The Good, the Bad and the History (The Chronicles of St Mary's, #14)

by Jodi Taylor

I began by developing the traditional Oppressed Librarian Shuffle. That’s Library 101. The next step was to overload the book trolley’s top shelf until it tips over as soon as you try to wheel it away. Once that’s mastered, you can move on to overloading the entire trolley. You heave it around the Library, adding more and more books as you go and complaining loudly about your back. Library staff who don’t have bad backs aren’t doing their job properly. Of course, you could easily take just half the books, shelve them and then come back for the second batch, but that’s not the Library Way. Then there’s the never being able to access the top shelf because you’re not tall enough and can’t find the elephant’s foot manoeuvre. There’s supposed to be a foot in each bay but there never is. Anyway, the correct procedure is to stand on one of the lower shelves and clamber up like a monkey, book clenched in your teeth. And before Health and Safety people begin to fibrillate, you don’t always bring the bookcase down on top of yourself so stop complaining. The whole manoeuvre is stylishly completed by returning to ground level and falling over the elephant’s foot, which turns out to have been hiding behind you the whole time. Colleagues will then mark your dismount for artistic content and technical difficulty.

The truth!

There’s something very satisfying about shelving books. Making sure the whole bay is perfect before moving on to the next. And then scowling at the bunch of feckless wastrels – or historians as they like to call themselves – as they burst into the Library and TOUCH THE BOOKS. AGAIN. Which, apparently, is something that is allowed to happen. Whereas glaring at any and all potential readers is not. It strikes me the world of librarianism needs a little rethinking.

More truths