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Movies set in libraries are relatively rare, so it is a pleasure to recommend Quiet Please, Murder (1942) to all my librarian friends out there. We recorded it from the Fox Movie Channel. Its running length is only seventy minutes long, but the action never flags.

Starring the inimitable George Sanders as a murderous antiquarian book thief/forger and amateur psychologist who is in cahoots with glamorous, duplicitous Gail Patrick, turned out in impossibly high heels and ridiculous hats, the movie is set in the K Street branch of what must be the Washington, D.C. Public Library at the height of World War II. And what a library it is! It has an art department with a Picasso hanging on the wall and classical sculptures on display, a music department with beautiful instruments including a harp (which becomes a plot device), and a history department furnished with a lovely old Victorian settee along with some other choice pieces. Strangest of all, at least to librarians, the library has the most efficient shelvers anywhere, who whisk away books and reshelve them with the speed of light. Unfortunately, its security system and procedures for handling rare books are nothing to brag about, and this is what sets the plot in motion. Also not to be missed are the usually upstanding Sidney Blackmer as a ruthless Nazi agent, and a mute assassin who works for Blackmer. My favorite part of the movie was when a perky reference librarian painstakingly explains the Dewey Decimal System to the private investigator (Richard Denning); Denning eventually cracks the case with the aid of a call number.

This excerpt gives a taste of the movie, but here are some lines that I found particularly memorable. Some of them may even come in handy some day.

“Make him talk but don’t finish him until we get the books.”
“Say, I’m so scared, I have to get something to read.”
“That little librarian, maybe she knows.”
“Say, you’ve got a couple of books in here.”
“We have two miles of books.”
“I hate to disturb you, sister, but if you want books, this is the joint.”
“A book never hurt anybody.”
“Gee, how do you stand the quiet in here?”
“We’ve got to get the books and get out of here.”

Finally, perhaps my favorite: “Each book has a number, just like the penitentiary.”

Click to view slideshow.

Well, today I made my first big cake mistake.  I was asked to make a christening cake for a little boy.  The mom had seen one on my blog that she liked, but she wanted a giraffe instead of teddy bears.  It needed to be scaled down a bit, but otherwise it was to be the same cake.

In the two weeks since she had asked for the cake, my life has taken a few twists and turns.  I normally live at a pretty steady pace, but these last two weeks have been something else.  To say I am preoccupied would be an understatement.  In the back of my mind had been this little boy’s cake and at some point, it took on a life of its own.  The giraffe became the centerpiece, and the colors evolved from baby blue & white to brown, blue, green & white.  Oh, the quilting disappeared and the buttons with it!

After placing the finishing touches on the cake, I went back to my emails to check on the time she was picking it up.  Lo, and behold…I read the description of the cake I was supposed to make – and it wasn’t this one!  My stomach began doing a little dance and panic set in.  Thankfully, Gavin’s mom really liked the design and was a little relieved that it didn’t look like a cake I had already done.  I take away several golden nuggets from this…

1. When a cake is requested via email, I will re-write it on a standard form
2. Life happens – I just can’t take on everything at once
3. There are a lot of really nice people in the world (thanks, Tara!)

Den store stol var blå og kæmpe stor. Nogen gange var den verdens største bjerg som skulle bjerg – bestiges som man sagde, andre gange var jorden giftig og man måtte hænge på hovedet for at nå sine forsyninger.  Men for det meste var der kamp til stregen om at få den bedste plads… heldigvis var den så stor ,den store blå stol at der var plads til to. Så sad vi der med hver vores kop med lækkerier fra lækkerheds bakken mens vi blev slugt af mystiske universer fra det lille hvide fjernsyn.

The big chair  was blue and huge. Sometimes it was world’s largest mountain that you had to climb other times the earth was toxic and you had to hang upside down to get the supplies. But mostly there was a battle to get the best seat … Fortunately, it was so big, the big blue chair that there was room for two. So we were sitting there, each with our cup with delicacies  while we were swallowed by mysterious universes from the small white TV.

Congratulations to my old friend and former colleague Fred Shapiro, Associate Librarian for Collections & Access at Yale Law Library, who is praised in an article in the February 12, 2012 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. (A subscription is required to access the article). Donald Altschiller, a librarian at Boston University, highlights several reference works and their authors in “In Praise of Reference-Book Authors.”

As someone who has worked in academic law libraries since 1984, I had not encountered (or even thought about) most of the reference works Altschiller writes about since library school. He eulogizes Joseph Nathan Kane, author of Famous First Facts, who died in 2002. I had no idea that Kane hosted a radio program during the 1930s also called Famous First Facts and that he later wrote questions for the TV program The $64,000 Question. Kane wrote nearly fifty other reference works and did most of his work at the New York Public Library, “methodically combing library stacks and card catalogs to produce authoritative reference works.” Norbert Pearlroth, author of the “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” column, also worked at the New York Public Library, and is described by Altschiller as one of the most “indefatigable and meticulous researchers of factual information.” The other reference-book luminaries that Altschiller includes are Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, Peter Mark Roget, Henry Campbell Black of Black’s Law Dictionary fame, and the Reverend Ebenezer Cobham Brewer who compiled Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, a literally irreplaceable reference work in the pre-Internet era.

More modern compilers of reference works are not neglected in Altschiller’s piece, including Fred Shapiro, who employs “both painstaking book research along with modern library technology to produce landmark quotation books. His Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations … [is] “the standard work for law quotations, and later his mammoth Yale Book of Quotations emerged as the pre-eminent general quotation reference work.”

It was refreshing to read Altschiller’s article and rediscover some favorite reference works and to be introduced to some new ones. At a time when Wikipedia is considered authoritative, many people seem not to recognize or value the meticulous, detail-oriented work that once went into creating high-quality reference works and that is a shame.

While in the jungle, a man is poisoned by an undiscovered creature, and will die suddenly at an inde