Blog to Book

The Librarian's Apprentice is now available in good old-fashioned book format, available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble for the low, low price of $10. If you, like Mr. Phillips, trust the durability of paper more than electrons, you may want to consider making the investment.

Class War, Part 3: And the Winner Is...

The auditorium was filled with the sound of people murmuring about Mr. Phillips' "perfect" classification system. I had always known Mr. Phillips was nuts. But I had never, until now, realized exactly how nuts he was.

"The man is insane," I said, scarcely able to speak. "The man is literally in...sane!"

"I have to admit, I really don't get this," said Ivan Large, puzzling over the photocopied handout of the Greater Perfect System. "Am I crazy, or does this make absolutely no sense?"

"No!" I said, no doubt sounding slightly delirious. "You're not crazy!"

There were a few more presenters after Mr. Phillips, but I didn't pay much attention, as my mind was reeling from the unsettling realization that I had been the apprentice to a mad librarian for the last four months.

My classification system was the last one to be presented. When Ivan and I had discussed the contest earlier, he had casually mentioned that I would be required to present my idea before the conference. Sensing my alarm at the prospect of speaking in front of a large audience, he had willingly offered to present it for me, "because," he said, "I really believe in your idea and I think it needs to be heard." However, after the revelation of the true nature of the GPS (and of Mr. Phillips' mental state), I no longer cared so much. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was because, after initially thinking of Mr. Phillips as a great genius, the realization that he was actually crazy made me feel more confidence in my own ideas. I hadn't even been completely serious when I thought up my system, and even now I wasn't sure that I meant it completely seriously, at least not for use as an actual library classification system (everything is shelved under "X"?... come on!). But I did feel that there was an important and valid idea behind it, and that beneath its absurdist and seemingly nihilistic surface, there was a deeply significant truth about human knowledge and its limitations, and that truth was what I, and Ivan, believed in.

I told Ivan I wanted to present the system myself, though I would still like for him to introduce me, an unknown non-librarian. "It would be my honor," he said.

We proceeded to the stage. I felt a little nervous but surprisingly calm. Ivan Large took the podium first. "Our final classification system was created by a good friend of mine, Curtis ----. Curtis does not have an MLS, but in my view that should not dissuade us from considering his ideas, for it is, in my opinion, the ideas themselves that we should consider, and not the official credentials of the person who has conceived those ideas. For credentials, though they may mean something in our world, are not in themselves what give thought and originality to a human mind. Curtis has much experience working in libraries and has been developing his own ideas about classification while being assigned to help develop another classification system, which for everyone's benefit shall remain unnamed. His idea may seem shocking at first--though I don't think it will appear as shocking as certain other systems that have been presented here today--but I ask you to look beyond the surface and see what it is that Curtis is really trying to express. I think that if you keep an open mind, you will agree with me that his system--let's call it more a theory or a philosophy of classification--embodies great insight into the very nature of what it is that your noble profession strives to do: namely, to attempt to comprehend and organize human knowledge. I will tell you offhand that this system--Curtis has dubbed it "System X"--is not meant to provide a practical framework for an actual library classification. It attempts to do something else, and that is to make us think about classification itself, indeed human knowledge itself, and the limits of both. Take it, if you will, as a bit of perspective. I've said enough. Now, to speak for himself, I present to you Curtis ----."

I had to admit that was the most comprehensible utterance I had ever heard from Ivan Large. I stood behind the podium and looked out at the hundreds of librarians who stared back at me, waiting. I'm sure that I didn't speak as eloquently as Ivan had, but I think I spoke well enough. I remained calm and presented my thoughts in a logical way. The exact words aren't important, and there would be little point in reproducing here ideas which I have already told you elsewhere in this blog. Suffice it to say that I presented my realization about the infinite complexity of the universe, and how classification is based on perceiving relationships among various entities, and that ultimately all classifications are incomplete. I assured them that this did not mean that there was no value to classifying things--that classifying was, in fact, a necessary and essential part of human life, both in and out of libraries. We have to have a system of understanding the world and what things are and how different things relate to each other. My point, I said, was simply that we realize that all such systems, devised as they are by human beings with incomplete knowledge, are bound to be themselves incomplete, and that this knowledge--about the limits of our knowledge--should keep us humble. I had come to the conclusion, I told them, that classification systems can serve either of two purposes (not mutually exclusive): they can be practical, or they can be works of art. (That was one point on which I had come to agree with Mr. Phillips, though his own work of art was evidently no more than the scribblings of a madman.)

"And so," I said, "I am here to present to you my work of art. As Ivan told you, it is not meant to be a practical system. It is simply an expression. At first glance, it may appear nihilistic, but I can assure you that it is not. Somewhat tragic, perhaps, but not nihilistic. But to me, more than anything else, it expresses the vastness and richness of the universe in which we live, that we can never completely know because we can never get to the bottom of it. Anyway, I won't explain it any further. Here it is."

There was a laptop at the podium for the presenters to use, and I typed something quickly before having it projected. The audience saw a blank white screen with one short line of text in the center:

EVERYTHING=X

The audience was silent. I couldn't tell what they were thinking. I didn't really have anything more to say about it, or at least I didn't want to say anything more about it (that is, I didn't want to overexplain it), so I thanked them and walked off the stage. The audience applauded, with something less than standing-ovation enthusiasm yet something more than mere politeness. It didn't matter, though, what the professionals thought, or if I won one of the top three prizes. I had presented my idea, and that was enough.

"That was absolutely brilliant!" said Ivan as I left the stage. "You really floored them!"

"Well, I don't know if I would say floored, exactly."

"Trust me, you floored them."

"If you say so."

Sometime later, they announced the winners. Third place went to something called the White-Edwards Characteristic Ontology. Second place went to the Automated Referential Metadata Schema (or ARMS). These were a couple of the ones that I hadn't paid much attention to when I was still in shock over the depth of Mr. Phillips' dementia. Was he honestly delusional enough to hope, at this moment, that he would win first prize? Yes, I nodded to myself, he probably was.

"And the winner of Class War III is..." said the presenter, opening the envelope and taking a moment to make sure he had read it right. "System X, by Curtis ----!"

I just sat there, stunned. "Go, go!" said Ivan, pushing me. I stood up, half-dazed, and walked up to the stage. The audience applauded, much more enthusiastically this time. I didn't notice, but I can be sure that Mr. Phillips was none too pleased.

So there you have it. I, the librarian's apprentice, won Class War III. Not that I had much in the way of formidable competition, least of all from my mentor and his "perfect" (perfectly demented, that is) classification system. Ivan, Monica, and I celebrated by going out for drinks that night. The next day we flew back to St. Louis. On Monday Mr. Phillips called me into his office and told me my apprenticeship was complete. I think this was his polite way of saying "you're fired" (not from my job as a shelver, but from my apprenticeship). That was fine with me. And so this blog must come to an end, since it is, after all, my blog about that apprenticeship. I have decided I'm going to go to library school and get my MLS. I've learned all I can learn from Mr. Phillips and at any rate if I want to work as a professional librarian for anyone other than him (which I most certainly do), I need the credential. But I have a feeling that the most important part of my education in librarianship will always be what I learned this summer while I was the apprentice to the great librarian Walter J. Phillips.

THE END

Class War, Part 2: Perfection Revealed

The second presenter was a long-haired woman named Julie wearing an inordinate amount of bracelets. "I'm here to speak to you today," she intoned in a high, airy voice, "of the Harmonic Synchronicity System. I prefer not to use the term 'classification' because it implies a hierarchical order that embodies privilege and prejudice. A classification system is exclusive, whereas my system is inclusive; it is bound by logic, whereas mine is guided by intuition; it is rigidly structured, whereas mine is organic and free. On my Website, anyone can contribute to the Harmonic Synchronicity System by adding intuitive tags to items and linking items together according to his or her innermost feelings. No ideas will be rejected; all ideas will be welcomed and considered of equal value and validity. Through this welcoming, truly democratic system, a great harmony will be achieved and result in an awakening to potential and possibility."

"I couldn't understand a darn thing she was saying," said Ivan Large. He swooshed his hand over his dome. "Right on over it."

The third presenter was Mr. Phillips. "I am here today," he announced importantly, "to present the Greater Perfect System of Library Classification. That's GPS-LC for short, or just GPS, if you prefer. The Greater Perfect System represents a radical evolutionary step beyond the so-called Perfect System that I presented last year, and which I now call the Lesser Perfect System. I am having a handout passed out that shows a simplified diagram of the system."

A few conference volunteers moved down the center aisle, handing each row a stack of papers (for each attendee to keep one copy and pass the rest to the next person). The paper handouts were necessary, of course, because Mr. Phillips refused to touch a computer. I don't know how much money he spent on photocopies.

I looked at my copy of the diagram. It was actually the first time I had seen the overall structure of the system to which I had supposedly been contributing for the last three months.

My jaw dropped.

Here, in simplified form, is Mr. Phillips' idea of the perfect classification system:

Class A: Things that exist.
Class B: Things that do not exist.
Class C: Things that are large.
Class D: Things that are small.
Class E: Things that are visible.
Class F: Things that are invisible.
Class G: Things that are red.
Class H: General information.
Class I: Theories of Walter J. Phillips.
Class J: Books about horses.
Class K: Things that are simple.
Class L: Things that are complex.
Class M: Things that are Chinese.
Class N: Books written by Democrats.
Class O: Books written by Republicans.
Class P: Books written by Bolsheviks.
Class Q: Books written by the Chinese.
Class R: Fairy tales.
Class S: Things that are certain.
Class T: Things that are uncertain.
Class U: Things that matter.
Class V: Things that do not matter.
Class W: Things that are known.
Class X: Things that are unknown.
Class Y: Things that make sense.
Class Z: Things that do not make sense.

