The All-City Youth Leadership group is taking a break from discussing how to improve cafeteria lunch to eat some catered goodies that look a lot better than what I am eating today. I think they might be finishing up and leaving for the day. I have been cleaning out ghost books from Destiny while they occupy the library, and am working on the 600s of the Dewey Decimal system. So far, I haven't gone beyond 616, but I am about to send the ghosts out for radiocarbon dating.
Just a sample of delightful items not seen for a very long time, and if it were not for a print out of the title details, I'd have no proof that they existed. The winner, by far, has to be "Devils, Drugs, and Doctors: The Story of the Science of Healing from Medicine Man to Doctor" by Howard H. Haggard in 1929. Runners-up owe their lack of appeal largely to the publishing industry which should be sued en masse if sales were low. Take your pick: "Goodbye to Bedlam; Understanding Mental Illness and Retardation" by John Langone, 1974 and "Food Trips and Traps: Coping with Eating Disorders" by Jane Claypool (1983). Ms. Claypool should sue on the basis that alliteration has been taken to extremes to the point of obfuscation of the writer's intentions unless she was discussing eating disorders among amoebic Venus flytraps. Not to be outdone by private industry, the New York Public Affairs Committee contributed a real beauty of a pamphlet no. 507, written by Elizabeth Ogg (not to be confused with Egg), entitled "Voluntary Sterilization." I wonder if Ms. Ogg was proud of this contribution to a middle school library, and if she was aware of how many involuntary sterilizations went on among African American and Native American women during this time period.
Other ghosts: Titles for Herbert Zim and Sonia Bleeker. While I have a lot of nostalgia for these two authors as I read their science and anthropology titles in elementary school, and while their work was very good, I think if I read them almost 50 years ago, they don't need to be on the shelves or lurking as ghosts in Destiny. Their papers are housed at the University of Oregon, Eugene, and maybe someday I will pay a visit to the shrine of the authors of my youth
I'm tempted to send this list of titles off for radioactive carbon-14 dating.
No comments:
Post a Comment