#badass librarians

Let’s hear it for badass librarians!

I have worked at a Public Library for about for years now, and I know that it is stranger than you think.

The Children’s Librarian/Union Steward is a licensed concealed carry.  She is married to a cop/military veteran.  She once got in trouble with her dojo for defeating the black-belts in the sparring ring (she was in the taekwondo contest circuit for a while) because it was ‘bad for their self-esteem’ or something.  Her name is VERY close to being ‘Angel of Justice’, and that is a fact.

The man who works at the reference desk is a military veteran, and I’m told that he’s not allowed to talk about some of the stuff he saw.

One of our LA’s is in the National Guard.

    I have worked at this library for almost four years.  I have seen known drug-dealers counting out suspicious amounts of money behind the stacks.  I have helped children find books while their mother cried into the phone about how ‘he never acted this way before’.  I have climbed over ruble and past the caution-tape to find books for patrons.  I have created the first lines of defense against floods.  I have walked through snowy winds across ice-covered roads to get to work on time.

      My co-workers tell of stranger things.  I have been told stories of the Spelunking Club who claimed they were allowed to climb our garden wall because ‘the people at the Downtown Library said so’.  I have heard legends of the Last Page Allowed to Work Full-Time Hours: He Who Has The Highest Seniority Ranking In The Librarian’s Union.  And I wonder why the boiler room always needs maintenance, and why they really poke around in the ceiling.

I have worked at the Library for four years, and I can tell you that it is safe.  The ladies who work at the desk are very kind, and they will tell you about their grandbabies if you like.  The garden is a very nice place to read, but you’re not supposed to climb the wall.  There haven’t been any known drug-dealers in here since before the LA started taking advantage of the change in local Open Carry laws.  The renovations are complete; they fixed the flooding and the shelves are accessible again.

I saw this on the bookshelf at work, and just… what an awesome title!

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer

To save precious centuries-old Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians in Timbuktu pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven.

In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that had fallen into obscurity. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world’s greatest and most brazen smugglers…