"I don't get it," said Ivan Large.

No further comment is necessary.

Class War, Part 1: Here Come the Robots

Saturday was the big day: Class War III, the classification system contest. The contestants took turns giving a brief presentation/explanation of their system. The first one was some bushy-haired, bearded, bespectacled guy named Mark with a laptop.

"My system is called ClassBot 2.0, based on the prototype ClassBot 1.0 that I presented last year," Mark said. "It is essentially an artificial intelligence program that not only classifies objects according to preprogrammed criteria, but also learns as it goes and further develops the classification system on its own. So ClassBot is essentially the world's first robot librarian."

Mark proceeded to demonstrate ClassBot's artificial intelligence. His computer screen was projected onto a large white pull-down screen so that the audience could see what was happening. He started by opening the program. A cutesy-looking robot face appeared and said, "Hello, I'm Classy! What can I classify for you today?"

"Hello, Classy," said Mark. "I'm going to ask the audience for a suggestion." He then asked us to suggest a classic book, one that would be old enough (i.e., out of copyright) to be likely to be found online. Someone suggested The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, and Mark repeated this to Classy the robot.

After a pause, the robot said, "Let me make sure I heard you right. Did you say, Theoragen Of Speeches?" (The robot's speech was also presented in text at the bottom of the screen.)

The audience chuckled in amusement, Mark more nervously. "No."

Another pause. Then, "Okay, let's try again. Please repeat what you would like me to classify for you today!" (The robot, besides being annoyingly cute, spoke in an irritatingly chipper tone.)

Mark tried again, speaking more slowly. "The.. Origin... of... Spe-cies."

Pause. "Let me make sure I heard you right. Did you say, The Origin of Speeches?"

"No," said Mark, evidently trying to hide his embarrassment with a bemused smile.

Pause. "Okay, let's try again. Please repeat what you would like me to classify for you today!"

Mark stated the title a third time, speaking even more slowly and loudly than before. He practically yelled: "The... Or-i-gin... of... Speee-sheeez."

Pause. "Let me make sure I heard you right. Did you say, The Origin of Species?"

Mark heaved a sigh of relief/frustration. "Yes!"

"Okay! Give me a moment while I classify The Origin of Species!"

The audience waited. And waited. Mark explained that Classy was conducting an Internet search for information on The Origin of Species, after which it would run an algorithm by which it would determine how to classify the work. Finally Classy had completed its task.

"Okay! I have successfully classified The Origin of Species! Would you like to know the results now?"

"Yes."

"Okay! The Origin of Species is classified as: Variation. Domestic. Selection. Struggle for Existence. Difficulties. Imperfection. Recapitulation and Conclusion."

The audience members just looked at one another, puzzled expressions all around. A few people giggled.

Mark said, "Uh... obviously there are still a few bugs that need to be worked out... but the basic system is there."

Classy chirped in with, "Have I served your classification needs successfully today?"

Mark said quietly, "No."

Pause. "I'm sorry, I didn't hear you! Have I served your classification--"

"No!" Mark turned to the audience and chuckled. "I don't mean to sound harsh to Classy here, it's just that he only understands simple 'yes' or 'no' answers to questions."

Ivan Large shook his head. "So much for artificial intelligence," he said to me.

Friday: Ivan Large Speaks

I started Friday by attending the presentation called "Relevance Optimization in Search Algorithms: A Systems Approach". It was kind of interesting though a bit technical. It was attended mainly by the type of people Mr. Phillips likes to call "tech gurus".

The next event was Ivan's speech, which was officially titled, "What Can It Possibly Mean?: Thoughts on the Future of Literature". When Ivan appeared on stage, he took the microphone in his hand and leaned casually against the podium. He started off by saying, "Good morning. I hope you all are enjoying the conference so far. I just came from a seminar called 'Maximize the Potential'. I have no doubt that your esteemed colleague Mr. Jackson had some really wonderful things to say about that, but I have to admit I couldn't understand a darn thing the guy was saying. Went-- [he moved his hand swiftly over his bald head and made a swooshing sound] -- right over my head. Right on over it. Anyway, I've been invited here today to say something about the future of literature. Now why they chose me to speak on the future of literature, I don't know, but I'll try to make my best guess as to what that future might be."

And so on from there. His speech was largely (no pun intended) incomprehensible, almost as much as his novels, and I'm sure many librarians in the audience were wondering who this guy was and why he got invited to speak at the conference, and, most of all, what the heck he was talking about. Here are some choice snippets:

Writing, as I'm sure you all know, implies a sort of underlying linguistic plenum, as though we--which is to say the collective reader/writer/auditor/speaker--were awash in a sea of endless symbols, infinitely combinatorial and permutational in its ever-changing array of interrelationships, mutations, and symbioses of meaning and indefinite levels of meta-meaning.

When we speak, we assert the efficaciousness of ideation and articulation in the project of establishing an epistemic base from which we may then proceed to act as knowing agents in a determinately knowable world-space.

The production of meaning-centered taxonomies is the fundamental project of the human species, and it cannot be argued that there is anything more essentially human than this.

You get the idea. At the end, the audience clapped politely. I don't think anybody was sure what they had just listened to. I know I wasn't. And I'm sure they were all wondering, as I was, what any of it had to do with the future of literature. Books went pretty much unmentioned.

Later that afternoon I attended the presentation "Ontology and Description: Orienting Metadata with Global Classificatory Schema". This one was even more technical than the first session, but I found it more engaging, perhaps because the subject matter--classification--held some interest for me. Ivan Large attended this one, too. He told me that he had convinced the judges to enter my idea into the contest.

"No way," I said. "They accepted it?"

"How could they not? Like I told them, it just makes sense!"

I don't know if Ivan Large is the most trustworthy expert on things that make sense, but whatever. My "system" (or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it an anti-system) was in the running!

Thursday

I returned home yesterday from Lib Con 08. It may take me a few days to tell about everything that happened. The flight was uneventful (always a good thing) and we arrived at our hotel in Orlando on Thursday afternoon. That evening we (meaning Mr. Phillips, Vivian, Monica, and myself) attended the opening meeting of the conference, which entailed sitting through some rather pointless speeches, followed by an informal meet-and-greet. Monica and I spotted Ivan Large among the crowd and, after waiting a few minutes while he was occupied talking to other people, we introduced ourselves. He's a really friendly guy, not standoffish at all, and he was surprisingly easy and fun to talk to. He didn't act the least bit like a self-worshiping celebrity, but just like an ordinary person. Strangely enough, we hit it off so well with Ivan that the three of us went out for coffee afterward. During the course of our conversation, the topic of the classification contest came up, and at one point I mentioned that I had thought about entering my own idea into the contest. Monica and Ivan were both very curious as to what my idea was, so I told them.

"It's silly," I said.

"Tell us!" they said.

"All right. You have to understand, I'm half-joking. But only half."

"Are you gonna tell us, or not?"

"Okay. My system is exceedingly simple, but it's based on a lot of thought. Here it is: Everything... is unclassifiable."

Ivan regarded me with a frown of deep perplexity.

"I told you it's silly," I said.

"No, not at all!" said Ivan. "This is very intriguing! Please, tell me more... Why is everything unclassifiable?"

"Because everything exists with many different relations to many different things, making a specific classification impossible. So you can only classify things in the most superficial way. When you go deeper, you encounter this incredibly tangled web of relationships that prevents you from ever being able to fully describe how any two things, let alone everything in the world, is related to each other. Therefore, everything in my system can only be classified as X."

Ivan stared at me as though he were in shock. "Curtis!" he said at last. "You... are a genius!"

I snickered. "A genius? Come on."

"I'm serious! That is the most brilliant thing I have ever heard!"

"You really think so?"

"Absolutely! And you say you're not even a librarian?"

"No, just an apprentice, supposedly."

"Well, guess what, kid, I'm getting you into that contest."

"I don't know... I'd feel like I was betraying Mr. Phillips."

"Well, if his system really is as perfect as he thinks it is, then he has no reason to worry. Your idea deserves to be heard."

And so Ivan Large decided that he would persuade the judges to allow my crazy idea into the contest. When I went to bed in my hotel room that evening I felt a mixture of nervousness about what Mr. Phillips would think and excitement.

Off to Orlando

Well, today's the day we travel to Orlando for Lib Con 08. I've finished packing and am ready to leave for the airport. Should be an interesting weekend. That plane crash in Spain yesterday kind of freaked me out, but what are the chances of something like that happening two days in a row? I guess life is always a gamble, no matter what you do or don't do. The odds are usually stacked in your favor, though (after all, out of I don't know how many thousands of days I've been alive thus far, I haven't died on a single one of them). Anyway, I don't know if I'll be able to post much this weekend, since I'll be pretty busy at the conference and won't have access to my own computer, so I may not post again till after I get back. We'll see how it goes. But I'll be sure to give a full report next week.

A Dream Come True

Today Mr. Phillips finally gave me his response to my work on the GPS. Even though I had long since stopped caring about the project, I couldn't help feeling a bit nervous when he called me into his office to discuss it. I sat facing him across his large wooden desk and braced myself. Mr. Phillips looked at me intently.

"Brilliant!" he said.

I was stunned. "Really?"

"Absolutely brilliant! I knew you were the right man for the job!"

