A Proverb By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet

I stumbled across an oddly titled book yesterday and took it back to my office to inspect. The title in question? Racial Proverbs. I wanted to make certain that the contents were indeed racial (relating to race) and not racist (having the belief that one race is superior to another), and I was pleasantly surprised. Not only did I find such gems as this Welsh proverb "A puddle will not grow dirty" (83) and this Wolof (Senegambian) one "Without fingers the hand would be a spoon" (600), I also found several lovely book-related proverbs. Enjoy!

Albanian
Who can read and write has four eyes (15).

Arabic
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket (330).

Chinese
To read a book for the first time is to make the acquaintance of a new friend; to read it a second time is to meet an old one (351).

Italian
Wives, horses, and books should never be lent (211).

Latin
Life without literature is death (220).

Moorish
The sight of books removes sorrows from the heart (556).

Indian
A book is a good friend which reveals the mistakes of the past (410).

Fijian
Ignorance is the night of the mind (639).

I'll leave you with this witty Argentine proverb that we should all try to emulate:
Clear accounts and thick chocolate (614).

Champion, Selwyn G. Racial Proverbs: A Selection of the World's Proverbs Arranged Linguistically. New York, NY: Barnes and Noble, 1963. Print.
www.picmonkey.com

Seeing Is Reading

Remember learning how to read? Cast your memory back to first grade: sounding out letters and forming them into words--C+A+T = CAT.  It was thrilling when everything slid into place. Reading now, as an adult, turns out to be a completely different experience. We don't read from left to right (or right to left, depending on the language). According to one of our new books, Weird-O-Pedia: The Ultimate Book of Surprising, Strange, and Incredibly Bizarre Facts About (Supposedly) Ordinary Things, we read letters in "short chunks simultaneously." The author states:

In tests where subjects were shown words quickly, then asked what they had seen, they had just as much trouble identifying the first letter of the word as the last. When they were given more time, readers became more accurate on all the letters, leading researchers to conclude that the letters were processed simultaneously" (111). 

Although this makes sense, I'd never thought about it like this before! Weird-O-Pedia, a devotion to nuggets of information, has quirky and fun information on all sorts of ordinary topics like sweat (women sweat less readily than men, 84) to airplanes (boarding planes at random actually goes faster than boarding in groups from back to front, 133) to sneezes...

Which brings me to one of my favorite nuggets in the book: Have you ever had the overwhelming urge to sneeze after you've glanced at the sun? (I have!) Enterprising scientists have studied the phenomenon and given it a name. It's called Autosomal Cholinergic Helio-Opthalmic Outburst. Bless you!

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Compartiendo_un_libro.jpg 
Palmer, Alex. Weird-O-Pedia: The Ultimate Book of Surprising, Strange, and Incredibly Bizarre Facts About (Supposedly) Ordinary Things. New York, NY: Skyhorse Publishing, 2012. Print.

And The Winner Is...

I've been pawing through a book I found hidden in the stacks a few days ago. The title makes it sound like the most lascivious and licentious book ever written - Simon's Book of World Sexual Records - but it's actually filled with fascinating facts. Here are a few!

Inverbervie Graveyard

Simon bestowed the award of Most Bizarre Love Charm to an old Irish legend. In order to make this fetching amulet, a young girl was to visit a graveyard and find a corpse buried for nine days. Then, this crafty lady needed to "cut from the body a narrow strip of skin extending from the top of the head down to the extremity of one foot." Have you ever seen someone peel a peach or an apple in one continuous strip? It's kind of hard to do! "They then tried to knot the length of dead skin round the arm or leg of a sleeping lover and to remove it before he awoke" (86). So in ancient Ireland, your choices were a dead skin strip or flirting. You know, whichever you found to be an easier, more appealing task.

Symbol for The New York Society
for the Suppression of Vice

The Most Vigorous Prude Award went to Anthony Comstock.
His group, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, helped usher in (between 1873 and 1882) "700 arrests, 333 sentences of imprisonment totalling 155 years and 13 days, fines totalling $65,256, and the seizure of 27,856 lb. of obscene books and 64,836 articles for immoral use, of rubber, etc" (180). I just wonder how many books would equal the weight of 27,856 pounds.

Fanny Hill
by John Cleland

Simon judged that The Most Famous Erotic Novel (before Shades of Grey, of course) was

Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. The author, Henry Cleland sold it for 20 guineas in 1749. The bookseller who bought it is said to have made £ 10,000 for the story of a young, innocent girl who falls into a life of prostitution. The book has been censored and banned worldwide (357).


Last, but certainly not least, is The Society in Which the Human Kiss is Least Practiced. The Thonga people (aka Tsonga) in extreme southeast Africa do not practice mouth-to-mouth kissing. Apparently, upon seeing this type of kiss for the first time, someone remarked, "Look at them-they eat each other's saliva and dirt" (107).

A book can hold so much more than its title or subject matter promises to its reader. Take a chance--open a book!

