November 28, 2004

• What an interesting list, thank you. I'd never have guessed Dante in the top five.
• #18 Garfield. WTF!
• I would be interested to know if their membership is primarily academic, or if they include many public libraries as well (which would explain the choice of Garfield, but also make me happy that so many classics are being purchased and held).
• Includes public libraries.
• 148
• Garfield, Doonesbury, The Far Side, Calvin & Hobbes... these are the new classics. Thank God. Pleasing juxtaposition #1: Lord of the Rings (#10) coming one place above Beowulf. Pleasing juxtaposition #2: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (#256) coming one place above the Constitution of the United States. Pleasing juxtaposition #3: Franz Kafka's Castle (#538) coming one place above The Power of Positive Thinking. Also, The Firm at 518 with Clear And Present Danger only at 686 - Clancy's gonna be pissed.
• So... who's gonna do the cross checking to see how many "banned" books made it onto the list?
• Capt. Pikachu: they did.
• Oh, as they mention, it's surprising that Stephen King didn't make their list. But Grisham is all over it. Which is disappointing. I mean, I'm no King fanboy or anything, but he's a helluva better writer than Grisham. But, I'd bet a hundred years from now King's books will be found in libraries when Grisham's won't. I was embarassed to realize that I had not read all the fiction works in their top 100. Whoops.
• Far be it from me to relish stabbing my favorite medium in the back, but aren't the cartoons cheating? Something is funny. Whenever they show up, it's as the name of the cartoon, not the name of a particular volume or collection. There's like fifty different Garfield books and Peanuts may have three or four times as many.
• Seems the key-word is titles; doesn't specify what sort of titles, book, CD, cartoon, whatever.
• I hate this list. For obvious reasons.
• Because I worked 5+ years answering a ready-reference hotline at a public library, maybe I'm a little biased (and also missing something): Where's the World Almanac, and the first reference type book I see doesn't clock in until #86, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. I thought every library had the World Almanac and the World Book Encyclopedia. Even with the internet, we could find a lot of stuff quicker in those two sources.
• Anyone else love the fact that Fahrenheit 451 is on the list of banned books?
• Garfield? The world deserves itself, doesn't it.
• And I'm sorry, but there's no way "Dianetics" should rank higher than "Curious George." WTF, indeed. I've never been so blusteringly mad in my life!
• Seems the key-word is titles; doesn't specify what sort of titles, book, CD, cartoon, whatever. Authority titles. It's safe to assume that the vast, vast majority of a library's holdings will be books. Catalogs do not differentiate between cartoon books and text books. If one examines a result, i.e. "Garfield," you will find a little doohickey that says "Bibliographic records." In the case of Garfield, there are 91 and in the case of Huck Finn, 1,093. Each record describes a different edition of a work or bibliographic entity. My guess would be that Garfield-the-comic-strip is interpreted as a serial and that each individual strip is a part of a larger work. This'd be analagous to serials or bound journals. That Huck Finn has 1,093 bibliographic records indicates that the OCLC member libraries have collected that number of different editions. Or something like that. One night I got blasted off Kris Kristofferson and Old Crow and forgot everything I learned in cataloging.
• A fact you must consider,is that many books ending up on the shelves of our public libraries, are donated from private collections and therefore these statistics may very well represent the previous generations popular taste.
• I don't seem to remember the olde-timey Garfield-book tradition.