I had no idea how he "knew" this, since I knew nothing whatsoever about classification at the start of the project (and more or less made it up as I went along), but I knew that to point this out to Mr. Phillips would have been, well, pointless.

"I believe," he stated, sounding more tremblingly excited than I had ever known him to be, "that you and I, Curtis, will emerge victorious in Class War! We have created the Phillips-[my last name] Greater Perfect System!"

At this point I was reminded of my dream where Mr. Phillips shouted, "I have achieved perfection!" Uncanny.

Well, I must admit I do feel relieved, though I'm afraid that if the GPS does not win first prize, Mr. Phillips will be terribly crushed. It also makes me feel torn about entering my own idea into the contest, even though I would have absolutely no expectation of it actually winning. The judges would surely think it was a joke, and in truth it isn't meant to be completely serious. The only way it would stand any kind of chance is if Ivan Large were one of the judges.

A Man With No Class

This will be a short week at work since we're traveling to the conference on Thursday. I submitted my work on the GPS to Mr. Phillips last Friday. He said he would study it over the weekend. I had no idea what he would think of it, or how exactly he planned to integrate it (assuming he approved of what I had come up with) with his own work on the project. I'm telling you, the man is nuts. At any rate, I'm way beyond caring about his classification system. As far as the conference goes, it'll just be nice to have a change of scenery for a few days, and I have to admit I'm incredibly curious to see both Ivan Large and the classification contest.

Speaking of our favorite avant-garde author, I found another book of his this past weekend. It's called 26 Persons. It features a cast of characters numbering... you guessed it... 26. And, in true Ivan Large style, the characters are known as (in order of appearance) Person A, Person B, Person C, and so on, all the way through Person Z. I only skimmed through the book at a bookstore (I'm still busy burrowing my way through Harmless Banter, so I'm not quite ready to launch into another Large novel at this point), so I can't say much more about it, but the entire novel appears to consist of dialogue among these 26 persons. Because it's apparently all talk, it seems at first glance that it could just as well have been written as a play. In a play, however, one would not get the author's highly informative commentary, such as this typical non-description:

"Where are my trousers?" said Person D, a man of uncertain height, indeterminate weight, unascertainable occupation, unknown creed, indistinct race, and vague motives.

You just wouldn't get that if you were watching an actor, who would at least be of a certain height and weight and racial makeup. Though any of these features could be modified to make him appear otherwise, the point is he would still have an appearance. You could never translate Ivan Large to the stage or the screen because he delights in making his characters and settings seem as nondescript--no, as non-specific--as possible, and that's part of his point. It's as though he refuses to... you know, I don't know why I never thought of it this way before... he refuses to classify things.

Wow. It's all become clear now. Suddenly I know why I must meet Ivan Large.

Dreams of Perfection

This morning I had a strange dream. I was in a laboratory with Mr. Phillips. We both wore white lab coats and were somehow supposed to be working on the classification system. It was as though Mr. Phillips was Dr. Frankenstein and I was Igor. There were books and sheets of paper strewn across a long table, and I was rummaging through them really fast, sorting and organizing them into stacks, and it seemed to be a race against time. Finally Mr. Phillips raised his hands toward the thundering, lightning-flashing sky and proclaimed, "I have achieved... perfection!"

After this I dreamed I was at Vivian's house. I've never been there in real life, so I have no idea what it actually looks like, but in the dream it was an old Victorian townhouse. She told me to classify everything in her house--books, dishes, clothing, you name it. It was an arduous task because Vivian made sure that I got everything perfect.

Boy, was I glad to wake up.

Getting Ready

On Friday Mr. Phillips expects me to submit my work on the GPS. I haven't really worked on it lately, ever since I became disillusioned with the project, but I had already done enough work over the first two months that I still have something substantial to show him. I don't know how good it is, but he's the one who decided to have me assist him with this quixotic project, so he gets what he paid for.

We travel to the conference next Thursday, and return on the following Sunday. This year the conference happens to be in Orlando. Why they chose a Florida location in August is beyond me. Ivan Large is giving his speech on Friday and Class War III is on Saturday.

I've been looking over a brochure for the conference and trying to figure out which presentations I might want to check out. Some of them I can rule out by the title, especially ones written in business-speak nonsense like "Maximize the Potential: Forging Impactful Library Services for 2010 and Beyond" or touchy-feely nonsense like "Affirming Values, Embracing Change: Diverse Perspectives for Today's Librarian". The titles alone are enough to make me shudder, so I think I'll steer way clear of those. More intriguing, if still a bit hokey, are the pretentiously technical-sounding presentations like "Relevance Optimization in Search Algorithms: A Systems Approach" and "Ontology and Description: Orienting Metadata with Global Classificatory Schema". I don't think I'll be seeing Mr. Phillips at these presentations, since this is exactly the kind of library or information "science" that he detests. One does have to wonder if the titles are as meaningless as the statements of that Ivan Large character, but they at least sound interesting (at least to a classification nerd like me).

Unfortunately, since it is taking place during Class War III, I will have to miss the scintillatingly-titled "Regimentation or Referentiality: Toward a Theoretical Framework for the Organization of Information".

Darn.

Mostly Harmless

Well, I have to say that Harmless Banter gets slightly more comprehensible as you go. By chapter 3, some kind of actual narrative begins to show through. It was in this chapter when I realized that the main character, who is apparently a businessman, is the person always referred to as "he", whereas other characters are called "someone else" or "a third person", etc. I've also begun to realize that there might actually be a method to Ivan Large's madness. In a bizarre, absurdist sort of way, he seems to be putting forth some kind of theme about the uncertainty of knowledge. For some reason, however, he chooses to do this through writing that alternates between the extremely boring and the outright incomprehensible. For an example of the former, consider this inspired stretch of prose from page 22:

He opened the drawer. He looked for a pair of socks. He looked over many pairs of socks, how many he could not say since he wasn't keeping count. The objective of looking for a pair of socks that matched the rest of his clothes outweighed, for him at this moment, the objective of counting the number of pairs of socks that he surveyed. With each pair, his brain considered for a variable period of time--exactly how long in each case was impossible to say without scientific monitoring in strict laboratory conditions--the color, texture, and pattern of the socks, and matched this information with the criteria that he had chosen as to what would constitute an appropriate pair of socks. The whole process took about fifteen point three eight seconds. At the end of this time, he had selected a pair of gray socks, which he then proceeded to put on.

This is the kind of passage that makes me want to throw this book against a wall. I have just two words for Mr. Large at this point: Who... cares? I mean, what is the man thinking, writing a whole paragraph on someone looking for a pair of socks? More interesting, at least, are the incomprehensible passages. Just try to make sense out of this scene from page 29:

The speaker stood behind the podium and spoke in the most dignified tones. "In these latter days," quoth he, "whatever!"
A man in a gray suit, notepad and pencil in hand and serious expression on his face, said, "Is that a fact?"
A man who knew nothing spoke. "According to the Roberts-Green Hypothesis, the massive equivalent q of the ascending r tangential, relative to the p-sub-mu declination, would seem to indicate a recurring g-quality pseudo-Linian meta-ontology in the v quadrant." He made this up completely and it meant absolutely nothing.
"There are some things," said a fourth person, shaking his head. "There are some things."
A fifth person, swishing his cup of coffee around, said, "This is damn good coffee. Damn good!"
A sixth person, who happened to be wearing argyle socks, said with a twinkle in his eye and a cheery smile, "Our sales indicate that Progress is being made!" He did not attempt to define what he meant by "Progress".
"Hey man!" shouted a seventh person, who wore a green shirt, slamming his hand on the table. "What is your basic?" It was unclear who exactly he was addressing, or for that matter what exactly he was asking.
"Furthermore," said the man who knew nothing, again ad-libbing, "if my calculations are correct, the h-prime set of k-variable sub-elements in the Weismannian spectrum of entities should not... I repeat, not... affect our profit margins adversely, at least not in the short term." This statement, too, was absolutely meaningless.
The secretary entered the conference room. "More coffee, anyone?"
The fifth person, still swishing his cup of coffee around and around, said, "This is damn good coffee. Damn good!"

"Will you just?" shouted the person in the green shirt. Again, it was unclear who he was addressing or what he was asking.

"I've got to be sure to remember to pick up my wife's dresses from the dry cleaners after work," said the man in the argyle socks, addressing primarily himself.

"Your theory has been entirely discredited," said the man who knew nothing smugly, "whereas mine is backed up by the facts!"
The man in the gray suit said earnestly, "Is that a fact?"

Ivan Large is obviously not going for any kind of realism here, but is evidently making the literary equivalent of a Warner Brothers cartoon, except that Looney Tunes makes a lot more sense.

