Exploit your local (academic) library

Sea turtle, Columbus Zoo. One of his flippers was partially amputated, probably by a motorboat when he was in the wild, bless him.

I find it hard to spin when I am depressed, and right now I am depressed. Well, I'm always depressed, that's why they call it "depression," but you know what I mean. So no actual spinning, but while at work today I explored the Ohio academic library consortium's (OhioLINK) catalog for books on spinning, and found a goldmine.

I've only begun to scratch the surface, having learned my lesson with library books and my slow reading speed, a problem of relatively recent vintage. No point in having these sent from hither and yon, with a short loan period, only to return them unread. I picked three likely titles:

Innovative spinning : Penguin Quill, by Dee Hight. This was published in the 70s by a company in Boulder, CO. Was this company the forerunner of Interweave? I wonder.

Fashioning fabric : the arts of spinning and weaving in early Canada by Adrienne D. Hood.

Methods of hand spinning in Egypt and Sudan by Grace M. Crowfoot, which seems to be published with Hand woolcombing by H. Ling Roth. I'm really intrigued by this one.

These are all old books, and there were only one or two copies of any of them in Ohio's academic libraries. If they were ever in the public libraries, they have likely vanished by now--either stolen, or destroyed through use, or scythed from the collection due to the misguided policies of New Modern Librarianship, whose hollow, self-reinforcing mantra "The library is not an archive!" has been used to excuse egregious cuts in the diversity and depth of public (and, increasingly, academic) library collections all over the United States.

But I digress--but not really, no, I don't digress. Fight back! Protect your public library collection's diversity, breadth, and depth!

Ahem.

At any rate, I look forward to receiving these, which should start happening sometime next week. There are a lot more books on spinning and knitting in OhioLINK, too! If you're an Ohio resident and have memberships with the Cuyahoga County Public Library or Westerville Library systems, or if you attend or work for a college or university in Ohio, you can take advantage of OhioLINK too. If not, your public library may be able to use interlibrary loan to bring you books that are rare, hard to find, or just not owned by your library system.