Unwarranted generalizations
I helped out Lotte a little this week at her temp job at the library outsourcing firm.
I was doing utterly mindless work: unpacking books and putting a barcode, stamp, and slip identifying the box of origin of each one. Unfortunately, like my man Scott, I can't stop thinking. The books are from the Boston Public Library's Jordan collection of children's books, and are in quite a babel of languages. In one-and-a-half days of work, I've processed books in French, Spanish, Portugese, Estonian, Hebrew, Farsi, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, German, and Polish. Patterns emerge, but whether they're indicators of national character or just characteristics of the eccentric sampling at hand is never clear.
- The Italian picture books have consistently exciting and stylish graphic design.
- The German ones are contrastingly stodgy.
- The Portugese sex ed picture book (translated from the Dutch) is much racier than the Hebrew one, which shows a stork bringing a baby at one point near the beginning.
- Barbie is apparently a single mother. The party line seems to be that Kelly's her "little sister." Who she's raising alone-yeah, right. Does Dan Quayle know about this?
- Lotte finds processing the Arabic and Hebrew books intensely discomfiting. Once you've gotten a rhythm going putting the sticker in back and the stamp in front, having "front" and "back" suddenly reversed can be disorienting.
- What the library intends its patrons to do with a (mostly) blank diary is beyond me.