A Thought, Part 2

As I said in the last post, a classification system (library or otherwise) can be thought of as a sort of map or guide to a certain field of knowledge or a certain group of items. It helps map out the territory, which then helps guide you to the specific item or place or bit of knowledge that you seek. So, if a library classificationist is the one who writes the guidebook to all human knowledge, this assumes that he knows where various fields are in relation to each other, which further assumes that he knows at least something about all of these fields of knowledge. But how can anyone really know how every subject relates to every other subject, if there even is an objective answer to such a question? I said last time that all classification systems are guesses. It might be more appropriate to say that all classification systems reflect the preferences (intellectual or aesthetic) and the practical needs of whoever designs the system. For example, the old edition of Roget's Thesaurus of Words and Phrases that I've been using divides all words (which is to say, ideas and/or things) into six classes:

I. Abstract Relations

II. Space

III. Matter

IV. Intellect

V. Volition

VI. Affections

The whole system descends in a hierarchy, from these six main classes to sub-classes and sub-sub-classes and so on, till you get down to the most specific ideas. This is all fine and dandy, and it gives the whole realm of knowledge a comforting sense of order and structure. However, in a more recent edition, called Roget's International Thesaurus, the categories are not nearly as hierarchical. It is divided into 15 main classes, but within each class, the order of sub-classes is what librarians call "enumerative" (i.e., a listing), rather than hierarchical (which can be thought of as a family tree). Is this an indication that Roget's (and, by extension, the rest of us) have given up on the idea of structuring human knowledge into some kind of logical order? The enumerative list is just that... a list. It doesn't attempt to understand or explain how ideas are related to each other, except in the simplest sense of grouping similar concepts together and putting similar groups under a general category. Worst of all, however, is the alphabetical style of thesaurus, which simply lists words by how they happen to be spelled. This can be very useful, of course, but that's the whole point... it is merely practical, without making any attempt whatsoever to classify our ideas and therefore to provide a sort of road map to all knowledge. Whereas an old-style thesaurus can be used in a similar way to a library classification system (except that it is a guide to words instead of books), the modern dictionary-style thesaurus serves no such purpose, leaving one just as lost amid the sea of words and ideas and things as without it.

One reason the classification project has held such allure for me is that, at some level, I have seen it as a way of locating things in the world. I mean "locating" both in the sense of "finding" and in the sense of "placing", as in "let's locate it here". And, although I mean "finding" in the sense of discovering something new or recovering something lost, I mean "finding" even more in the sense of discovering where something is in relation to everything else. Instead of something being lost in the flood of ideas, images, and experiences that we encounter each day in our 21st century lives, or floating adrift in the vast sea of knowledge, a classification system is a way of "locating" or "finding" its place in the world. Perhaps, ultimately, it's a way of making the world more like home, by organizing the random, chaotic clutter of our experiences and knowledge into a meaningful and beautiful order.

In my previous post I mentioned an uncertainty principle (specialization vs. generalization). What I have been talking about here leads me to what I might call an incompleteness theorem of classification. It goes something like this: In order to know how to organize knowledge and experience, one must already remember everything that needs to be organized. If you forget something, then that thing gets left out of the system, and the system is therefore incomplete. But in order to find everything that needs to be included in the system, we first need a system; without a system, we are left to the whims of memory, which is always incomplete and leaves things out. We can never be sure that we have included everything that needs to be included. In other words, we can't make a complete system without already having a complete system. Therefore, all classification systems are incomplete, and in fact it is impossible to create a complete classification system.

A Thought, Part 1

Today it occurred to me that one of the primary purposes of classification is to help us find things. This might seem obvious, but it bears some thought. If you have a library where every book has its place in a logical scheme, it's much easier to find something than if you have a room full of books in no order whatsoever. So classifying things is not only a way of mapping out the structure of reality, but, like any other map, it is also a guide to help you get to a certain article of knowledge.

This brings up some interesting questions. Librarians, like philosophers, don't make it their business to know everything. They focus instead on the big picture, and on attempting to understand the interrelationships among different things and to make out the grand structure of reality. So librarians classify books on the basis of some kind of general understanding of how different topics are related. But the problem is that having this general understanding requires at least some degree of knowledge about the subjects themselves. Think about it. If you know nothing about a given field of knowledge, how can you possibly know how to map out its contents? For that matter, if you know nothing about a given topic, how can you be qualified to say how it relates to other topics?

The upshot of all this is that there seems to be a sort of uncertainty principle at work here. The more you know about a certain field of knowledge, the better you are able to classify its contents. But the more you know about the field, the less you can know about all other fields (since time and mind are finite). Therefore, the more specific a system gets, the less general it can be, and the more general (or universal) the system gets, the less specific it can be. Which brings us back to the old conundrum of having to choose between specialization and generalization. You can't have it both ways.

So how is an ideal (by which I don't mean perfect, but simply the best possible) classification system to be constructed? No single person can know everything, so a single person can't know how all subjects relate to each other. Conclusion: it is impossible for a single person (or two, or any small number) to create an adequate classification of all knowledge. No wonder I was feeling overwhelmed. No wonder I think Mr. Phillips is crazy. Forget about perfect. Adequate isn't even possible... at least not with a small number of people.

But what about a large team of experts? The problem here is that if everyone is an expert (and, for the sake of argument, let's just say that everyone is, since no single person can possibly master all of human knowledge), then no one is qualified to say definitively and authoritatively how all the various fields of knowledge relate to each other. This would be an almost God-like perspective.

The heart of the matter is that the overarching structure, the grand scheme, of reality must in some way forever remain hidden from us. All classification systems are guesses.

Taking a Break

I guess one thing I've realized about classification systems is that they can be of two basic types: philosophical and practical. It's not that they are mutually exclusive--philosophy can have an effect on practice, and practice can reflect philosophy--but they represent different emphases and purposes. What I call a philosophical classification is the kind I have been striving for--an attempt to chart the grand structure of reality, with practical application in an actual library being of secondary importance. The other type of system, the practical kind, is what most library classification systems are, I think (librarians being, on the whole, a supremely practical lot). It exists for the primary purpose of putting the books in order on the shelves so that they may be found as easily and quickly as possible, with the aid, of course, of a library catalog. Perhaps because I am of a more philosophical bent (I majored in a field of the humanities, after all, which isn't very practical), I am more intrigued by the philosophical sort of classification. And that's why Mr. Phillips' scheme appealed to me at first, with its aim of "perfection". But after spending weeks obsessively thinking about it and working on it only to run into seemingly insurmountable difficulties, I have to admit I'm a little burned out on the whole thing. Lib Con 08 (the library conference) is only two weeks away and I've lost all enthusiasm for the GPS. I'm thinking that maybe library classifications should just be practical after all, that there is no such thing as a perfect classification system, and that when you're creating a system to classify things, the nature of the system will depend on the nature of whatever it is you're classifying, as well as on your own practical needs. Or perhaps on your own aesthetic preferences. Which is what Mr. Phillips is doing, I suppose, in attempting to create a work of art. But that's his work of art. Sure, I'm just the lowly apprentice, like an apprentice painter, but somehow I'm not content in this role. Am I too sure of myself, thinking that I no longer need a master to teach me, eager to strike out on my own? No, I don't think that's it, because I don't feel sure of myself at all. If anything, I feel disoriented, disillusioned, completely unsure how to approach the problem or even if there is any point to approaching it. I feel that I've come face to face with the limits of human knowledge, and it's enough to make me wonder why we seek knowledge.

You can tell by my posts this week that I've been more interested in the "literature" of Ivan Large than in Mr. Phillips' (or my own) classification project. I guess my mind needed a break. And there's nothing better for sending your brain on vacation than reading a little Harmless Banter.

Headaches

I read another chapter of Banter on my lunch break today. I honestly don't know what this book is supposed to be. Two chapters in and there hasn't been one named person, just a bunch of meaningless "dialogue", if it can be called that, among nameless characters (described vaguely, if at all) in some unnamed setting (also described vaguely, if at all). I'm trying very hard to "get it" and am evidently failing miserably. On page 10 I came across this stirring passage:


He said something. No one else heard or at least did not understand, or at least did not pretend to understand, what he said.
No one else said anything for the next five minutes and thirty-six seconds. Then someone else said something. No one quite knew, or at any rate no one really cared, what this other person said.
"Did someone say something?" said someone.
"I don't know," said someone else.
After that, no one else said anything for a while, at least not within earshot of any of the aforementioned people.


Not exactly Shakespeare here. I can only shake my head in dumbstruck disbelief. How in the world did this guy get published? How does he get interviewed on talk shows and invited to speak at library conferences? Are people insane? Have any of these people actually read his books? I don't see how anyone in their right mind can admire, much less enjoy, passages such as the following (page 15):


An unidentified person ran. Another person, who looked vaguely familiar to one or more of the bystanders but whose identity could not be positively determined, ran after the first person. They ran in a big circle, round and round. Dogs barked, somewhere, near or far no one could say with any degree of scientifically verifiable certitude. At any rate one would have to first define what one meant by "near" and "far" before one could say to what degree some entity (such as the sound of the dogs barking) was near or to what degree it was far. It was because these simple yet crucial terms remained undefined that the truth value of the proposition "the dogs barked nearby" was undecidable, as was the truth value of the proposition "the dogs barked far away".
The two unidentified persons, both of unknown political persuasion, continued to run around in a big circle, for no reason that was apparent to the naked eye, nor, for that matter, for any reason that could be determined based merely on objective, unbiased observation and deductive logic.


Where's the Tylenol?

Living Large

Tonight after work I stopped by the public library and checked out a copy of Harmless Banter by Ivan Large. I read the first chapter. It's pretty weird stuff. The best way to explain it is just to give you a sample passage (page 3):

He screamed. Someone else screamed. A third person screamed. Within five seconds everybody started screaming.
They screamed. After they had screamed for a full minute and paused for breath, they screamed again. In each moment when they had been screaming for a period of time greater than zero and less than x, where x=the total duration of their collective scream, it was a true statement to say that they were, at that moment, screaming. However, in a strange twist of fate, the statement was no longer true once they had all stopped screaming.
"What," someone said.
"In," he said.
"The," he said.
"World," he said.
"Are," he said.
"We," he said.
"All," he said.
"Screaming," he said.
"About?" he said.
"I," someone else said.
"Don't," someone else said.
"Know!" someone else said.

