A Post-Weird Earls Weird Earl. SDMB--1950s Style

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

No Death Rays or Deeps Sea Trenches needed!

Hilarious Questions Posed to the NYPL Pre-Internet

“If we didn’t have the Internet right now, and you were looking to find out information on the migratory patterns of blue birds, you couldn’t just go to a computer and ask,” says Morgan Holzer, New York Public Library’s Information Architect. “You had to find an encyclopedia, which were expensive, so you would go to your library. And if you were at the library and didn’t want to find an encyclopedia, there’s a person standing right there who you could just ask and who had been trained to either give you an answer or tell you where to find an answer.”

And sometimes those librarians in the general research division—who are responsible for fielding all sorts of inquiries, either over the phone or in person—wrote down the questions they were asked.

When they heard one they hadn’t heard before, that was a little weird or a little funny, they might write it down," Holzer says. “Or if it was a hard one that they might have to ask someone later on or couldn’t answer right away, they would write it down.” Recently, the Library stumbled upon a box of some of these old reference questions, with dates ranging from the 1940s to 1983 (and a particular concentration of questions from the '40s and '60s).