juni

When I was in library school ten years ago, 2016, the Boston Public Library had recently gone through a scandal, as stated in the tags, where it was believed a couple of prints by the artist Albrecht Dürer, German artist from the late 1400s and early 1500s, was stolen. This was a BIG DEAL because like, who steals from a library, but also HOW, and of course the prints were VERY VALUABLE. Also, this is also the city where 30 years ago a couple guys walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and just. Took paintings off the wall. And left. So that was still in the public memory.

After further investigation, the prints were discovered! Yay! Where were they?

In the same room they were supposed to be in.

Three shelves away.

The box they were stored in was put on a different shelf from where they were supposed to go, and when someone went to look for the box, it wasn't where it was supposed to be, and they couldn't find it, so. OBviously it was stolen.

Anyway. This whole incident revealed just how poorly the Prints & Photographs collection at the BPL was organized.

Which is to say: it wasn't.

The last person in charge of the collection was extremely interested in acquisition, but not so much in the organization and storage of said acquisitions. Which is. You know. The whole point of a library. It wasn't just him, though. There was virtually no cataloging of the collection. For decades, the prints and photographs were just kind of... put in the collection room. A very safe climate controlled room, to be sure, and (mostly) in archival folders and boxes, but apart from a few labels on shelves, and a single old card catalog that was extremely vague and out of date, the entirety of the collection's organization method was essentially "well I always put this box on this shelf here, so that's where it goes." And new things? Just went wherever there was space.

The whole "oh no the Dürers were stolen oh wait no they weren't" thing was an extremely public revelation of the horrifying state of the collection. So the BPL decided to start from the ground up and fully inventory, catalog, and appropriately organize the collection. One of my professors in the Simmons LIS program was hired to run the inventory efforts, and she hired her grad students to do it, and I was one of those grad students.

So for six ish months, I had a part time job going into a secret locked room in the depths of the BPL, picking boxes off a shelf, recording where I got the box from, what was in the box, what state those things were in, and then putting it back on the shelf.

There weren't just shelves though. A previous head of the collection was... very into circus stuff? Like... I don't know. But some of the prints were old circus advertisements and there were cardboard boxes of... idk. Circus toys and stuff. And we had to go through them, because they were part of the collection. WHY were they part of the collection? No idea. That wasn't our job. Just go through the clowns, guys. Gotta put it in the Excel spreadsheet, and then it's the cataloger's problem.

There were way more just. Random cardboard boxes. I don't really remember how many, but enough that you're like "jeez guys, this is your JOB. what the fuck are you doing." But we had to go through them, because that WAS our job.

One of these cardboard boxes had a false bottom.

Now, wait. I need to clarify. This isn't an archival box. This is a plain Jane corrugated cardboard box.

With a false. Bottom.

Why?

It was hiding letters.

Love letters.

Written to the previous head of the collection.

From woman who was not his wife.

At the time, they were both still alive, and they were both still married.

And these letters were... well. Purple prose and flowery romance and we DID do dramatic readings of a couple but not all of them. There were definitely Harlequin Romance level descriptions of intimate moments. Our supervisor very wisely made us all go back to our work and took care of the letters herself.

Did they get inventoried?

Maybe.

I honestly don't know.

But also WHAT THE HECK.

I hope BPL learned their lesson and has gotten more serious about inventorying and cataloging their stuff as a result of all of these shenanigans.

I was driving through Vermont with a friend, and we pulled over at a tiny shop offering Maple Items. We were on the state highway, not the interstate, so "pulling over" meant "squeezing my tiny car into a parking bay the size of a broad highway shoulder."

As we got out of the car, an older woman emerged from behind the building where she had been pruning her roses. She introduced herself as Tammy.

Her shop offered the promised variety of Maple, but also a number of small antiques and a plethora of dog figurines, plaques, and clearly-hand-stitched garden flags.

A huge purple ribbon hung on the wall behind the register, along with many pictures of small dogs. This was no county fair ribbon. It was the size of my torso. The material had the soft sheen of actual silk.

As I placed my purchases on the counter, I asked, "Do you... Breed dogs?"

Yes. She does. She has bred Yorkies for the last 40 years. Her mother bred Yorkies before her. The purple ribbon was from her national championship winning Yorkie.

You may be expecting that the infodump was going to be about Yorkies.

It was not.

It was about 40 years of drama in the Yorkie breeding community. Where – you must understand – the judging at shows is often about who you're in with, not about the dogs. This is especially true when Tammy's opponents win anything.

And Tammy's mother! Well. Phyllis has been on the Yorkie scene since Yorkies were invented. Because of this, many women of equally venerable age hold deep grudges against Phyllis. The sort of grudges that result in episodes of Midsommar Murders.

This led to deep injustices against Phyllis on the part of judges and prevented her dogs from winning so often she retired from the scene. Judging is all about who you're friends with, after all.

After 20 years in hiding, Phyllis – the One True Queen of Yorkie Breeding – hatched a plot. She may have been out of the show circuit, but she was still breeding dogs. She entered an absolutely perfect bitch in the national competition, but sent her with a handler rather than go in person.

None of the usurpers knew who this dog belonged to, and in dog-breeding circles this Does Not Happen. This could have resulted in further injustices, but Phyllis was crafty. She knew this tournament was being judged by a man from the UK, who knew naught of the drama in the US Yorkie Empire.

With these advantages – and being the best dog there – Phyllis's bitch won the highest honor at the show.

Incensed by this insult to their ill-gotten supremacy, the other owners descended on the handler after the show, demanding to know for whom he was working.

"Phyllis," said he.

The name of the overthrown queen evoked horror in the usurpers.

"PHYLLIS!? She's still ALIVE!???"

Yes, Phyllis yet lived, and this bitch – the dog, not the woman – went on to mother Tammy's current dogs. One of whom, Lucy-Fur, is the reincarnation of Tammy's sister (also Lucy). This is certain for two reasons.

Firstly, Sister Lucy absolutely went straight to Hell upon her death, and Lucy-Fur the dog is positively as evil as Sister Lucy was.