If your head is spinning, so is mine. And take this gem from page 6:

"Are you kidding me?" said a man who was tan. "You have got to be kidding me!"
"If only," said someone who was paying no attention to the man who was tan. "We had something," the other person continued. "To look forward to!" He started bawling uncontrollably.
"You moron!" said a third individual, slamming his cup of coffee to the hard table. "Don't you know that you never, ever, under any circumstances, end a sentence with an infinitive!"
"Tell me you're kidding me," said the man who was tan, addressing neither of the above-mentioned individuals. In a low, menacing tone: "You better be kidding me..."
"What you should have said was: If only we had something... to which... to look... forward!"
"If you're kidding me I'll... well... you have got to be kidding me!"
"Whaa-aaa!" said a fourth person of unknown race, ethnicity, or creed, somewhere in the dark, sounding like what people once thought Dracula sounded like. "Whaa-aaa-aaa-aaa!"
"You better be careful out there," said a fifth personage of undeclared gender, sitting at the bar. "In the night... in the dark."
"Ahh, night," said a sixth character, of indeterminate socioeconomic background. "That is when all the unknown quantities come out."
"You have got to be kidding me! Tell me you're kidding!" The man who was tan's voice rose into a pitched scream: "You... have... got... to be... kidding... MEEEEEE!"

I don't know. All I can do is whistle under my breath and say, "Okay then."

What I want to know is, is this guy for real? Is he just pulling our leg? Why did the library conference invite him to speak? Do they really take this man seriously? I mean, is this what passes for high literature these days? I have to admit, though, whatever else you might say about it, I find it hard to stop reading it. It makes for a fascinating, if grotesque, experience. It's like a surreal dream where you never know what's going to happen next because it's absolutely, completely devoid of logic. I sure can't figure out what any of it means. I guess I just need to take Ivan Large's word for it and assume that meaning--at least in the novels of Ivan Large--doesn't really mean anything.

Meaningless Banter

Today Monica told me about this guy who's going to speak at the library conference. She's really looking forward to hearing him speak and eagerly wishes to meet him. He's some writer named Ivan Large. Sounds made-up if you ask me. A lot of these writers use pseudonyms. Anyway, he's this avant-garde novelist and he's supposed to be giving a speech about the future of literature. I've never heard of him, even though I was an English major (albeit years ago), but he's apparently hot with the more literary set of the hipster crowd (of which Monica, as I've alluded to before, is decidedly a member).

Monica showed me an online video of Ivan Large making an appearance on a local talk show somewhere. He is a very odd man. He's quite thin and completely bald, and was wearing a black turtleneck, black jeans, and black-framed glasses. During this whole video clip he sat back in his chair with his legs crossed and his hands clasped around his knee, and leaned his head to one side. I mean his head was practically sideways. He sounded like a bit of a nihilist, yet displayed a cheerful, smiling disposition. At one point the host asked Mr. Large about the meaning of his latest novel (Harmless Banter). The author leaned his head way over to the right and said with a grin, "Allow me to let you in on a little secret, Mike."

The host, one of these local-television celebrity types with perfect hair and seemingly made of plastic, leaned forward earnestly.

After a dramatic pause, Mr. Large said, "Meaning... doesn't really mean anything."

Mike, the host, sat back as though floored by the profundity. And--this is what really got me--keep in mind this was no university symposium, but a local television talk show--the audience cheered. I was flabbergasted. Mike, aka Mr. Plastic, shook his head with a chuckle and said, "Whoa! Now that's deep!" The audience continued to cheer. "Deep!" repeated Mike.

Whatever. I don't know if this guy is a hack or if he's just a bit zany, but I'm intrigued enough, or perhaps just morbidly curious enough, that I'm thinking I might check out a copy of Harmless Banter. Should be interesting to see him at the conference.

Crazy from the Heat

Maybe the heat is getting to my head, I don't know. It was like a hundred degrees today in St. Louis. Or maybe I've just reached the breaking point in attempting to achieve the perfection that Mr. Phillips seeks. At any rate, I've had a sort of epiphany about the classification system. It's incredibly, beautifully simple. Some would say it's crazy and, well, maybe it is crazy. I'm not sure how it's going to work with Mr. Phillips and the contest. I'm thinking I might do something pretty radical and enter my own idea in the contest. I know Mr. Phillips would never go for my idea. It's not even worth bringing up to him. I'll just keep it to myself and pretend I'm still working on his misguided project. That's right. I've come to believe now that Mr. Phillips is misguided in his striving for perfection. What does that mean, anyway... "perfection"? How is it humanly possible, and how would you know it if you saw it? Who will be the judge of perfection? Does Mr. Phillips think his colleagues at the library conference are trustworthy arbiters of perfection? The way he talks about his colleagues, I'm surprised he puts any stock in their opinions at all. He is always so scornful and dismissive of his fellow librarians, as though they are all a bunch of idiots. Maybe he just wants to prove something. Maybe he just wants them to bow down before his genius. I don't know. All I know is, I'm through trying to make something perfect.

Perfection

Today I was sitting at a desk working on the classification project, with thesauri, dictionaries, and encyclopedias spread out before me, drawing diagrams with a pencil and notepad and doing a lot of erasing. Vivian was shelving some books nearby, and at one point, having long since lost my ability to concentrate on the work at hand, I started watching her. Not overtly staring, mind you, just sort of surreptitiously, casually glancing every now and then while I pretended to look busy. I found myself captivated by the way she shelved the books, so... I don't know how else to put it... elegantly. Just like when she stamped the due date cards. Every motion seemed perfect. I don't mean in a mechanical way, but in a graceful way. It was almost like watching some kind of ballet. And--well, I know this is going to sound funny, since Vivian is probably 15 or 20 years older than me--she seemed, in that moment, strangely beautiful. I don't mean to say that I like her, not in that way anyway. I just mean that she appeared to me to possess the kind of beauty that a ballerina does. It's not so much sexual as it is aesthetic.

Anyway, this got me to thinking about culture and civilization, and how they are by definition a human addition to nature. In case you don't see the connection, I'll explain. Vivian's elegance, it occurred to me, isn't so much her "natural" way of moving as it is a cultivated sophistication, just as a ballerina's movements are. Like music, poetry, architecture, or for that matter any kind of technology, her movements are human constructions, "improvements" upon nature if you will. But aren't human beings themselves part of nature? If so, how can anything we do or make be un-natural? To distinguish the artificial from the natural seems to suggest that human beings can somehow transcend nature. And if we can transcend nature, isn't that an amazing thing? Perhaps it is human nature to transcend nature, if "nature" means that which is given to us, and to add something of our own creation.

I see that Mr. Phillips takes this approach to classification. He doesn't care so much about his system being a mirror of nature as he is interested in creating a great work of art... beautiful yet arbitrary. Well, there's nothing wrong with that, I suppose. But my approach has been to try to figure out nature itself... the way things are. I can assure you this is easier said than done. Science and philosophy attempt to do this, and they are famous for being intellectually challenging disciplines. Scientists at least have physical stuff to work with, things they can observe and verify. Philosophers deal in abstract ideas, logical relationships, metaphysical entities. Perhaps it is too much for me, or perhaps for anyone, to attempt to construct a library classification system by simultaneously constructing a philosophical system, rather than basing it on already existing philosophical principles.

At any rate, I don't see why Mr. Phillips thinks of his system as a work of art and yet strives for it to be "perfect". I don't know why I never noticed this apparent discrepancy before. How can one say that a work of art is perfect? Does he just mean in an aesthetic sense, as we would say that a certain song or painting is perfect, by which we would mean that it is flawless and perfectly executed? Up till now I have thought of a "perfect" classification system as one that perfectly expresses the structure of reality. By now I'm starting to become disillusioned with the possibility of attaining such a thing. I do believe that reality has a structure, but I've come to realize that it's a lot more complex and intricate than we can ever hope to understand. Is Mr. Phillips right? Should classificationists (if that's what we're called) consider what we do an art more than a science?

Of Squirrels and Philosophers

I've been especially busy the last few days since I've started preparing for Class War. Oh yeah, that's what they call the classification contest at the library conference. Cute, huh? This year's contest is actually Class War III. Mr. Phillips has competed in all of them so far. In the first Class War, his system came in third place. In Class War II, an improved (but still Lesser Perfect) system came in second. This year Mr. Phillips is determined to win first prize, armed with the GPS and a little help from you know who. Of course, I still think the man's totally out of his mind, thinking that I'm going to help him win this thing. I try to humor him, though. Even though I don't have any idea at all what I'm doing.

Today on my lunch break I was sitting in the park watching the squirrels. It occurred to me as I watched them that even animals must classify things, although their systems are much simpler than ours. I was thinking that those squirrels might have only two categories, "nut" and "not a nut". Must make life really simple. But then again, it might also make it really boring, at least for a human being. Maybe for a squirrel it's all right.

I suppose the complexity of life, or perhaps the ability to perceive complexity, is one of the things that makes life interesting. When you start to think about the whole of reality and the kaleidoscopic variety of things that compose it, it makes the world seem far richer than it might have seemed before. It also begins to seem a little overwhelming. It's like when you're the kid in the candy store, with enough money to buy one kind of candy, and you're suddenly confronted by more kinds of candy than you ever knew existed. It's thrilling and paralyzing at the same time. What do you choose? Or let's say you decide to try a different kind each week. Which one do you choose first? How do you know which one is your favorite until you've tried them all? Can you ever try them all? What if there are still other flavors that your local candy store doesn't carry? Maybe one of those is really your favorite? What if you never discover it?

