I think I do have some song lyrics printed in Yiddish, translated English and transliterated Yiddish-with-english-letters; if you’d like some of those, I could probably send them off to you.
Thanks,
-V.
Ooh, I’d like that!
Call me Ish Kabibble…
Yay for ILL!
I generally forget about ILL, perhaps partly because it kinda seems too good to be true. “Wait–you mean that even though you don’t have this book, and you have no idea who might have a copy, all I have to do is fill out this form and it will magically appear sometime in the next couple weeks? Where’s the catch?”
(Then again, I had a traumatic ILL-related experience during college that led to the revocation of my public library card, so perhaps I avoid thinking about it even though the problem was not ILL’s fault.)
I think the main thing I don’t like about using ILL is that at the end, the book goes back to whatever mysterious place it came from. If I get a library book, it’s comforting to know that the book will always be there on the library shelves. (Unless, as spookily happened with the travel-to-an-alternate-universe kids’ book The Towers of February when I was a kid, the book mysteriously vanishes from the library shelves and all record of its existence is expunged.) But with ILL, if I want to go check it out again, I have to do the ILL thing again. And the magic might not work next time!
Anyway. None of this is, of course, a knock against ILL. ILL is wonderful.
…I realize this question is somewhat contrary to the spirit of this book report, but I can’t resist asking: What did you think of the book?