Library as a Resource

[bendk]

Our library system was recently taken down by hackers or malware. It was unusable over the internet for weeks. It made me reflect on how much I value our library system. I don't know if all systems are the same or make use of the same resources. I am going to list some of the ways I benefit from our library. If you know of other benefits, please weigh-in.

I use it mostly to reserve books and movies and have them sent to my local library, or to the main library's drive-thru window for easy pick-up. For in-demand items - usually new movies - you can place a reserve and you will be notified by e-mail when your item is available.

For items not available in our local system, you can search through the state's system. (my state is Ohio). If a book or movie is anywhere in the state, you can request an interlibrary loan. I use this a lot. There used to be a time when you could access the entire country's library system. That was before Republicans put cost-cutting measures in place. I can understand that. Although it would be nice if you could maybe request one or two items a year in the entire system. I use this mainly for expensive books or for books that I may want to read a little and determine if I want to purchase them. But I do sometimes request a difficult to find DVD.

Our main library also has a 400-seat movie theater that plays a free movie every Thursday night at 6 PM. I've gone three times so far. One was a newer movie that attracted too many people. It was like a madhouse with kids running up and down the aisles, so I left. Lesson learned. But the other two times I went were very enjoyable. I saw The Island of Lost Souls (1932) and just recently Them! (1954) There were only a dozen people in attendance. It is a wonderful experience to see these older films on the big screen. They also use this auditorium for special guests. I attended a lecture by two Kent State professors when they released their biography of the author Jim Tully. It was informative and entertaining. Tully grew up dirt poor, rode the rails, joined the circus, was a professional boxer, and ended up writing some books and as a screenwriter in Hollywood. I bought a signed copy after the presentation and got to briefly talk to the authors. I know I asked them about William Lindsay Gresham, but other than some information on Nightmare Alley, I can't recall the conversation. (I was very ill at the time. I just got released from the hospital and I promised myself that if I got out in time to go to this lecture, I would. I did, but barely maintained consciousness.)




Jim Tully - Wikipedia


About a year ago, I got an e-mail stating that Temple Grandin was going to appear. They advised patrons to place a reservation. Like a dope, I waited until the next day and it was already completely "sold out". I admire her a great deal. She deals with autism (my younger sister is prominent in this field and has her own podcast) but my main interest is that she designs humane slaughterhouses. (a horrible juxtaposition of words). Basically, she structured them so the animals never see it coming. She wanted to eliminate the fear response. I wanted to ask her about her work in that field. That was a missed opportunity that I regret.

Our Main Library has the entire collection of Gale Research books where TL used to work. Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, and Contemporary Literary Criticism. You can see his influence in these volumes. Lovecraft has two large entries in TCLC, the first in Volume 4! A case could be made that Ligotti played a not insignificant role in helping Lovecraft gain traction as a legitimate author, not just a genre author. To put things in perspective, Volume 4 was published in 1981. S.T. Joshi had only published a couple of books on Lovecraft at the time.





Our main library also has a bookstore which offers books, audiobooks, and DVDs at very low prices. I used to visit this quite regularly. I've only gone a couple times in recent years, but I did pick up a really nice book on old English political cartoons recently. You never know what you're going to find. That's always fun. You can also donate books. I do this all the time. Even expensive books. I'm sure other bibliophiles will be excited to find them.

My library offers the digital services of Hoopla and Kanopy. Both allow so many borrows per month. For Kanopy - a movie streaming service - you are allowed 10 movies/documentaries a month. That's more than enough for me. And they have a tremendous selection. Just recently, I watched The Triangle of Sadness. This is a great movie. It recently won the Palme d'Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. I've been waiting for this to show up on Netflix or Hulu. How they got ahold of it is amazing. Hoopla is also a wonderful service that offers a limited number of borrows per month. Hoopla has comics, movies, eBooks, audiobooks, etc. The number of movies they have is inferior to Kanopy, but some of their selection is different and hard to find. They have Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde ( an old favorite of mine, mainly because of Martine Beswick) and they have Mandy with Nicholas Cage. Their comic and audiobook selections are tremendous. I use it a lot.