I guess my point is that the sheer richness of the world is both a blessing and a curse. It's exciting to find oneself in such a teeming universe of multitudinous things, but it can also make one feel overwhelmed by options for potential experience and knowledge, and make one's actual experiences and knowledge seem a bit random. What you can do and see is always inadequate, a vanishingly small fraction of what there is. I'm beginning to think that philosophers and librarians are a bit alike in that they both seek somehow to comprehend the whole of reality, knowing that they can never actually know all there is to know (despite what children might believe about the librarian's omniscience), yet not content to limit themselves to one specialized subcategory of a subcategory of knowledge, the way today's university professors do. Philosophers (at least those who still seek to contemplate the whole of reality, rather than a sub-subcategory of it) and librarians (at least those who attempt to develop classification systems) would rather attempt to comprehend the whole thing, to try to figure out its dimensions and its structure, the relations among its various parts. Not that anyone--at least not anyone in his right mind--believes we can actually attain such knowledge completely. Omniscience is a divine quality, not a humanly possible one. Centuries ago, people used to think it was possible to master at least all human knowledge. Now we despair at even this task. But the philosopher and the librarian seek to comprehend the big picture, if not all the details, and perhaps metaphysics and classification are the closest we can ever approach to being real know-it-alls.

Conference Call

Now here's something weird. Mr. Phillips told me today that I am going to accompany him to a library conference next month. Hold on, that's not the weird part. He has entered us in a contest to be held as part of the conference... a classification system contest. It seems that Mr. Phillips has been entering this contest for the last couple of years and hasn't yet won, which of course he thinks is due to the fact that he has not yet perfected his Perfect Classification System (that was the Lesser Perfect one, after all). He hopes to have enough of the framework of the Greater Perfect System worked out in the next few weeks to be able to really wow them at the conference. Which, of course, means that I will have a ton of homework to do between now and then.

But don't worry, I intend to keep you posted every step of the way.

Complications

Classifying everything that exists is a lot more complicated than it seems. The branches of the tree get really intertwined. The thing I've come to realize is that things aren't always, or even very often, connected to other things by single, simple lines. They are often connected by many lines to many different things, in many different types of relationships. So it seems you can't really have a simple family tree. Take human relationships, for instance. I am descended from my mother and father, and their parents before them, and so on. But I am also connected to many other people, both through genetics and through social association, and I am connected to all these people in many different kinds of relationships, from friend to brother to coworker to random stranger passed on the street. Reality seems more like a big net than a tree, with the lines crossing every which way. This makes the whole project of classifying things infinitely more complex than it might seem at first glance. In a typical library classification system, each book has a definite place in the scheme, which corresponds to its physical location on the shelves. In a network (essentially, like the way the Internet is ordered), there are multiple links to and from any given entity, so its location in the scheme is relative rather than absolute. It's challenging enough, in this light, to trace all the relationships of just one thing, let alone everything that exists. I'm starting to wonder if maybe I've gotten in over my head.

Degrees of Separation

When trying to determine the relationship between any two entities in the GPS, one often runs into undecidable propositions. For example, try to figure out the relationship between the Holocaust and the Japanese monster movie Rodan. They can both be classed as things that happened on Earth in the 20th century, but is that all? How do you know if that's the only way their genealogies interconnect? For a classification system can also be looked at as a sort of genealogy of things, not necessarily in the literal sense of which things gave rise to others, but in a metaphysical sense, i.e. what categories and sub-categories of things exist, and how the different categories descend from each other in a giant tree. Just like in a family tree, you can determine how you're related to someone by tracing your respective lineages back far enough until you find a common ancestor. I read once that it's mathematically impossible for any two people on earth to be more distantly related than 50th cousin. Or it's sort of like how everyone in Hollywood can be located within six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. I haven't yet figured out how many degrees of separation are possible between any two entities, but it has to be a finite number, right? At any rate, even if the number is incomprehensibly large, it still boggles the mind to contemplate the fact that two disparate things like the mass murder of millions of people and a crazy Japanese monster movie coexist in the same universe. What is their common ancestor? How far is each of them from Kevin Bacon?

A Grand Scheme

If you're reading this, you must be a very faithful reader indeed, seeing that I haven't posted in just over two months. This is what happens when you become obsessed with inventing the perfect classification system. I didn't mean to abandon the blog. I neglected it for a few days once I became engrossed in my project, then pretty much forgot about it. Well, here we are again. There really isn't that much to fill you in on, except that I have developed some ideas of my own, and these ideas now seem a more interesting subject than my apprenticeship to Mr. Phillips per se. At least they are interesting to me, but I don't know how much of that is due to my obsession. But hey, it's my blog, so I can write about whatever I want, and nobody's making you read it, right?

For now I will just record this thought: Classifying things, I've come to realize, is more than just a way to attach labels to them. It's a way of understanding, or at least attempting to understand, what things are, and how different things relate to each other. In other words, it's sort of like a philosophical system, or at any rate it's an expression of a philosophical system. A classification system attempts to determine not only what a thing is, but also its place in the scheme of things. Although it may seem an arcane art, I think the reason classification has become so fascinating to me is that it makes everything in the universe, from the biggest to the smallest, to seem interconnected, all things part of one grand design. The classification system is merely a human attempt to interpret and describe that grand design, to embody it as faithfully as possible. And I've realized, too, that's why I fundamentally disagree with Mr. Phillips. I believe there is some grand structure, a scheme of things, whereas he seems to think either that there isn't, or that we can't know it, and that a classification scheme is just an artistic creation, like a symphony or a cathedral. I see it as more like a science, or at least a philosophy... in either case, it's a sincere attempt to arrive at the truth, which is to say the way things are. And the wondrous thing to me is that reality, in some mysterious way, seems to be something like a symphony or cathedral itself. Maybe it is quixotic to attempt to find out the outlines of this grand design, but to me that is the challenge and the allure of this project. Not that I believe that every little thing can be assigned a specific place in the scheme, by myself or any other mortal... but the belief that it does have a place in the overall structure, whether we can understand it or not--that it can be located somewhere in the grand scheme of things--this is what animates and underlies my quest.

The System Builder

Sorry I haven't posted in a few days. I've been busy. On Friday, Mr. Phillips let me in on his grand classification scheme. It seems he had been working on a classification system for some years, which he had referred to as the Perfect System. Well, after much development and hard work, he had come to feel that it was inadequate, not so perfect after all, so he shelved it (so to speak) and is now starting over on a new one. This one he calls (are you ready?) the Greater Perfect System. The old one he now refers to as (I know you're not ready for this one) the Lesser Perfect System.

Anyway, it seems that Mr. Phillips wants me, for reasons known and probably comprehensible only to himself, to assist him in the construction of the GPS. He gave me a copy of Roget's Thesaurus of Words and Phrases to help me get started. Unlike most current thesauri that list words in alphabetical order, dictionary-style, this is an older edition that lists words by category--in other words, a sort of classification system. But the old Roget's is a classification of words, not of books, so it can't be adapted as it is for use in a library. However, as Mr. Phillips points out, words are essentially ideas, and Roget's categorization of words is essentially a categorization of ideas, which can provide the basis, or at least some kind of rough guide or helpful aid, for a library classification system.

At any rate, ever since I got home from work on Friday, I've been working on the GPS, with Roget's and a notebook and pen (Mr. Phillips would like it that way, sans computer). I have to admit I've become rather fascinated and obsessed with the project. Geeky, I know. I guess I've caught a little bit of Mr. Phillips' classification mania.

The Card Catalog

Today Mr. Phillips had Vivian teach me how to type catalog cards. Yes, type, as in using a typewriter (manual, no less).

I don't care what Mr. Phillips thinks, there is something to be said for word processors. Every single time I made a mistake (which was often), I had to toss that card and start all over. This was especially frustrating when I made the mistake near the end. And believe me, Vivian made sure that I got each card perfect, down to the smallest detail of punctuation and spacing, before allowing me to move on to the next one.

After I had spent the morning practicing how to make the cards, Vivian then taught me both how to file them in the card catalog drawers and how to find cards in the catalog by author, title, and subject. That last part I vaguely remembered from grade school, back in the days before you could look up a book on the library's computer catalog.

I have to admit that the card catalog is aesthetically superior to its computerized version, and, to tell the truth, once you get the hang of it, it's not really that much more difficult to use, if at all. Maybe Mr. Phillips is onto something, at least when it comes to keeping the card catalog.

I still think he's wrong, though, about there being no right answer to the bone classification exercise. I can't really explain how, exactly, but I'm working on it.

The Eye Test

Today was weird. Which, of course, is normal when you're the apprentice to Walter J. Phillips, the great librarian.

Today Mr. Phillips sat me in a comfortable chair in a dark room and showed me slides of birds. He would show three birds in succession, a, b, and c, then a and b side by side, followed by a and c, then b and c. Then he would ask me which pair seemed to resemble each other the most. If I seemed uncertain (which was more often the case than not), he would run through them again, saying, "A and B... A and C... B and C. OK, one more time..." I felt like I was at the optometrist.

By the way, if you're wondering what any of this has to do with librarianship... you're in good company. Mr. Phillips' pedagogical methods get stranger and stranger every day.

"All right, here we have Corvus corax... followed by C. brachyrhynchos... and lastly C. frugilegus. Now here is C. corax with C. brachyrhynchos... next is C. corax with C. frugilegus... and finally we have C. brachyrhynchos with C. frugilegus. Which pair is the best match? Here they are again..."

