Athena’s Banquet

Today I

• Processed board books (checked invoices against shipped contents, added stickers)
• Processed new children’s books (fairly small shipment)
• Sorted a cart of children’s books for shelvers
• Handled reference questions

I got some fairly interesting reference questions today, actually.

• A kid came up asking for the “Jack and Annie” series, and I had to probe quite a bit to figure out that he wanted the Magic Treehouse series – I dove into the catalog too soon and wasted a bit of time faffing around before starting to ask more questions that finally got me to the right place.  I also neglected to write down the author’s name before tearing off into the stacks/back and that wasted some more time.
• I got a request to figure out what order a particular series of books was in – I believe it was the Rick Riordan series but I don’t remember for sure. In any case, the catalog was pretty useless for this particular thing, so I ended up hitting Amazon instead, which is usually pretty good at telling you up front what order a series goes in.
• And the tour de force: A woman came in saying that she’d been talking to a fellow bus rider who told her to pick up a book called “Orange Chest,” by a local author (Ballard) with red hair, and that it was a collection of recipes and vignettes.  She admitted that she might have heard the title wrong and that it could also be “Orange Zest.”  The YA librarian and I worked around these for a while – we checked the catalog, we checked Google (thoroughly unhelpful googling “orange zest recipes vignettes”, by the way), I started checking to see if Wikipedia had an article for local authors under Ballard or Seattle (nope) and started to see if I could find a list of Seattle-area food writers.  I couldn’t, and then I realized that I’ve been reading Molly Wizenberg’s Orangette for years and years, and she was a Seattle writer and by god she might even have red hair (her About page indicates that she does indeed).  And she wrote a book (A Homemade Life).  With recipes and vignettes.  And (most embarrrassing of all) I had even put myself on the hold list for it a few days ago after a friend said I reminded her of Molly and I should read it.  So I told all this to the patron (except the part about my friend) and she got really very excited, and then I told her there were 350 holds on it…but she could be 351!  She said she might also want to buy it for her daughter, so I wrote down the author and title and gave her the blog address for good measure.  Let’s hear it for external knowledge saving the day!

Things I learned today:

• Always write down author’s names and titles before charging off to find a book.
• When patrons are recounting things they heard on the bus, it’s okay to have a lax attitude to the accuracy of their hearing.  It’s also good to be a longtime food blog reader.