One of the ways you realize you are officially an adult is when you find you are old enough to have the following encounter: A couple of months ago, at my father-in-law's 64th birthday party, we decided that in honor of the occasion we should play the Beatles' "When I'm 64." So I went to the stereo and started digging through the huge pile of LPs, looking for the Sgt. Pepper album. My two nephews, 4 and 7 years of age, looked on, and as I removed the disk from its crumbling paper sleeve and placed it on the turntable, they watched in puzzlement, asking, "what's that?"
Today I had a conversation with three co-workers in which we reminisced fondly about the smell of freshly mimeographed worksheets we used to get in school, still damp from the machine. Our nostalgia turned to bemused chagrin when we realized that no schoolchild these days would have any idea what we were talking about. Yes, we are officially "old."
Ever wondered how those ditto machines worked? Wonder no more! The conversation got me curious, so I did a bit of searching and found the following, from the
The spirit duplicator, which was introduced in 1923 and which was widely used for several decades, evolved from the hektograph and Ditto machines described above. The best-known spirit duplicator company was Ditto, Inc. The Ditto process involved the creation of masters and the transfer of ink from masters to copies. A Ditto carbon consisted of a sheet of slick, impermeable paper (the master) attached to the front of a second sheet that had on its face a coating of paste-like ink. When one typed or drew on the front of the master, a reverse image in heavy ink was transferred to the back side of the master. The master was then detached from the second sheet and attached to the drum of a rotary press with the inked surface outward. When the drum was rotated, the inked surface of the master was wiped with a solvent such as spirit ether to wet the ink, and until the ink was exhausted impressions were made on papers that were fed under the drum.
I guess the solvent explains the sniffing phenomenon!
Came across that description of librarians in while catching up on my backlog of College and Research Library News magazines, which have been piling up on my desk for more months than I care to admit. I finally have a worthy candidate to replace "Thwart not the librarian" in my e-mail sig file.
Incidentally, the quote happened to come from a comic drawn by the person who was, in large part, responsible for me joining the library and archives profession, Kappa Waugh. She was my supervisor at my very first library job, which was a work-study position in the inter-library loan office at the Vassar College library. I hadn't really thought much about her in years, but when I became a member of ACRL a year or so ago, I started getting this news magazine, and I noticed that every issue featured a funny comic. It turns out those comics are drawn by my old boss, K. Waugh. I suppose that illustrates (pun intended) why she was the kind of person who turned me on to librarianship, even though my job was actually pretty boring.
In case anyone cares, the old sig file quote, "Thwart not the librarian," comes from Erica Olsen, who runs the Librarian Avengers web site. I'll be sad to see it go, but sig files, like all other information, must eventually be assimilated by the all-powerful Borg Google.
Another thought: Maybe some day I'll actually be able to come up with a pithy quote for my sig file instead of plagiarizing from more witty people.
P.S. Confidential to mom: Happy birthday!
Tonight is the first night of Chanukah. Chanukah is actually a very minor holiday on the Jewish calendar, in terms of religious significance. It celebrates a military victory that isn't even mentioned in the canonical Bible (it's in the texts known as the apocrypha). In the last century, especially in the United States, Chanukah's importance has grown due to its proximity to Christmas. In a country where Christmas is so aggressively celebrated, both at spiritual and secular levels, it is not surprising that Christmas-inspired traditions, such as holiday decorations and gift-giving, have become de riguer in many a Jewish household.
Lots of people know that Chanukah celebrates the victory of the Jews, led by a small group of warriors known as the Maccabees, over the tyranical Greeks. What a lot of people don't know is that the war was not just with the Greeks. It was also a war with Jews who had assimilated to Greek culture. Isn't it ironic that a holiday marking a victory against assimilation has itself become the most assimilated holiday on the Jewish calendar?