I don't like the sound of all the lists he's making.
I have thousands of tapes, and photos and fliers, letters, posters, artwork - basically everything that ever happened, I kept. I'm not a hoarder, though. I'm sort of a librarian.
Librarians are awesome; I don't care who knows it.
The old man was peering intently at the shelves. 'I'll have to admit that he's a very competent scholar.' Isn't he just a librarian?' Garion asked, 'somebody who looks after books?' That's where all the rest of scholarship starts, Garion. All the books in the world won't help you if they're just piled up in a heap.
What I try to do - and I think this is the former librarian in me - is to get primary source material.
[Librarians] study their field with as much determination and as much delight as open-heart surgeons.
I was a librarian.
I'm a librarian, not an oracle.
There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.
I was a librarian in a city school.
I'm not a library.
The argument we always used to use was that keeping records in the catalog was good for people that were coming new to the music, but I think that was talking over a ten year or fifteen year time span.
The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All round its cramped margins lies the gulf.
When I was a postdoc, I jotted every fresh thought on a three-by-five card and kept them in a card catalogue.
The book must of necessity be put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, must be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!
Typically, booksellers like to put things into neat little categories.
In the last century, I earned my living as a librarian, and I loved it. I'd have to take some classes to get up to speed with 21st-century librarianship.
I used to make up names when I used to catalog my stuff.
Item numbers have existed from time immemorial.
But my motivation was more a matter of wanting to create order - to keep track of things. All those boxes full of photographs and sketches weigh you down, because they have something unfinished, incomplete, about them. So it's better to present the usable material in an orderly fashion and throw the other stuff away. That's how the Atlas came to be, and I exhibited it a few times.
Collecting is my passion.
Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for.
I guess I always have been a collector.
The library world is set up on this model where the library is a physical building and has a number of books and serves a geographical community.
I think I've always had an obsession with collecting, as most people do.
