Friday, 18 April 2008

The rewards of cataloguing

One of the big ones is being on the cataloguer's mailing list for emails like these:

Dear colleague,



On lcn 10109488 (The Complete tales of Henry James), which is a
twelve-volume work, you have a piece linked to a part record for a v.13:

XXX Main Libr 813.46 13 v.13 Available

Please could you check your copy and amend the holding? Thanks.

Best wishes,

S.

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Cataloguing god of one of the foremost university libraries in the world.
Get it? Good. Now FIX it!

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I couldn't stop laughing, and as S. is a friend, I emailed him back with:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Maybe it's the very rare v. 13 out of 12 that very few people know about... a ghostly one...
Ixx

(Think "Turn of the Screw")

His response?

Now now. We mustn't mock those poor people who never learnt to count beyond the number of their digits.
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I'm sure that's in the 11th commandment somewhere ("Mockest not those who should be lost to natural selection"), but as I'm already coveting Ruth's pencil skirt, I might as well keep heading down that slippery slope...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

But as a not-so-good Catholic boy, I always thought the eleventh commandment was 'Thou Shalt Not Get Found Out'...

(In my case, I have experienced limited success in this respect...)

Reiza said...

Oh my goodness! Your 11th Commandment cracked me up. :-) I must share that one with friends.

Thanks for popping up back at my place. I've been lurking here and when you stopped commenting at my blog, I wondered if I had offended you somehow. Glad to know that's not the case. :-)

Anonymous said...

I'm a bit sad I'm no longer on the cataloguing mailing list.... if only because I miss RS's comments.....

Pragmatic Mystic said...

Anon - join the club, sweetie!

Reiza - oh, hon, never! Check your blog (Hamotzei, Amen) for a more detailed response. Welcome back, I've missed you over here! I always felt that the commandments were incomplete without a tip of the black hat to Darwin...;-)

Anon2 - RS doesn't post much, so you've not missed much. Yes, those comments did so much to brighten up my day...

Ixx