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Book: This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
Quotes of Book: This Book Is Overdue!: How
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  1. Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How

    Whole chapters of contemporary history are disappearing into the ether as e-mails get trashed and webpages are taken down and people die without sharing their passwords.
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  2. Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How

    I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children-and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast-or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps.
    book-quotelibrariesobituaries

  3. Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How

    I regretted my human form briefly; it would be so much easier to drag and rope information into the brain as neatly as one dragged and dropped information on the computer. Perhaps I was suffering from a touch of information sickness? If I could weed out my thoughts...There was one reliable cure I've found, a bit of the hair of the dog--the release in reading. Not a manual: something with a narrative, a chute built by a writer and waxed until the reader fell into it and skittered right to the end without stopping. The relief of being in someone else's hands. Yes, exactly: I needed to be under a spell....it didn't matter who I was, or what I did, or where I paid taxes, or how long I stayed. I'm sure it didn't matter if the book had RFID tags or a checkout card with a ladder of scrawled names, though tags were neat. I knew the librarians would help me figure out anything I needed to know later--I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or in this case, guardians of my peace.They were the authors of this opportunity--diversion from the economy and distraction from snow, protectors of the bubble of concentration I'd found in the maddening world. And I knew they wouldn't disturb me until closing time.
    book-quotereadingpeace

  4. Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How

    A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a "true reflection of our history," whether it's a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the organizer, the animating spirit behind it, and the navigator. Her job is to create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future.
    book-quotelibrarieslibrarylibrarians

  5. Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How

    Writers seldom just stop writing. We're like serial killers in that way. You have to stop us, because we cannot stop ourselves.
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  6. Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How

    I understood-I thought I understood-then things changed, or I learned the next thing that made everything I knew before obsolete.
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  7. Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How

    We were bleeding information from the nose and ears, though dazed and disoriented was not how I experienced it. Most of the time, I felt like I was three years old, high on chocolate cake and social networks, constantly wired, ingesting information and news about information, books and books about books, data and metadata-I was, in other words, overstimulated yet gluttonous for more.
    book-quotetechnology

  8. Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How

    One of the reasons I decided to enter this profession," one of the Riot Librarrrians wrote, "was because I'm in love with information, and the library remains one of the few spaces in our lives where information is not a commodity.... There's a subversive element to librarianship that I adore.
    book-quotelibraryservice

  9. Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How

    Though I loved the wired world, the new-wave librarians, the avatars and activists, I turned into a dinosaur in that library. I couldn't help it; I was an old-fashioned writer who loved the ancient books summoned via pneumatic tubes, the archives, the quiet. I had found something rare there: an inexhaustible wonder.
    book-quotelibrarywonder

  10. Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How

    So where does one go in such a wobbly, elusive, dynamic, confusing age? Wherever the librarians and archivists are. They're sorting it all out for us.
    book-quotelibrarianslibrarianlibrarianship

  11. Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How

    Librarians' values are as sound as Girl Scouts': truth, free speech, and universal literacy. And, like Scouts, they possess a quality that I think makes librarians invaluable and indispensable: they want to . They want to help . They want to be of service. And they're not trying to sell us anything.
    book-quotelibrarianslibrarianship

  12. Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How

    Who knows how many people are invisible because their stories don't fit our categories?
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