And so on, for about three or four hours.

Don't ask me. I just work here.

The IQ Test

Ok, so I had to "classify" a box of bones. Easy, right?

Well, considering that I know almost nothing about anatomy, not so easy. I wasn't sure what type of animal these bones were from, or even if they were all from the same type of animal. How was I supposed to find out? I suppose I could find some books on animal bones...

And how should I classify them, anyway? By size? Shape? Body part? Species? Who could say? Mr. Phillips was out of the library all day, so I could not ask him for clarification. I only had a one-word command: CLASSIFY.

Was this some kind of intelligence test? A lesson in the difficulty of classification? If it was the latter, then I can say that I learned my lesson well. When you know next to nothing about bones, classifying bones is a near impossible task.

Well, I started out the best I could, organizing them by general size and shape, what looked like leg bones here, what appeared to be vertebrae there...

But this approach soon became complicated. At some point it becomes hard to know how to group things, what to put together and what to keep apart. Which is more important, the similarity or the difference? At one extreme, you just have to lump them all together as "bones"; at the other extreme, each bone is a unique individual specimen. Is every object a prime number, divisible only by itself and one? Are there really "kinds" of things, or are all classifications arbitrary? It seems there would have to be real kinds... all of these objects are obviously bones. But what about different kinds of bones? Are the divisions between different types of bones as definite and clear as what divides bones from non-bones? And of what greater thing are bones just one kind? Is there only a single group to which they belong? Can't we say that bones are a kind of this thing, but also a kind of that thing? And wouldn't everything that exists ultimately have to be a "kind" of one ultimate thing? A kind of what? Thing? What is a thing, anyway?

While my head swirled with such vertigo-inducing philosophical questions, the bone classification exercise became increasingly difficult and frustrating. Just when I thought I had a good system down, the next bone specimen would throw a wrench in the works and I had to rethink all of my assumptions.

Where did Mr. Phillips get all these stupid bones, anyway? Why does he have them? Just to torment me?

Mr. Phillips finally stopped by right before 5 o'clock to look at my work. "Interesting," he said.

"Well?" I asked. "Did I get it right?"

He gave me a funny look. "Right? Why, young man, you miss the whole point. As I told you, classification is an art." He shrugged nonchalantly. "There's no right answer." He chuckled and turned to leave. Needless to say, I was smoldering.

I almost didn't want to believe him. I didn't want to believe that I had just wasted eight hours of my life trying to find something that didn't exist. I wasn't sure if I should be more angry with Mr. Phillips or with myself. So last night I sulked.

Today, I started to think that maybe, just maybe, Mr. Phillips was wrong.

Only Classify

Where do I begin.

I came in today, Monday morning, and Vivian told me that there was an "assignment" from Mr. Phillips waiting for me in the workroom.

So I went in the workroom, where I saw a large cardboard box sitting on a table. A handwritten sign on the box said simply:

CLASSIFY

I opened the box.

It was full of bones.

I kid you not.

...sigh...

I'll tell you the rest tomorrow. Right now I just need a beer.

Dewey Decimation System

On Friday Mr. Phillips called me into his office. "Allow me to let you in on a secret," he said.

I waited. Then Mr. Phillips leaned forward, looked at me seriously, and said:

"Dewey was wrong."

I had to think for a moment. "As in the Dewey Decimal system?"

"The very one! Well, I'm here to tell you that Melvil Dewey, creator of the much-vaunted Dewey Decimal Classification system, didn't know what the hell he was talking about!"

"He didn't?"

"No! To think that you can classify everything that exists into ten and exactly ten groups? How convenient! And that each of those ten groups is further divisible into ten subgroups, and so on? Such a neat and tidy cosmology! As though the universe does everything in tens!"

"I never thought of it that way."

"Well, let me tell you this: The Dewey Decimal Classification system is something to be surpassed! Mankind can do far better!"

"What about the Library of Congress system?" I ventured, remembering my work in a university library.

"Library of Congress?! You've got to be kidding! Leave it to the United States government to devise the single worst classification system known to man! Why, it's hardly even worthy of the name! The word 'system' at least implies that there is some sense to it! The problem with Dewey is that it has too much sense; with Library of Congress, that it has--as one would expect of anything associated with Congress--too little sense!"

"So what is the answer, sir?"

"I'm so glad you asked, young man. Because that brings us to the very crux of librarianship and indeed of your apprenticeship. Classification. It is the heart of the matter. It is what we librarians do. We take the vast multitude of books that exist and we sort them out into some kind of comprehensible system. Otherwise, people would never be able to find what it is they're looking for. But it is more than that. That is just the practical, day-to-day outcome. Ease of finding is all they teach you in library school, but that is merely the natural result of classification. Classification, my boy, is an art, the finest art in the fine art of librarianship! A classification system is like architecture, like poetry, like music! Unfortunately for the world, however, Dewey's system is utterly dull and prosaic, while Congress's is pure noise! What we need is a classification system that will rise up like a symphony of human knowledge, in perfect harmony!"

I have to admit that at this point I thought Mr. Phillips was starting to sound a little crazy. Idealistic, yes, brilliant even, but just a little bit nuts. That is, until the next thing he said...

"And you, young man, are going to help me compose the perfect classification system!"

Then I thought he was totally out of his mind.

The Tech Guru

Today the Foundation's main IT guy, whom I shall call Jason, came into the library to make a presentation about databases and why they are a good idea for storing the Foundation's archival records and documents. (Yes, the Foundation itself does have computers, just not its library, in the sense that none of the library functions have been computerized. Some of the individual library employees have computers in their offices, but not, of course, Mr. Phillips, who refuses to have one of "the devil's tools" on his desk.) I don't need to tell you that Mr. Phillips was a hard sell on this idea of digital archiving.

"Preposterous!" he blurted out in the middle of Jason's presentation.

Jason just stood there for a moment, unsure how to respond. He is a younger guy, about my age, with bushy dark hair, beard, and glasses. Definitely a "geek" type, and the philosophical opposite of Walter J. Phillips in every way imaginable. Finally he said, "And how is it preposterous, Mr. Phillips?"

"Leave it to a tech guru to come up with the perfect way not to preserve documents!" [At this point I saw Jason give Monica a quizzical frown and mouth silently, 'guru?'] "Do you really think your computerized toys are going to last as long as these books? When it comes to archiving, I'll put up good old-fashioned paper against your bright and shiny gadgets any time!"

"Mr. Phillips," said Jason with patience and a hint of amusement, "it's true that paper does have many good qualities and it's a medium that has served us well for a long time. However, the truth of the matter is that paper decays--you have millions of books sitting on library shelves right now silently rotting away--whereas digital files are capable of being around indefinitely. So I would--"

"Indefinitely?!" Mr. Phillips interrupted. "That's what you tech gurus think, isn't it? You think that all your computer files are going to be around forever! Well, you mark my words, young man, I predict that all your digital files will vanish long before my books!"

"Really. And how do you figure?"

"Why, just think about it! Have you heard of peak oil?"

"Of course. It's when the global oil supply begins to decline. But what--"

"Well, computers, and all the digital files they contain, depend on electricity to keep them going, don't they?"

"Yeees..."

"So when the oil becomes more scarce and more expensive, so does the electricity, and the more costly it becomes to keep the computers up and running and the digital files alive! And when the oil runs out, there goes the power grid, and all your computers are worthless, your digital files gone forever!"

Jason chuckled. "But you're forgetting about alternative energy sources--"

"I'm sorry, but I can't entrust the future of important documents to blind optimism! When all the computers lie dead, the books will still be sitting on the shelves, just as readable as ever! Now, if you'll excuse me, I've heard enough of this nonsense. Quite frankly, to continue further would be a waste of my time and yours. Good day, Mr. ----."

Mr. Phillips left the conference room, leaving Jason, the IT guy, stunned. He looked at us and shook his head. "Unbelievable," he said with faint hilarity. "Simply un-believable."

Library Perverts

So today I asked Mr. Phillips why he chose me to be his apprentice even though I don't have an MLS. I should have known such a question would set him off.

"That is precisely why I chose you, young man," he said, "because you haven't had your mind warped by library school and the perverse doctrines that it teaches."

I couldn't help asking. "Perverse?"

"Yes, perverse! They call it Library Science! Science! Librarianship, my boy, is not a science! It is an art! That's right. The librarian is an artist, and the library his work of art. A library is one of the most complex and intricate works of art that man is capable of creating. It consists of a building or room, true, and shelves, but these are the mere frame for the painting, which consists of the books. The librarian chooses which books to include, and combines them into a harmonious whole, a veritable symphony of knowledge!"

Interesting notion, I had to admit. When I was growing up I had never thought of my local public library as a work of art. I had also never thought of the old lady who checked out my books to me as an artist. Then again, I had never thought of her as a scientist either.

"But what is even more perverse than the heresy of Library Science," continued Mr. Phillips, in full tirade mode, "is the blasphemy of Information Science! Information! To think," he protested, "that libraries can be reduced to information! It boggles the mind!"

I was afraid to confess that it wasn't perfectly obvious to me what the problem was with saying that libraries were about information, but Mr. Phillips saw the questioning look on my face.

"Really!" he said, indignant. "What kind of philistines run these schools today, to insist that libraries serve no higher purpose than the dissemination of facts and information?" [He said the word with palpable distaste.] "Libraries, young man, are about knowledge! Knowledge is not something you can 'Google'--if it were, we'd all be geniuses by now, wouldn't we?--no, it's something that you earn through hard work and diligent research, and above all, intensive reading and thought!"

