Retiring Librarian Quotes

TO ALL THE ambulance drivers firewatchers air-raid wardens nurses canteen workers airplane spotters rescue workers mathematicians vicars vergers shopgirls chorus girls librarians debutantes spinsters fishermen retired sailors servants evacuees Shakespearean actors and mystery novelists WHO WON THE WAR.

A woman spent about ten minutes looking around the shop, then told me that she was a retired librarian. I suspect she thought that this was some sort of a bond between us. Not so. On the whole, booksellers dislike librarians. To realise a good price for a book, it has to be in decent condition, and there is nothing librarians like more than taking a perfectly good book and covering it with stamps and stickers before – and with no sense of irony – putting a plastic sleeve over the dust jacket to protect it from the public. The final ignominy for a book that has been in the dubious care of a public library is for the front free endpaper to be ripped out and a ‘DISCARD’ stamp whacked firmly onto the title page, before it is finally made available for members of the public to buy in a sale. The value of a book that has been through the library system is usually less than a quarter of one that has not.

At this time on a weekday morning, the library was refuge to the retired, the unemployed, and the unemployable. ... 'I'm not always this gabby,' the librarian said. 'It's just so nice to talk to someone who isn't constructing a conspiracy theory or watching videos of home accidents on YouTube.

Miss Mountjoy! The retired Miss Mountjoy! I had heard tales about “Miss Mountjoy and the Reign of Terror.” She had been Librarian-in-Chief of the Bishop’s Lacey Free Library when Noah was a sailor. All sweetness on the outside, but on the inside, “The Palace of Malice.” Or so I’d been told. (Mrs. Mullet again, who reads detective novels.) The villagers still held novenas to pray she wouldn’t come out of retirement.

Our cook gave a short bow and retired to the servant’s quarters. “There,” Wendell said at length, once we’d eaten our way through a large percentage of the dishes, leaning his chair back as he sipped yet another cup of coffee. “Now that is the civilized way to begin retaking a kingdom.” “You would say it is the civilized way to begin any endeavor,” I said, amused. “Or a day of lazing about.” “One needs a great deal of time to laze about after one has been poisoned,” he said in a complaining tone. “Not all of us wish to go charging off to the library to terrorize librarians and scribble out three papers or more immediately after a traumatic experience.” I merely shook my head and took another piece of toast.

Prince Philip’s study in his private quarters at Wood Farm, the house on the Sandringham Estate where he spent much of his retirement years, was as minimal and uncluttered as the boardroom of a ship. His was always the leanest operation of the Palace machine, deploying only two private secretaries, an equerry, and a librarian to execute several hundred royal engagements a year. Despite his peremptory manner, he was by far the most popular member of the family to work for—“very unassuming and knows that it is not always as easy to do something as it is to ask for it be done,” as one household servant put it. In 2008, he gave his Savile Row tailor (John Kent of Norton & Sons) a fifty-one-year-old pair of trousers to be altered.

Awomen spent ten minutes looking around the shop, then told me that she was a retired librarian. I suspect she thought this was some kind of a bond between us. Not so. On the whole, booksellers dislike librarians.

Nash and her husband, Roy Stone, have worked for the Los Angeles library for a combined total of seventy-nine years. (Not long after I interviewed them, they both retired.) It was Nash’s purse that Glen Creason and Stone had been looking for immediately after the fire, when they discovered that the Patent Room had melted. Nash and Stone are library people. Besides being a senior librarian, Stone had been the head of the Librarians’ Guild for many years. He once confided to me that when he worked at a branch downtown, local drug dealers used to come to the library and ask him to help fill out their tax returns. He thought it was a perfect example of the rare role libraries play, to be a government entity, a place of knowledge, that is nonjudgmental, inclusive, and fundamentally kind.