Sunday 22 October 2017

Stamp Collection






Would make an excellent shirt pocket.














Hex Enduction Hour, anyone?








The joy of ex-library books.  Don't forget to click on these to enlarge; they deserve viewing big.  Should appeal to fans of collage, accidental art and early Fall record sleeves.

14 comments:

  1. love it.

    Do you remember when you went to the library and there was this odd little box thing that the librarian would put the book under - open to that first page with the little folder thingy for a docket to put in - and there'd be a soft flash which i guess was it taking some kind of low quality photo or xerox-type copy as a record of who took the book out and when... now when did they stop using those then? i guess the bar code system took over at some point. the older machines looked really clunky and there was something vaguely... medical about them.

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    1. Hmm, I can picture something along those lines but I think I'm assembling rather than remembering.

      When would this have been, roughly?

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  2. Replies
    1. I have to know now. I've asked some librarian pals, will report back.

      Delete
  3. i tried googling various combinations of words but got nothing. one of those everyday-life basic background fucntioanl things / procedures / machines that no one bothered to document maybe. and why would they? they were pretty clunky ungainly looking and had zero aesthetic appeal. but because i was down the Berkhamsted library three times a week it's a vivid childhood and teen memory - the bespectacled librarian shuttling my choices under this sort of white plastic funnel and this dull light beaming onto the books.

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    1. This is pressing all my "thrillingly mundane-but-mysterious" buttons. Think of all the activity that led up to the installation of those machines, the unheard of jobs involved in maintaining them etc.

      Anyway, I found this discussion with all sorts of interesting memories of various library checkout methods, including a fair bit of discussion re the photo method:

      http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=558711

      which led to this pdf which not only describes the process but names some commonly used machines:

      https://ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/5693/librarytrendsv5i2h_opt.pdf?sequence=1

      Searching for images now...

      Delete
  4. Here we go, courtesy of a couple of regulars on the Fall Online Forum:

    http://andersforskar.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/fotomekanisk-utlaning.html

    Note the funnel shapes. Would they be the ones?

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  5. I don't remember anything so hi-tech in the library from when I was small. I think we just got a stamp.

    Thank you muchly for both this post and the subsequent comments by the way - absolutely wonderful.

    The "Western Plains Library System" one is my favourite. Perfect readymade album cover.

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  6. (Now to rename myself Bruno Schulz and record future collector's holy grail "Sanitorium Under The Sign of the H"...)

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  7. Ha! Do it!

    Incidentally, you've reminded me of a dream I had where I visited a mountain-top music library. While riffling through the racks I found a 12" EP by The Fall featuring the tracks "Innovation Management" and "Hampshire County Council".

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  8. yeah the descriptions of machines that use microfilm sound plausible. Or this persons's description - "remember the checkout librarian putting both the main card from the book (which had the due date stamped on it) and your library card onto a tray with some kind of camera mounted overhead, and touching a button. The tray/camera device lit up, and made a sound resembling "eee-DURRRRRR-eee". I saw this system in the 1970s and 1980s." The eee-DURRRRRR-eee sound rings a bell!

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  9. And then on the Andersforskar blog, that machine does look pretty close to what i remember - the pic with librarian in her glasses and boring top certainly has a memoradelic charge for me

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  10. triffic internet detective work BTW

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  11. Turns out I had a picture of one of the old ones on my Flickr all this time:

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/bollops/8529996634/in/album-72157632944636449/

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