Meet the Apprentice

I shall call myself Curtis, though that is not necessarily my real name. I am 35, single, and find myself at this stage of life to be curiously ambitionless. That is all you need to know about me. The purpose of this journal is to document my apprenticeship to the great librarian Walter J. Phillips, which begins tomorrow morning at eight o'clock. Mr. Phillips works in the library of the Douglas Arthur Foundation here in Saint Louis. I have a couple of friends who are librarians, and they are always telling me I should go to library school (since I am an otherwise unemployable English major who has worked a chain of lowly library-clerk and bookstore jobs for paltry pay and even less esteem), so I know that apprenticeship is not the usual route to becoming a librarian these days. But one of these librarian friends recently informed me of an opening for a book shelver at the Foundation, and Mr. Phillips hired me during the first (and only) interview. Don't ask me why. He is a brilliant but eccentric man. This was about six months ago. I have enjoyed working at the Foundation very much. It is so quiet and civilized, quite unlike some of the public libraries I have worked in.

Well, last week, I was surprised when Mr. Phillips, a very busy and important man who had hardly spoken to me, indeed who I had barely seen, since starting the job, called me into his office and made me a very unexpected and unusual offer. He asked me if I had an interest in becoming a librarian, and I assured him that yes, I did, only I hadn't gotten around to attending library school just yet. Then he told me that library school was really quite unnecessary and asked me if I would be interested in being his apprentice. At first I didn't know what to say. The word "apprentice" only made me think of Mickey Mouse and Donald Trump. No doubt sensing my confusion, Mr. Phillips proceeded to tell me that in the past, up until librarianship became professionalized sometime in the 19th century, librarians learned by apprenticeship, and that he was all for the older ways and such, library school being, in his opinion, almost as much of a joke as business school. He said all they taught you in library school these days was computers, and that computers had nothing to do with libraries, and so forth. The gist of it was that I was offered the opportunity to be the apprentice to Walter J. Phillips, and I willingly accepted.

Tomorrow I will let you know how the first day goes.