4 ms·
I used to borrow the books which had "to be disposed if not lent in the next 3 months" slip in them. Never regretted reading them. The best one included a very
by ggm 3mo ago
I used to borrow the books which had "to be disposed if not lent in the next 3 months" slip in them. Never regretted reading them. The best one included a very odd short story by Flann OBrien about a carpenter who walls himself inside the oak panelling of a build he is working on, and a woman convinced Sago farming will cure Ireland's famine.
- kreelman 3mo agoThis site is vaguely addictive in a dopamine feeding sense. What will the next image be? ...One more click won't hurt... :-)
- ggm 3mo ago200 clicks later... I often find myself drowning in things like the Qld state library photo archives of the suburbs of Brisbane. They name street junctions which still exist, you pull up a modern photo in google maps, you look at the old one with Trams and wooden houses.. And another..
- defrost 3mo agoNi bheidh ar leitheidi aris ann. A line much abused in Myles na gCopaleen's (aka Brian O'Nolan's, aka Flann O'Brien's) An Béal Bocht (trans: The Poor Mouth)(1947) It translates as "Our likes will not be there again." and is originally from An toileánach (1929) - https://archive.org/details/toileanach0000ocro https://archive.org/details/toileanach0000ocro about remote island life.
- tclancy 3mo agoI’m not sure what’s happening in this thread, but so happy to see Myles mentioned on HN. Every time I post one of De Selby’s research papers, it gets downvoted to oblivion for some reason.
- ggm 3mo agoThere's two kinds of dark suckers. you've met the second kind. It's always saddened me I've been to Dublin 3 times and never made it to Dalkey. I want to pay a courtesy caul..
- osullish 3mo agoDalkey is lovely, i used live there for a few years, but couldn't afford to buy a house there. Great to see Flann O'Brien in the comments - an under appreciated genius
- inopinatus 3mo agoMy gateway drug was The Third Policeman, as read aloud by Patrick Magee on the wireless in 1986, a feat all the more remarkable for a man that was, quite appropriately, dead at the time.
- selimthegrim 3mo agoPity that they couldn't get him to read the latest audiobook release in the US.
- cloud8421 3mo agoStruggling to find the carpenter’s story, do you remember the title by any chance? Thanks!
- NoboruWataya 3mo agoA surprise to see Flann O'Brien pop up in the comments. While we're here, I will say that At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman are fantastic books, I highly recommend them.
- robin_reala 3mo agoThere’s something about resurrecting underloved media, isn’t there? I recently did a Catherine Louisa Pirkis collection[1] for Standard Ebooks; most of her stories had scans on archive.org / Hathi that I could use, but “Trooping with Crows”[2] was only available from the British Library as a physical copy. We paid for it to be scanned and I’ve uploaded those to archive.org now.[3] I’d be surprised if anyone had read it in the last decade, if not longer, yet it’s a perfectly good Victorian genre romance with a strong lead. [1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/catherine-louisa-pirkis/short-fiction https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/catherine-louisa-pirkis/sh... [2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/catherine-louisa-pirkis/short-fiction/text/trooping-with-crows https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/catherine-louisa-pirkis/sh... [3] https://archive.org/details/12641-cc-26-001 https://archive.org/details/12641-cc-26-001
- xnorswap 3mo agoI understand the romantic appeal of discovering "abandoned" books and forgotten ideas. However I suspect my reaction to your anecdote is very different to the one that most people might have, because I think that behaviour is harmful to the library. ( A very minor harm, but a harm nonetheless. ) They have identified books that people don't borrow, and have made it clear they want to get rid of them. That's to benefit the library, catalogue and storage isn't free and endless. So they have a signal that no-one is borrowing these books, and they can replace it with books that do get borrowed. Along you come and interrupt that signal, in a way that doesn't have underlying desire to borrow that book. So the clock gets reset, and so it goes. In software development terms, imagine you develop a product with a number of features with a public API, and telemetry points that a feature goes unused. You want to clean up the code so you mark some endpoints as deprecated and list that in your change log. Now imagine there's a developer who looks at the changelog for deprecation warnings, then goes out their way to develop apps that call them. "Unloved books" might seem more romantic than un-called API endpoints, but the library needs to rotate and refresh to stay healthy. If you want unloved books, then pick them up for next to nothing from the sale outside the library, most libraries will practically give away books they've rotated out, and you're actually doing them a favour "disposing" of them while likely giving them a token amount of money for it.
- Cthulhu_ 3mo agoIf the library wanted to get rid of them, they would've quietly removed the books; I suspect they want people to read them before they're removed, hence the "please give this book a chance" marker. A deprecation marker is a "this will be removed"; these markers are "this will be removed if nobody reads them even with this marker in them".
- gcr 3mo agoReframing this point: Some good books aren’t borrowed because they’re not discoverable, not because they’re boring. The library is highlighting a few titles for increased visibility to ask, “would this pique a reader’s interest if they knew about it, or is this generally bad?” Without this stage, the library would expunge more genuinely interesting titles. I’ve always kinda felt the role of a library is for recall rather than precision
- coldpie 3mo ago> Never regretted reading them Interesting! I'm surprised to hear you've had that experience. I pick out books at the library largely by the cover & back blurb, not by whether they're popular or well reviewed or whatever. And to be honest, I've picked out a lot of crap this way, where I turn it back in after just a chapter or two. I suspect that frequency of being checked out & popularity/well-reviewed-ness are correlated. So I also suspect (admittedly without evidence) that my algorithm of picking somewhat randomly means I pick out books that are not popular with some frequency, and I've definitely regretted many of my choices. So it's surprising to me that you haven't had any that were terrible.
- eudamoniac 3mo agoI have around 1200 ebooks in Calibre; around 300 I downloaded on purpose and the rest came in large batches. I have these two groups separated out. I'm pretty sure I've never read one from the batch group that was close to good. The vast majority of books are crap and if you pick at random you're going to pick crap. Most of my batch books are from Standard Ebooks which, while a noble project, has a serious addiction to publishing dreck no one should waste time reading.
- coldpie 3mo agoYeah I suspect ebooks are even more dire as they have neither the curation of a publisher putting money into physical production; or the curation of a librarian with limited shelf space.
- robin_reala 3mo agoSE just publishes stuff that volunteers want to work on. There’s no master plan beyond the collections policy: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/collections-policy https://standardebooks.org/contribute/collections-policy
- eudamoniac 3mo agoWell it turns out that the volunteers have bad taste I'm afraid
- mhb 3mo agoSounds similar to the aspiration of randomly picking an out-of-the way restaurant in hopes that you are going to discover a great little hole-in-the-wall. Needless to say, I suspect any lack of regret in either case might be attributable to cognitive biases.