Serving the innate urge for intellectual content

As part of my job as direc­tor, I spend a great deal of time read­ing pro­fes­sional lit­er­a­ture, keep­ing up with library trends, con­cerns and news. I recently ran across an arti­cle that I found to be par­tic­u­larly appro­pri­ate, in light of the many changes occur­ring in pub­lic libraries. The author is a library direc­tor in Cal­i­for­nia, a woman who “tells it like it is” and often cuts right to the heart of the matter.

She writes, “Librar­i­ans aren’t stu­pid. We know that a lot will change in pub­lish­ing and libraries, even in the next few years. Some of it will be trau­matic and dif­fi­cult, but some of it will be amaz­ing and won­der­ful. And at core, the endur­ing val­ues will abide. We as librar­i­ans believe in books, believe they belong in people’s hands, believe in the right to read, believe in authors, believe in read­ers, believe that read­ing changes lives, believe in what we do. And we also believe there will always be not just a need, but an innate urge for intelligently-composed, well-edited, carefully-curated intel­lec­tual con­tent — some of which, for a very long time to come, if not for­ever, will be real­ized in book-like objects, shared within a read­ing ecology.”

Of course, no one has a crys­tal ball to tell us what libraries will be like in 20, 50 or 100 years, but these beliefs have become abid­ing for me: Pub­lic libraries have existed for cen­turies and will con­tinue to be an impor­tant part of our soci­ety; and peo­ple will be always be read­ers. And isn’t that sim­ply wonderful?

Did one of the Van­der­bilts die on the Titanic?

The World Book Ency­clo­pe­dia notes that Alfred Gwynne Van­der­bilt, 34-year-old mul­ti­mil­lion­aire sports­man and heir to the Van­der­bilt ship­ping and rail­road empire can­celed his pas­sage on the Titanic so late that some early news­pa­per accounts listed him as being on board. Van­der­bilt died on May 7, 1915, when the Lusi­ta­nia on which he was sail­ing with his valet Ronald Denyer was tor­pe­doed by an enemy sub­ma­rine. Although he could not swim, Van­der­bilt report­edly gave his lifebelt to a nurse as the ship took her final plunge into the sea. His body was never recovered.

Were for­tune cook­ies invented by the Chinese?

As far back as the 19th cen­tury, a cookie very sim­i­lar in appear­ance to the mod­ern for­tune cookie was made in Kyoto, Japan, and there is a Japan­ese tem­ple tra­di­tion of ran­dom for­tunes, called omikuji. The Japan­ese ver­sion of the cookie dif­fers in sev­eral ways: they are a lit­tle bit larger, made of darker dough, and the bat­ter con­tains sesame and miso rather than vanilla and but­ter. They con­tain a for­tune; how­ever, the small slip of paper was wedged into the bend of the cookie. Food: A Culi­nary His­tory from Antiq­uity to Present reports that most of the peo­ple who claim to have intro­duced the cookie to the United States are Japan­ese, so the the­ory is that these bak­ers were mod­i­fy­ing a cookie design from their days in Japan. Makoto Hagi­wara of Golden Gate Park’s Japan­ese Tea Gar­den in San Fran­cisco is reported to have been the first per­son in Amer­ica to have served the mod­ern ver­sion of the cookie when he did so at the tea gar­den in the 1890s or early 1900s.

Did some­one named Mur­phy invent the Mur­phy Bed?

The Mur­phy bed, also known as a wall bed, fold down bed or pull down bed is a bed that is hinged at one end so it can be folded up and stored ver­ti­cally against a wall or in a closet, named by inven­tor William L. Mur­phy. Using an old closet door­jamb and some door hinges, he built a pivot that allowed the bed to attach to a wall and fold up against it for easy stor­age. Mur­phy applied for a patent for his inven­tion in 1900. A book sim­ply titled Fur­ni­ture pro­vided this information.

If you have a ques­tion that you would like to see answered in this col­umn, mail it to Mary Jane San­tos, Delaware County Dis­trict Library, 84 E. Win­ter St., Delaware, OH 43015, or call 740–362-3861. You can also email your ques­tions by vis­it­ing delawarelibrary.org or directly to Mary Jane at mjsantos@delawarelibrary.org. No mat­ter how you con­tact us, we’re always glad you asked!

Posted by Mary Santos on Mar 30 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.