A Teach Me How To Dewey production

This Is How We Dewey:

• 390 Customs, etiquette, folklore
• 391 Costume & personal appearance
• 392 Customs of life cycle & domestic life
• 393 Death customs
• 394 General customs
• 395 Etiquette (Manners)
• 396 No longer used—formerly Women’s position and treatment
• 397 No longer used—formerly outcast studies
• 398 Folklore
• 399 Customs of war & diplomacy

This section is a bit of a grab-bag. I suppose customs, etiquette, and folklore fit together under the broad category of culture, but on the shelves this looks like that one drawer in the kitchen where you throw all that miscellaneous crap that doesn’t have a standard space, like rubber bands and capless pens and scrap paper. Not at all discounting the value of these topics—because how could we live without Emily Post telling us how to behave?!—but clearly some sections are better synthesized and meant to be than others. But that’s why we love Dewey, right? There’s a reason for everything (theoretically… we hope…) so we best try to understand why.

Or these books just needed to be somewhere.

The Dew3:

Breakfast: A History
By Heather Arndt
Dewey: 394.1252
Random Sentence: “For those wanting even less human contact for their meal, there were the automats.”

Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?: A Modern Guide to Manners
By Henry Alford
Dewey: 395
Random Sentence: “I have benign hand tumors, so don’t worry.”

Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folktales From the Gulf States
By Zora Neale Hurston
Dewey: 398.208996073
Random Sentence: “Tom told his wife, ‘Tell God I’m not here.’”