Simons, G. L. Simon's Book of World Sexual Records. New York: Bell Publishing Company, 1975. Print.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AInverbervie_Graveyard.jpg 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NewYorkSocietyForTheSuppressionOfVice.jpg
http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9780140432497/fanny-hill-or-memoirs-woman-pleasure

Greenville, MS - On The Cutting Edge

Back in the late 1880s, Greenville, MS had quite the impressive school system. Mr. Eli E. Bass, the School Superintendent for Greenville City Schools, was fond of anything new and innovative. Due to his influence, Greenville Schools can claim:

• the 1^st science laboratories in Mississippi schools (1888)
• the 1^st high school library in Mississippi schools (1889/1890)
• the 1^st class to graduate from a Mississippi high school (1890)
• the 1^st health and physical education department in Mississippi schools (1899)
• the 1^st public school system in the Mississippi accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (1902)
• the 1^st public kindergarten in Mississippi schools (1905)
• the 1^st public school music department in Mississippi schools (1905)
• the 1^st art department in Mississippi schools (1905)

Here's a fun side nugget: between 1925 and 1955, a Mrs. Carolyn Metcalfe Badow modernized the card catalog system by typing the information from over 3,500 handwritten cards onto new cards. That's a lot of typing, but I'm sure everything was much more orderly and legible after that!

Gaston, Mable. "GHS: Mississippi's Oldest School Library." Mississippi Library News 37.1 March, 1973: 29-30. Print.

Weather Whether It's Blue Skies Or Grey

Last week while I was helping a patron with some genealogy research, I ran across a woman named Tornado. Was it a fluke? Ah, no. It turns out that many people's parents thought to name their children after weather phenomena. Check out these names I found in the US Federal Census:

Rain and lightning in Mississippi

• Rain Jett, F
  Kentucky, 1910
• Rainey Bacon, F
  Maryland, 1940
• Flood Edmonds, Sr. and Jr., M
  West Virginia, 1940
• Storm Moore, F
  Texas, 1900
• Tornado Harrison, F
  Pennsylvania, 1940



Tornado in Missouri

• Hurricane Smith, M
  West Virginia, 1930
• Cyclone Fox, M
  Michigan, 1940
• Blizzard Schneider, F
  New York, 1930
• Monsoon Peckham, M
  North Carolina, 1820
• Thunder Hatcher, M
  North Carolina, 1930
• Lightning Hightower, M
  Illinois, 1930



Blizzard in Minnesota

• Snow Baker, F
  Georgia, 1940
• Freeze Quick, M
  Pennsylvania, 1940
• Ice Lane, M
  Tennessee, 1940
• Frost White, M
  Maryland, 1910
• Milford Hail Acres, M
  Tennessee, 1940
• Sunshine Anderson, F
  Mississippi, 1940
• Breeze Huffman, F
  California, 1940



Flooding in Indiana

• Cloud Bagwell, M
  South Carolina, 1940
• Donna Fog Commett, F
  Kentucky, 1940
• Hot Brandon, M
  Mississippi, 1930
• Drought Davis, M
  New York, 1940
• Stark Weather Stevenson, M
  Arizona, 1940
• Climate Gaines, M
  Texas, 1940

When I have kids, I'm naming them Sleet and Mist. What do you think?

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blizzard_Dec12_2010_Minneapolis_%E2%80%9C%E2%80%9D%28MN%29.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Girardcr29.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Residents_boat_down_a_main_street_in_Munster,_IN.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ship_Island_lightning.jpg

The Best Overdue Books Ever

Lithuania

I stumbled across a story last week which I've been waiting to share with you. An unlikely librarian in Lithuania is a new heroine of mine; that is, this unlikely librarian and her concocted story of some very important overdue books.

Ona Simaite

Ona Simaite was born January 6, 1894 (some sources say 1899) in Akmenė, Lithuania. She worked at Vilnius University as a librarian and literary critic. The Nazi occupation of Lithuania began in 1940 and she saw the horrors of the Nazis up close. Simaite decided to act. She convinced the Nazis that Jewish students living in the ghettos had overdue library books that needed to be returned to the library. (Never underestimate the fear and awe that an overdue library book strikes in the hearts of men.) Once she had gained access to the Jewish ghetto, she brought in much needed supplies for the people trapped inside and brought out historical documents and texts for preservation purposes. She was finally found out in 1944 and captured by the Nazis. They tortured her and sentenced her to death. She escaped this fate when colleagues and others at her university spoke in her behalf. She was sent instead to the concentration camp in Dachau, and then later, to one in France. Simaite survived the war and died in Israel in 1970. She was designated Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1966.

This story just goes to show what a librarian with a strong purpose, a determined spirit, and a threat of some overdue books can do. If you'd like to learn more about this incredible woman, check out the book Epistolophilia by Julija Šukys. It's at the top of my to-read list.


http://www.credoreference.com/entry/chambdictwh/lithuania
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf196n97td/admin/#bioghist-1.7.4
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_ph.php?ModuleId=10005173&MediaId=484
http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206025.pdf

Happy Friday!

Here's a fun comic we found in The Clarion-Ledger on microfilm from June 7th, 1954!

"You'll have to check that slab out -- we can't have all that noise in here!"

Indeed, time has changed! We don't recommend taking a hammer and chisel to library books. Instead, we hope you'll visit your local library this weekend and check some out (and treat them gently). Have a wonderful Friday!

Microfilm: The Clarion-Ledger. June 7th, 1954. pg 11