Well, we weren't exactly
inundated with responses to last week's teaser -- surprisingly, we thought,
since the author of the quoted reminiscence is one of the official Triumvirate
of Famous Librarians. No, not Mao Tse-Tung or even Casanova, but the poet Philip
Larkin, who spent most of his working life as an academic librarian, latterly at
the University of Hull. The quotation comes from the short essay "Single-handed
and untrained," which you can find either in Larkin's Required writing: Miscellaneous pieces,
1955-1982 (University of Michigan Press, 1999), or in the collection
Long overdue: A library reader
(Library Association Publishing, 1993) edited by Alan
Taylor.
No new teaser this week,
because whaddya know, whoda thunkit, etc., but today's entry is our hundredth,
and in time-honored
tradition, we're celebrating by saluting all the "hundreds" in the DDC.
There's class 100 Philosophy &
psychology itself, of course. There's the Hundred Days of 1815 (March
20 - June 28), in standing room at 944.05
Period of First Empire, 1804-1815. We've got the Nineteen hundreds
(Decade) indexed at T1—09041
1900-1919, and again in World history at 909.821 1900-1919. Sure enough, the Twenty
hundreds (Decade) are also there at T1—090511
2000-2009. The LC subject heading Hundredth Day of School is mapped
to 372.18 Student activities--Elementary
education. (According to LC's authority record, "many schools in the
United States and Canada celebrate the 100th day of school with educational and
recreational activities involving number 100.") And finally, there's the Hundred
Years' War, which (as any fule kno)
actually lasted 116 years (1337-1453) and therefore doesn't count. For the
record, it approximates the whole of 944.025
Period of House of Valois, 1328-1589. Don't worry: the next time
we'll be doing anything like this again will be for our thousandth entry --
sometime in 2009.
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