fish posting
fishposting x2
More you might like
Before the internet, librarians were the gatekeeper of knowledge. For your reading pleasure, the New York Public Library released a cache of queries and conundrums called in from the 1940s to the 1980s.
The thing you have to understand about cards like this, that I think is not obvious from the original post, is WHY librarians did this. Because for every question like this there were a hundred that were perfectly answerable, and to save the process of looking up that answer the next time, librarians would record and file the question and answer. These were the original FAQs! And then every time someone called and asked for the height of the Empire State Building or when is the president’s birthday or what have you, it’s right there on a card and you don’t have to dig through reference books to find it.
I know it is my father's first time on this Earth, too. And I know He had it worse when he was little.
But I was little too.
— Franz Kafka, from letters to his father
Monks in a monastery courtyard,
Storm over a Lake in the Background (1856)
Oil on canvas.
โ Franz Ludwig Catel (German, 1778-1856)