I nodded. Walter J. Phillips is a rather intimidating man, and someone in my position does well to nod frequently and keep silence. Besides, I know next to nothing about librarianship, and Mr. Phillips is highly reputable in the field, if controversial. Later in the afternoon, while shelving periodicals (I'm still officially a shelver), I looked up the October 2003 issue of Libraries Today, which one of my coworkers had shown me when I first started. Mr. Phillips is featured on the cover of that issue, an authoritative scowl on his face. The caption reads, THE DOUGLAS ARTHUR FOUNDATION'S WALTER J. PHILLIPS: CONTRARIAN LIBRARIAN.

Boy, I thought. They sure got that right.

Library School

I have to say that not everyone at the library is pleased about my apprenticeship. Take Monica (as I shall call her). She is one of these oh-so-cool hipster librarians who wears black frame glasses and vintage clothes and thinks she can look down her nose at me just because she has an MLS and a superior command of the Dewey Decimal system. On Friday she saw me stamping due date cards (yes, again), and remarked that it was a mere clerical task and had nothing to do with what professional librarians do, and wondered why Mr. Phillips made me practice such a menial action so obsessively. I told her I didn't know but I trusted that Mr. Phillips, being the great librarian that he is, must have had some very good reason for making me practice due date stamping. Then she shrugged and made some comment about how it was highly unexpected that Mr. Phillips chose me to be his apprentice when I hadn't even gone to library school. She didn't come right out and say it, but I know that Monica is jealous and feels that the situation is unfair. The way I see it, though, Mr. Phillips is putting me through his own unique version of library school. I don't know why he chose me, though. I'm not one to question good fortune, but it does make me a little curious. Perhaps I'll ask him about it on Monday.

Due Dates

Today Mr. Phillips made me practice stamping due date cards, the way the librarian used to check out books to me when I was a kid. Mr. Phillips is an older gentleman, what some would call a cranky old man, and is fiercely, you might even say maniacally, conservative (not necessarily politically--I have no idea what his politics are--but certainly when it comes to librarianship). I think he has been running this place for about 30 years and he has managed to this day to prevent the intrusion of computers ("those infernal machines", as he so colorfully refers to them) into the Foundation's library. Indeed, when I first started working here last fall, I felt like I was stepping back in time, back to my childhood in the 70's when the library still had a card catalog and the librarian stamped the due date on the little due date card and stuck it in the pocket in the back of the book. Well, the electronic age has yet to arrive at the library of the Douglas Arthur Foundation, and, as long as Walter J. Phillips is in charge, the 21st century will just have to wait.

Mr. Phillips had to attend some important meeting this morning, so he delegated the actual due-date-stamping training to his second-in-command, a fiftyish woman whom I shall call Vivian. Vivian has been here almost as long as Phillips and seems his equal, if that were possible, in library conservatism, while successfully managing to embody just about every librarian stereotype you've ever heard. She wears cat-eye glasses, her brown hair is invariably pulled up in a bun, and I'm pretty sure she's unmarried. I've heard her mention her cat, but never anything about a husband or children. I once saw her shush some important members of the Foundation who were chatting in the reading room. They respectfully, if begrudgingly, complied.

Anyway, Vivian demonstrated for me the correct method of stamping due date cards. "First," she said, "you pull the card out of the pocket."

She pulled a card out of its pocket in the back of a book.

"Then you take the stamp... if it's the beginning of the day, make sure it is set to the correct due date..." [she held it up so I could see that it was set to 15 MAY 2008, two weeks from today] "...then you ink it... not too much ink, mind you. Next you stamp the card on the first empty line on the left hand side, unless that side is full, in which case you stamp it on the first empty line on the right. Now watch, this is very important... you must bring the stamp down at a 45-degree angle, like so... then roll it, gently but firmly, up then down... applying just the right amount of pressure... too little and you've left an incomplete date, too much and you've made an ungodly mess. Then you return the stamp to its holder... and lastly, return the card to the pocket, quietly close the book, and slide it discreetly to the patron. You know, of course, that libraries do not have customers, they have patrons. A library is not a business."

"Of course."

"Very good. Now here, you give it a try."

Nervously, I tried to emulate all of Vivian's moves. Every single one of her motions had displayed complete perfection and the utmost elegance, which I suppose had come with almost three decades of practice. She really has this due date stamping thing down to a science. Perhaps even an art. My first attempt was less than perfect.

"Darn," I said, careful not to swear in front of the stern Vivian.

"That's all right, it's your first time. You'll improve with practice. Here," she said, producing from a drawer a huge stack of due date cards, "why don't you go into the workroom and practice until ten o'clock."

Two hours of stamping due date cards? Well, I told myself, if this is what it takes to become a great librarian, I'm willing to put in the time. After all, great musicians don't become that way without hours of repetitive practice, right?

I've gotta tell ya, though, my hand is still sore.

Day One: The Meaning of the Word

Well, my first day as an apprentice librarian was interesting. I showed up at 8:00 in Mr. Phillips' office--and what a lovely office, by the way, with a huge wooden desk and leather chair, and the walls lined with wooden shelves filled to the brim with old books, plus stacks of books on the desk--and reported for my new duty. Phillips seemed distracted at first, looking around for something, and didn't seem to notice when I walked in. I cleared my throat and he said, "Oh, there you are,"--as though I were just the thing he had been looking for--"do have a seat, young man."

I sat nervously in a plush armchair facing his desk. I waited another minute or so as he continued to ruffle through papers and books. "Ah! There it is!" he said at last, triumphantly holding a small red volume that I had been eyeing absently ever since I sat down. "Have you ever read Virgil?"

Embarrassedly, I said, "Um... no, can't say that I have, sir."

"What? You studied literature in school and they never gave you Virgil?"

"Technically, I was an English major. Virgil, if I'm not mistaken, is Latin."

"And I suppose you never took Latin?"

"Uh... no. No, sir."

Phillips shook his head in disbelief. "I say, what do the universities teach anymore? No Greek, no Latin! How can they take themselves seriously as supposed institutions of higher education? Harvard! Yale! What jokes they have become!"

I sat silently, feeling as inadequate as ever I had, intimidated by the great librarian and his towering intellect. If he could scoff at Harvard and Yale, how pathetic must I have seemed, with my state-university bachelor's degree in English Lit?

"But none of this is your fault, my boy," said Phillips. "You are merely the victim of the laughable state to which our educational system has fallen. No one who goes to college in this day and age receives a real education. It's simply appalling. But let's move on." (I sighed with relief at that change of subject.) "So you really want to become a librarian?"

"Yes, sir. I trust that you can teach me how."

"Very well. Let's start with the fundamentals, shall we? Isn't that the way education usually works? You start with the fundamentals, and move on to the... the higher..." [he swirled his hand, trying to come up with the word] "...well, whatever. You know what I mean." He gazed at me seriously. "Do you know what the word library means?"

Was this a trick question? "Uh... well, at the very least, it's a place where there are lots of books."

"Exactly!" He sat up emphatically. "A place where there are lots of books! Not computers, not Web sites and blogs, not, God forbid,video games... but books! The word library, young man, comes from the Latin word liber. Do you know what that means?"

"Book?" I ventured.

"Precisely! The word book is at the very heart of the word library. My goodness, library basically just means the book room! Not the computer lab! Not the Internet cafe! Not the video game arcade! Not Blockbuster Video! The book room!"

I nodded, hardly daring to speak.

"Here, let me show you something." I followed Mr. Phillips out of his office, into the main reading room, and into the stacks. He pulled an old volume at random off the shelf and thrust it in my face. "Smell!"

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me! Smell it!"

I sniffed. The dust almost made me sneeze, but I caught it.

"Do you know what that smell is, young man?"

I wanted to say dust, but guessed that would have been the wrong answer. "What?"

"That," he said, "is the smell of knowledge." He held the book to his nostrils and inhaled deeply.

I never knew knowledge had a distinct aroma, but I took his word for it. He, after all, was the great librarian Walter J. Phillips.

"Look around you. Do you know where you are?"

Again, I surmised that the obvious answer was not the correct one.

"You are standing," he said, "in the Republic of Letters. Do you know who are the citizens of that noble republic?"

"Who?"

"All those who have written great books, the poets and philosophers, the novelists and playwrights, historians, scientists, political thinkers, you name it... all those who have taken part in the Great Conversation, those who have spoken their parts in the great drama of human civilization, and moved on to let others take the stage. And the library is where you come to take part, to kneel at the feet of the brightest and best minds of history, to learn from the greats! This is where education takes place, young man."

I nodded, overwhelmed by his passionate outburst.

"You see all these books? Each one of these books embodies a living person, a great man or woman who had something to say to the world, and said it! Most of them are gone, but their voices remain, recorded in the pages of these books, ready to speak to you if you only turn the page."

I stared around me at all the books on all the shelves. It was almost spooky, imagining that in each one was someone's voice, someone's mind, all waiting silently for me--for anyone--to listen. Standing dwarflike in that immense sea of knowledge, I came to feel viscerally the magnitude of my ignorance, and at the same time an awakening desire to acquire as much of that knowledge as I could. This was more exciting and more meaningful than acquiring economic wealth... there before me, as though a newly discovered country, was a whole world of intellectual riches that was free for the asking.

Mr. Phillips explained to me that librarians, being keepers of the books, should make it their business to know the books, and expressed his opinion that reading should take up a considerable amount of the librarian's time. In view of my poor education, he took sympathy and assigned me to read from the classics--in English translation--for the remainder of the day.