Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
"In Wet Weather, books must be protected"
At Stroud Green and Harringay library today, I picked up an old book that had been retrieved from Reserve Stock for display. Upon opening it, I was delighted to find that the book had once been part of the Hornsey Lending Library Stock and still had the rules pasted in the front.
As well as the usual (for the time) exhortations to keep books clean, there is a reminder that books in houses where infectious diseases had broken out were taken out of circulation and destroyed even though there's little evidence that infections can be transmitted by books.
Tags for Forum Posts: libraries
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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When I worked in a library in 1979/80 a lot of the older stock still had the gummed labels warning about bringing back a book from a house of infection- seems to have been a bit of an obsession back in the day. People also used, and left in the books, a remarkable variety of bookmarks. A five pound note, an envelope of luncheon vouchers, a string bean (uncooked), a small sketch by the artist David Gentleman and a rather passionate letter from a boyfriend were some of the things that dropped out when I was giving them a quick flick before returning them to the shelves. I also had two regular readers who would carefully wrap the books they borrowed. One used brown paper, and always read wearing gloves, so the book wouldn’t get dirty. Another used tin foil so the book wouldn’t whisper the plot to her when it was on her bedside table.
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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I’ve long suspected that libraries are places of magical realism, your post has pretty much confirmed that now.
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Permalink Reply by Kate Currie on
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I can remember my mother having to bake my library books before taking them back when I had measles in 1963...and my grandmother wouldnt borrow books from the public library "because you never know what you could catch" - only from Boots circulating library (dont know if being part of a chemist saw off the germs?!?)
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