The Librarian at Play

The Librarian at Play by Edmund Lester Pearson

Edmund Lester Pearson's *The Librarian at Play* is a collection of humorous sketches about library life, narrated largely by a librarian (Mr. Edwards) and his colleagues, satirizing patrons, gadgets, genealogists, and literary conventions of the day. A salesman demonstrates "interest gauges," tiny liquid-filled instruments invented by Professor Dufunnie that measure a reader's true engagement with a work; the narrator tests them on Professor Frugles, Mrs. Cornelia Crumpet, and a boy named Willie, exposing gaps between people's professed and actual literary tastes. A separate essay mourns vanished stock characters of old fiction—the choleric retired colonel, the dying maiden, the learned heroine, the saintly dying child, the family ghost, the faithful old servant, the melodramatic villain, the village simpleton, and the miser—contrasting them with modern fiction's ambiguous villains and frozen-north settings. The narrator buys Martha Matilda Bunkum's gardening guide and, with his wife Jane, struggles comically to find planting instructions for sunflowers, resorting to a chaotic telephone call to the library before burying the book in disgust. A newly installed library telephone service in Baxter overwhelms assistant Pansy Patterson with absurd calls: a woman misidentifying a chicken as an exotic bird (resolved by bird-author Reginald Kookle), a math puzzle, a man confusing Peru the country with Peru, Indiana, and Mrs. Pomfret Smith's endless, fruitless attempts to identify a half-remembered novel. A fictional "Olympian Times" reports an athletic meet of literary and historical characters, featuring a lopsided football game (Achilles's team versus Hamlet's), tennis, golf between King Arthur and Macbeth, fencing between Cyrano and D'Artagnan, and a baseball game between "The Boys" and "The Old Men." A bottle found at sea contains Professor Horatio Fassett's diary describing his shipwreck and marooning with his prize-winning list of "One Hundred Best Books," which he finds increasingly useless and unreadable compared to books he actually enjoys, and eventually destroys or discards. Scholars Obadiah Wurzberger and Nicholas Jasper write outraged letters to a library board complaining of being unable to work amid frivolous, distracting patron conversations they transcribe verbatim—including teens cramming for exams, genealogists, and a woman planning a historically inaccurate pageant. Librarian Percival Gooch shows off his library's "literary-zooelogical annex," a menagerie of animals drawn from literature and nursery rhymes, from Rip Van Winkle's dog Wolf to the Jabberwock and Snark. A dream-vision depicts an afterlife where library offenders—girls who scribble in books, annotators, page-clippers, genealogists, and book-hoarding "bluffers"—suffer fitting comic punishments. A substitute librarian named Fernald endures chaotic evenings at a settlement library (Graham House), managing rowdy children, a confrontation with a troublesome boy's father, and overlapping book-exchange requests, followed by a scene of Miss Grant handling similarly overwhelming patron demands at the central library's children's room. The narrator, inspired by Mrs. Reginald Creasus's lavish gardening book, attempts to grow sweet-peas and comically misunderstands the term "mulch," getting mixed advice from acquaintances before his plants underperform. Finally, the narrator visits Percival's brother Anthony Gooch, whose private "museum" is an armory of weapons drawn entirely from literature—Laertes's poisoned rapier, Madame Defarge's pistol, Rip Van Winkle's musket, Umslopogaas's axe, Horatius's sword, and dozens more—each explained with literary allusion, ending with Gooch's plea that the narrator write about the collection seriously rather than flippantly.

By Edmund Lester Pearson · First published 1926 · Genre: Non-fiction, Humor, Biography · 14 chapters · 45,525 words

First lines

"We are thinking of calling them 'interest gauges," said the agent, "but perhaps you can suggest a better name."

I took one of the little instruments and examined it. Hardly over an inch long, with its glass tube and scale, it resembled a tiny thermometer. The figures and letters were so small that I could not make them out, though they became clear enough through a reading-glass.

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The Librarian at Play is listed on Textopian as a novel by Edmund Lester Pearson, dated 1926 CE.

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Literary Criticism · Book Reviews · Library Science · Humor · Essays · American Literature · 20th Century · Non-Fiction · Books About Books · Reading · Librarianship · Cultural Commentary

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