Tag: books
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DDC 080-089: Paging Carrot Top
A Teach Me How To Dewey production The Rundown: In case you don’t remember (or have tried to forget) (a) payphones, (b) the “comedian” Carrot Top, or (3) the AT&T “Collect” commercials featuring Carrot Top and payphones, let me enlighten you. (Warning: this video might give you unwanted flashbacks to Carrot Top and the early…
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DDC 070-079: Carryin’ the banner
A Teach Me How To Dewey production The Rundown: 070 Journalism, and newspapers 071 Newspapers in North America 072 Newspapers in British Isles; in England 073 Newspapers in central Europe; in Germany 074 Newspapers in France & Monaco 075 Newspapers in Italy & adjacent islands 076 Newspapers in Iberian Peninsula & adjacent islands 077 Newspapers…
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DDC 060-069: Museum’s Rules
A Teach Me How To Dewey production The Rundown: 060 General organizations & museology 061 Organizations in North America 062 Organizations in British Isles; in England 063 Organizations in central Europe; in Germany 064 Organizations in France & Monaco 065 Organizations in Italy & adjacent islands 066 Organizations in Iberian Peninsula & adjacent islands 067…
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DDC 050-059: Killer serials
A Teach Me How To Dewey production The Rundown: 050 General serials & their Indexes 051 Serials in American English 052 Serials in English 053 Serials in other Germanic languages 054 Serials in French, Occitan & Catalan 055 Serials in Italian, Romanian & related languages 056 Serials in Spanish & Portuguese 057 Serials in Slavic…
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DDC 040-049: The Abyss
A Teach Me How To Dewey production The Rundown: Darkness. Emptiness. Eternally nothing. This is the first and only unassigned ten-spot in all of Dewey. It used to be the home of Biographies, but most libraries separate biographies into their own section, leaving this vacant lot to the weeds. Of course, on the shelves the…
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DDC 030-039: Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the 030s
A Teach Me How To Dewey production The Rundown: 030 General encyclopedia works 031 Encyclopedias in American English 032 Encyclopedias in English 033 Encyclopedias in German 034 Encyclopedias in French, Occitan & Catalan 035 Encyclopedias in Italian, Romanian & related languages 036 Encyclopedias in Spanish & Portuguese 037 Encyclopedias in Slavic languages 038 Encyclopedias in…
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DDC 020-029: Meta-Dewey
A Teach Me How To Dewey production The Rundown: We’re getting meta up in here. I suppose it’s fitting that the section on libraries should be towards the beginning. Imagine how much this section has changed from Melvil Dewey’s time until now. I wonder how blown his mind would be by the Internet and online…
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DDC 010-019: Books, man…
A Teach Me How To Dewey production The Rundown: Ohhhhh yeaaahhhh… Pure, unadulterated book crack. This is where things start to get good. Book lovers don’t have to go far to get their fix in Dewey. Bibliographies of all stripes serenade perusers of the stacks like the Sirens in The Odyssey, each its own rabbit…
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DDC 001-009: You’re wrong about aliens and books
A Teach Me How To Dewey production We’re really doing it, buddies! Teach Me How To Dewey (aka the Dewey Domination System, aka Operation Climb Mountain Dewey) is in effect, library card at the ready to check out some sweet books, and maybe a movie or two if we’re feeling lucky. Generally, each post that…
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This Is How We Dewey: A Primer
A Teach Me How To Dewey production Ready for the Snapchat summary of Dewey? Here it goes: The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) organizes library material in a numerical hierarchy by field of study. Each one has its own 100-level placement, called a class: Each class has its own 10 subdivisions, which have their own subsections,…
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The Ballad Of X
Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: “It would be nice if people were to understand that science is a special exercise in perceiving the world without metaphor, and that, powerful though it is, it doesn’t function as a guide to those very large aspects of experience that can’t be perceived except through metaphor.” Wendell Berry, Life Is A Miracle: “If…
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Dorothy Day and the Noah Way
A passage early on in Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own popped out when I first read it and stuck with me as I watched Darren Aronofsky’s remarkable Noah. Elie’s book chronicles the intersecting lives and spiritual journeys of four influential Catholic writers: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery…
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The Word Exchange
Warning: Here be minor spoilers. I collect cool words. It started with Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition: words like calumny, bugbear, abstemious, and postprandial popped out as I read that great history of Prohibition a few years ago, and I wanted to remember them, so I wrote them down. I’ve done that…
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Math Is A Wonderful Thing
I don’t know whether it’s due to some paucity in my education, a natural curiosity, or a sort of intellectual masochism (or all three), but I’ve occasionally sought out books about topics that often don’t agree with my brain yet still fascinate me. Being free from the shackles of syllabus reading (however instructional and edifying…
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Now Is The Time
I’d like to thank two like-minded quotes for not leaving my conscience alone. I’m not thankful in the happy Thanksgiving sense—more like how someone keeps fighting an argument, if only with himself, though he already knows he’s toast. Fine, I give in, but I’m not happy about it. The first is from John Wesley’s “Sermon…
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iLibrary: Resistance Is Futile
If a library doesn’t have books, does it cease to be a library? The coming of BiblioTech, a new Apple Store computer lab bookless library in San Antonio, the first in the nation, begs the question. It has also brought with it rhetorical musings on whether the future of libraries is already here, and whether…
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Seeing In Black And White
Rod Dreher recently wrote about Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson’s comments about, essentially, how happy he believed Black Southerners were in the 1950s before the civil rights movement. To Dreher, Robertson’s comments demonstrate the power of narrative, of the stories we tell ourselves and how they affect how we see the “truth” of our own situations, even when…