{"id":558,"date":"2006-05-15T23:01:18","date_gmt":"2006-05-15T23:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=558"},"modified":"2006-05-15T23:01:18","modified_gmt":"2006-05-15T23:01:18","slug":"whats_at_your_library","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2006\/05\/15\/whats_at_your_library\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s at Your Library?"},"content":{"rendered":"

To kick off Book Week here at Simple Tricks and Nonsense, here is an item<\/a> I’ve been meaning to blog about for some time but haven’t gotten around to yet. (My apologies if you’ve already seen it somewhere.) It’s a list of the top 1000 titles owned by libraries as determined by an organization called the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a network of some 53,000 libraries around the world. According to the intro copy, the list — which is updated annually — comprises “the intellectual works that have been judged to be worth owning by the ‘purchase vote’ of libraries around the globe.”<\/p>\n

As you can probably imagine, the list includes all the usual canonical titles that you think of when you hear the word “classics,” but there are some surprises. One of them appears right in the top 20, which I’ve reproduced below the fold. (Hint: I’m talking about number 15…)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The Bible<\/li>\n
  2. United States Government Census<\/li>\n
  3. Mother Goose<\/li>\n
  4. The Divine Comedy<\/i>, Dante Alighieri<\/li>\n
  5. The Odyssey<\/i>, Homer<\/li>\n
  6. The Iliad<\/i>, Homer<\/li>\n
  7. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/i>, Mark Twain<\/li>\n
  8. The Lord of the Rings<\/i>, J. R. R. Tolkien<\/li>\n
  9. Hamlet<\/i>, William Shakespeare<\/li>\n
  10. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland<\/i>, Lewis Carroll<\/li>\n
  11. Don Quixote<\/i>, Miguel de Cervantes<\/li>\n
  12. Beowulf<\/i><\/li>\n
  13. The Koran<\/li>\n
  14. The Night Before Christmas<\/i>, Clement Clarke Moore<\/li>\n
  15. Garfield at Large<\/i>, Jim Davis<\/li>\n
  16. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer<\/i>, Mark Twain<\/li>\n
  17. Aesop’s Fables<\/li>\n
  18. 1,001 Arabian Nights<\/li>\n
  19. Macbeth<\/i>, William Shakespeare<\/li>\n
  20. Gulliver’s Travels<\/i>, Jonathan Swift<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Garfield at Large<\/i>? On the same list as MacBeth<\/i> and The Odyssey<\/i>? Now, I’m no snob… I’m glad that the list isn’t entirely composed of the dusty old tomes that are annually forced on unwilling high-school students. But Garfield at Large<\/i>? Really? No kidding? Garfield at<\/i>-fracking- Large<\/i>? That whirring sound you can hear is the spinning of my head.<\/p>\n

    I’ll cop to the fact that I do own a copy of this particular title, and I’ll even go so far as to say that this collection of comic strips, the first of the approximately 89,422 Garfield books that have been pumped out of Davis’ sweatshops over the past 25 years, was actually pretty funny in its time. That’s a complement that’s been very hard to pay to anything Garfield-related for a very long time. Even if this fat-ass, lasagna-gulping cartoon cat hadn’t been mercilessly overmarketed during the ’80s and early ’90s, and even if the strip wasn’t so cynically and transparently designed to appeal to the broadest possible audience by never, ever taking risks, the formula was squeezed utterly and completely dry by 1985 or so. How many variations can you do a four or five themes before they cease to be variations at all? And how soon before that is all possible humor drained out of the final product and all you’ve got is just one more day in the pathetic, boring lives of a morbidly obese cat, a mentally challenged dog, and their clinically depressed human? But the very first Garfield book, at least, had some laughs in it, at least as best as I can recall. (I haven’t actually opened the book since I was about 14.) Nevertheless, including it on this particular list raises a number of questions:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Of all the cartoon strips in all the newspapers in all the world, how is it that Garfield<\/i> is the one that has achieved sufficient popularity to rank alongside the great works of Western literature in the top library holdings? I always assumed Peanuts<\/i> was pretty much the gold standard for comic strips, so if the #15 slot was going to go to a cartoon, why not a Snoopy book? Is Garfield really the pinnacle of the cartoonist’s craft?<\/li>\n
    2. Considering that the list is compiled based on purchases made during a particular year, we can assume that a helluva lot of copies of this particular Garfield book were bought by libraries during 2005. Why this one title instead of one of the other titles in this never-ending series? Is it because librarians know that the first one is really the only funny one? Is it because all those vintage first-edition copies spontaneously disintegrated in the past year after decades of service? Was there was an unreported rash of nostalgia-fueled thefts?<\/li>\n
    3. And finally: By what stretch of the imagination can a Garfield book be considered an “intellectual work?”<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      To kick off Book Week here at Simple Tricks and Nonsense, here is an item I’ve been meaning to blog about for some time but haven’t gotten around to yet. (My apologies if you’ve already seen it somewhere.) It’s a list of the top 1000 titles owned by libraries as determined by an organization called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-bookshelf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}