Holiday Books by Mail

December 16th, 2009

The Parcel Post Loan Library distributed this booklet to customers prior to Christmas 1914. The Parcel Post Loan Library was a commercial endeavor that took advantage of the inclusion of book shipments in the parcel post postage rate starting in 1914. There is a previous post about how the Wisconsin Free Library Commission used parcel post to provide books by mail. The Parcel Post Loan Library rented fiction books in their printed catalogs at a rate of 15 cents a week. Non-fiction books in their catalogs were available for purchase.

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Magazines in Google Books

December 16th, 2009

Google books has begun adding full text magazines. They have digitized almost 100 magazines, from cover to cover, showing us the ads, pictures, articles. Each magazine seems to vary how far back in time they go.

They wrote about adding magazines to google books on their blog a year ago.

They are really interesting and fun to look through, plus they are great historic documents. By digitizing every page, it is almost like going to the Periodicals stacks on the second floor of Gleeson and flipping through them on the shelves.

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Azariah’s Library

December 15th, 2009

There's an eating place in the Academic Common's of Oberlin College in Ohio called Azariah's Cafe. The cafe is named for Azariah Smith Root (1862-1927), the librarian at Oberlin College from 1887 to 1927. Root was responsible for transforming the library at Oberlin into one of the best college libraries in the nation. Root's original involvement with the Oberlin College Library began before his appointment as librarian with a project to catalog the library's collection in 1885 using the Dewey Decimal Classification System. Root played a major role in acquiring a grant of $150,000 from Andrew Carnegie in 1905 for a new college library building which also served the community of Oberlin as a public library. He developed a detailed description of what should be included in the new library which is considered to be the first library building statement written by a librarian. Root was also heavily involved in librarianship at the national level and served as President of the American Library Association (ALA) in 1922. He was actively involved in promoting quality library education and training. This included work with others that resulted in the certification of library schools by ALA. Root served as director of the American Correspondence School of Librarianship which was established in 1923 until his death in 1927. Azariah's library has evolved into the Seeley G. Mudd Center. The old Carnegie building still survives on campus serving multiple non-library functions. I posted a previous blog entry about Oberlin's card catalog which has an exterior view of the Carnegie building. The history of Oberlin's library is preserved through an outstanding College Archives. Herbert F. Johnson has written a thorough biography of Root in the Dictionary of American Library Biography (Libraries Unlimited, 1978).

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3 Years of Library Cover Stories

December 13th, 2009

This month completes three years of library cover stories on my Library History Buff website. "Cover" is a philatelic term for an envelope, postal card, or similar postal artifact that has been sent through the mail (or is intended to be sent through the mail). I collect covers that have a library connection and over a period of almost fifteen years have assembled a collection of several thousand library covers. If picture postcards that don't have a library message are excluded, I probably have the largest collection of library covers in the world. In January of 2007 I started featuring a library cover from my collection on the home page of the Library History Buff website each month. After starting the Library History Buff Blog a little over a year ago, I have usually included the monthly library cover story on the blog also. I also have blog posts that feature other library covers. The rather unimpressive cover above was featured in November, 2007. That cover was the starting point for uncovering a very interesting story connecting a librarian at the Library of Congress, Thomas S. Shaw, with Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War II. That story is located here. The archives for the library cover stories for 2007, 2008, and 2009 can be accessed by clicking on the year. More about library covers can be found by going to the Postal Librariana page on the Library History Buff website. I already have a very interesting library cover story picked out for January, 2010. Stay tuned.

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the herb garden

December 11th, 2009

the herb garden in the front yard is beginning to take shape.