You can also put in a request to purchase materials. I have only done this twice, and it was ages ago. I requested they purchase two DVDs. One was Transcendent Man, a biography of Ray Kurzweil. The other was Your Inner Fish by the paleontologist Neil Shubin. (Both are now available on YouTube. I think I requested them before streaming was even possible)

Some of the materials that I have gotten recently:

Several books from the series : Gothic Literary Studies
https://www.ligotti.net/showthread.p...othic+literary
Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900 by Frederick C. Beiser
Feeling of Wrongness : Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture by by Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman
The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely by Anthony Vidler

What services do you use at your library? Have you gotten anything interesting lately?

[Acutely decayed]

Judge a culture on how well it treats it’s librarians

[evenfall]

I am using the same Ohio library system as you (through SearchOhio). I usually try to find titles that are unavailable elsewhere or unaffordable and are not at archive.org where many libraries publish their scans (your first book is on there).

Some of the titles I borrowed recently:

Vampires Are by Stephen Kaplan (Amazon price $987.77)
Moons, Myths and Man by H.S. Bellamy (Amazon price $1,397.95) - this one is on the Internet Archive but the scan is really poor quality.

[cannibal cop]

The library where I grew up had a fantastic, extensive Children's Section that occupied most of its second or third floor, and in retrospect it seems that around that time (the mid to late '70s) there was an incredible abundance of artistically and imaginatively striking works available for younger readers that featured fine examples of macabre and scary storytelling, as well as providing intriguing introductions to the worlds of classical mythology, folklore, and the occult. The books and stories I discovered there rarely if ever spoke down to me as a younger reader, or tried to temper their often grim revelations through the addition of forced levity or unconvincing happy endings.

With an almost sinister frankness well-suited to their frequently stark and forbidding visual presentations, they dealt more often than not in examples of terrible or terrifying fates befalling mostly ordinary people who had done nothing to deserve them (or at least certainly nothing quite so awful), and it now occurs to me all these years later that that's as fine a summation of the essence of Horror as I can come up with, and all those wonderful "children's books" provided as perfect an education in that subject as could be hoped for.

It would be fair to say that as a very young, burgeoning reader I found some of those stories disturbing, but in being disturbed I was also intrigued, and was driven to read more and, more importantly, to become a better reader in an effort to understand better what I was reading, to make some sense out of those stories and all the strange terrors they held. It's also probably fair to say that if I had grown up ten years later, around the era of Goosebumps and all the other sterile, PTA-approved "kid-friendly spooks" that eventually displaced the older, more mature and confronting works of my early reading years, my interest in both reading and the process of learning to read would have been reduced significantly, and possibly never even have been stimulated in the first place.

That same library also carried a great collection of horror and related material in the adult section, including a broad selection of anthologies from presses large and small. That's where I came across, for instance, the beautiful Whispers edition of Robert Bloch's Strange Eons, which basically served as my linked introduction to Lovecraftian horror and the world of the specialty press. But even when I moved away there was still a time at the beginning of the '90s when I found it easy to make great discoveries even at small suburban library branches, like rare ScreamPress volumes and a first edition of Robert Aickman's Tales of Love and Death.

In addition I should point out how important library booksales always were to me as a cheap way to accumulate a wide variety of reading material, with the very occasional stunning deal to be found if you kept looking, like my signed copy of Bradbury's Long After Midnight. Or the paperback of Nigel Kneale's Tomato Cain I picked up literally for a dime.

[bendk]

Quote Originally Posted by cannibal cop

In addition I should point out how important library booksales always were to me as a cheap way to accumulate a wide variety of reading material, with the very occasional stunning deal to be found if you kept looking, like my signed copy of Bradbury's Long After Midnight. Or the paperback of Nigel Kneale's Tomato Cain I picked up literally for a dime.

Occasionally a branch library will have a sale. Years ago, all the branches would organize a sale once or twice a year at our local shopping mall. It was great for a while. You could get a ton of nice books for next to nothing. (One year I got the entire series of Man, Myth, & Magic for $20). But it got busier and busier over the years. And people are nuts. They push and shove and leap over the tables. I stopped going. You get a little disillusioned when you see someone elbowed in the throat for a copy of Swann's Way.



