Leisure reading

This isn't directly related to LS560, but I thought the timing was interesting.

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The book store that I work for occasionally, Book Soup, is an independent store in West Hollywood, and I've been working there for almost six years. Many of the books that fill the shelves have recommendations written by staff members, and I've written my fair share. One of my briefest recs is for The name of the rose by Umberto Eco, which simply says that it is my favorite book ever. I realize that that's not the most informative description, but it's true, and it seems to sell a fairly steady stream of copies. While I was in Alabama for orientation, a woman came into the store, saw the recommendation, and gave the cashier her contact information to pass on to me, to see if I would be interested in doing a book club for The name of the rose. I'm not much of a book club person, but I've been meaning to reread it, and thought, what the heck.
I started reading it a couple of days ago and was struck by how relevant it is to my latest educational endeavor. The book tells the story of William of Baskerville's visit to an unspecified monastery in 1327, where monks are dying and mystery shrouds an ancient codex. The monastery has a magnificent library whose organization is so obscure that only the librarian knows where books are. William asks the abbot about access to the books, and the abbot describes it in this way:

Only the librarian has, in addition to that knowledge, the right to move through the labyrinth of the books, he alone knows where to find them and where to replace them, he alone is responsible for their safekeeping....only the librarian knows, from the collocation of the volume, from its degree of inaccessibility, what secrets, what truths or falsehoods, the volume contains. Only he decides how, when, and whether to give it to the monk who requests it; sometimes he first consults me. Because not all truths are for all ears, not all falsehoods can be recognized as such by a pious soul; and the monks, finally, are in the scriptorium to carry out a precise task, which requires them to read certain volumes and not others, and not to pursue every foolish curiosity that seizes them, whether through weakness of intellect or through pride or through diabolical prompting.

 What a delightful interpretation of the librarian's role! I'm mostly being sarcastic. I enjoy the idea of the librarian as arbiter of knowledge, though of course it's no longer practical. In the 14th century there were obviously far fewer scholars, and those that existed were working within a much narrower intellectual framework than today's scholars. I must confess that there are times when I look at the scholars at the Huntington with suspicion, wondering if they're worthy of the materials to which they have access. I like to think that I'm slightly more open-minded than this fictional 14th century abbot, but this may be something I need to work on.

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The Huntington doesn't have any photographs of Book Soup that I've found, but we do have photographs of Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, which purchased Book Soup in 2009 after the death of our owner. Vroman's opened in 1894, and in 2008 was named the Publishers Weekly Bookseller of the Year.