Discards BX 905 C425 2001 - AS 2 G36 2001

In all likelihood this is the penultimate cart of Reference Discards so I went to great lengths to find some gems. I must confess I am not in the mood to read reference works for fun this morning (most likely because I have medieval Chinese manuscripts on my mind) yet I persevered for the sake of my dear reader!

When I looked at the Gale Directory of Learning Worldwide, I was like, "Who has use for this boring thing? --certainly not me." Whoa buddy, was I wrong. Turns out a reference work like this would have been helpful when I was crafting my Fulbright application in 2011, and later when I was arranging my educational leave from. For example, can the internet give such a comprehensive list of libraries in the Netherlands as this can? Not from what my Google-Fu can tell...

I like the ditty below because its covers are like red pleather pillow cases. For reals tho, it can be fun to poke around outdated theological encyclopedias... looking to see what they have to say about the Gospel of Judas... just kidding! That bad boy wasn't discovered until well after 1979. 

Was happy (and surprised) to see an entry for Apollinaire in this Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion... are they suggesting surrealism is a religion?... lol

The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy delivered with a definition of Schrödinger's cat, etc... if you want to sound smart, just read this and intersperse its terms in daily dialog/FB posts/Twitter rants and you will see your standing rise (or others' regard for your pompousness rise).

Thanks to this little ditty, I have a new Russian author to check out... one that apparently writes on themes of China and San Francisco? This is too random to have been planned. Ivan Alexeievich Bunin (Google is trying to correct me into typing Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin... to which I say, Back off buddy!) FTW (hashtag the gentleman from san francisco) 

Last but not least (well...) I'm bringing it all home with the Dictionary of Behavioral Science... don't read this one to make yourself sound smart, just read it to get bored/fall asleep/contemplate the meaning of the classic printed Reference work. 

Nonetheless... in case you were wondering about the pleasure principle... I regret to inform you it was not first coined by Gary Numan... nor Janet Jackson!

Here's our week in discards! 

Discards CT100 C97 - BF575 G7 N38

The bulk of this week's discards are Current Biography, which we have 3 catalog records for and which were shelved in two different locations. (1940-1950 were in the Reference Annex and marked keep in Ref; 1951 - 2012 were in Reference marked for discard and to find an online version.) I took care of these descrepencies and we are discarding them all, although we have yet to secure access to an online version.

Otherwise there are a handful of theological reference works, including the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, which got cataloged and shelved in BL, but I wonder why not in the Q section? ...Ah the deep mysterious of cataloging ;-)

Discards CT 213 G37 - BX 801 C364 1981-2004

I am so close to finishing the discards I can taste it!

I am working backwards from the Zs to the As and today I made progress through the CTs up to the BXes. Nothing too sentimental or very noteworthy here (or is it that I have my focus on the study zone project and would rather be getting creative with the new signs!). The cool thing I found is some directories of archives and manuscripts repositories, which is important to remember -- they must exist in digital format now, and they will come in handy if I need to do that kind of work in the future. 

This week we discarded more of the Who's Who and biographies, and moved into the Catholic directories. 

Certified in Core Bookbinding!

My certificate of achievement for completing the Bookbinding Core Certificate Program at the San Francisco Center for the Book. I took workshops on Coptic Bookbinding (April 4, 2015), Flat-Back Case Binding (April 11, 2015), Limp Paper Binding (April 18, 2015), and Classic Rounded Back Cloth Binding (April 25 and 26, 2015).

This scan bears witness to the original artifact -- a letterpress certificate of heavy card stock, my name artfully recorded in calligraphy. A great bit of icing on the cake.