An additional service our library system provides is they hold computer classes. I have yet to attend any of these, though.

They also take suggestions on how to improve their services. I suggested they allow patrons to schedule time with a tech tutor. (Something like the Geek Squad from Best Buy). And they did list that as a new service.

Another thing pertaining to the Gale Research books, the criticism they compiled can sometimes be very interesting as they often highlight notable people. For instance, Heidegger gives his thoughts on George Trakl. (his critique was a little convoluted, but you get the idea)

[Ironrose]

"One year I got the entire series of Man, Myth, & Magic for $20"

Wow. And I thought I'd really scored when I got them for $60 from a bookstore in 1994. The woman wanted $100 for them but let me have them for sixty because "there are two volumes missing." I took a glance at them and saw the number 24 had an index and knew she was mistaken. But I didn't say anything.

[bendk]

Quote Originally Posted by Ironrose

"One year I got the entire series of Man, Myth, & Magic for $20" Wow. And I thought I'd really scored when I got them for $60 from a bookstore in 1994. The woman wanted $100 for them but let me have them for sixty because "there are two volumes missing." I took a glance at them and saw the number 24 had an index and knew she was mistaken. But I didn't say anything.

That's still a good price. I loved those books. Unfortunately, I lost them all when my storage unit was foreclosed on when I was in a coma in the hospital. Bummer.

[bendk]

I'm still trying to learn about my library's resources. I found out that they also provide Indieflix. (Their selection of classic films is extensive.)
"Indieflix is a global streaming service that offers thousands of classic movies, independent films, series, and documentaries from around the world. It also supports social impact films that aim to create positive change in society."

Some recent DVDs I got through our interlibrary loan system:

The Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor
The Amusement Park directed by George A. Romero
Jodorowsky's Dune documentary by Frank Pavich
Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. documentary by Erroll Morris

They were all good, although Kantor strikes me as a little too serious and self-important. Jodorowsky's Dune was fantastic.

Jodorowskys Dune | Official Trailer HD (2014) - YouTube

[bendk]

Have any of you experienced this problem: a new book comes out and it is not in your immediate library system. But, upon checking, it is in your extended interlibrary system. There are multiple copies available, but when you request it, it says " NOT REQUESTABLE". This has happened several times lately. The first time was for Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio : a timeless tale told anew written by Gina McIntrye. I sent an e-mail to my library asking them why it was not requestable. They never responded. Instead, they ordered a copy and placed it on reserve for me. That was nice of them. The second instance was for John Kenn Mortensen's Night Terror. This time when I inquired, I stated that I was not requesting that they purchase it, I just wanted to know why it wasn't requestable. Again, no reply. They ordered four copies and reserved one for me. I don't want my library catering to my wants. I don't think they should squander their limited resources that way.(I am happy to see that all four volumes are currently checked out with still one on reserve).

In both cases, I wanted to peruse the book before determining whether or not to purchase it. While I enjoyed both books, I probably won't buy either as they aren't exactly cheap. This is the main reason I like interlibrary loans.

Here are a couple of images from Mortensen's book:






There is a book flip through video on YouTube for the Pinocchio book.

Currently I have one interlibrary loan book out: T.E.D. Klein and the Rupture of Civilization : a study in critical horror / Thomas Phillips. There are about a half a dozen Ligotti mentions, And, surprisingly, four pages devoted to Laird Barron's story "More Dark." I may buy this book, or at least copy some pages from it.

[Zaharoff]

Envious of your library and resources.
Four years ago, our then-new director discontinued ILL, saying it was not cost effective.
Next allowed homeless to camp night night and day outside the main doors. The director also looked the other way at the increase in urination, defecation, and ejaculation in the stacks. Also permitted adults to begin prowling the childrens section - forever taboo before.
If any staff voiced discontent, they were advised they should quit.
Needless to say, patron traffic plunged and senior librarians moved on.
The director has now departed, and City Hall has sold the building at a fraction of its value five years earlier.
Point is, your library is only as good as its director. Any time your have a change, keep an eye on the newcomer, lest you become like ours. A string of branch locations with no one at the helm.