"I'm used to our spending good money on rubbish for our Reference Library but they sometimes surprise even me. I was talking to one of our Bibs. Team when they said: 'have you seen this?'
"It was a new reference book. A set of navigation tables. Page after page of tables for them as need to navigate the briny sea by nothing more than the stars and a sexton. And no guide as to how to use them. And a handy fall-out-and-lose bit of paper listing the locations of the key astronomical points of reference used in the tables.
"It's a comfort to know that should anybody find themselves lost without their sat-nav on the M62 they can come into our reference library and find out precisely where they are."
And a postscript:
"I tell a lie: we don't have a set of navigation tables. We have two sets of navigation tables."
4 comments:
Maybe they're taking the threat of global warming seroiusly.
Gadjo: that would be the most charitable explanation for something I found on the cataloguing shelf.
The ones which crack Cow up is where those 'fall-out-and-lose' parts are the most essential parts of the book, such as the translation key.
As for the reference books, once it's been bought, it will be in the system forever being re-ordered automatically until the publisher goes out of business or the library does.
Moo!
Uncanny: it is the same the whole world over!
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