Friday, November 06, 2009

Strangest library woe to date

On the binding, the book is the one I need about Albert Memmi. Inside, it is what I'm guessing is a totally unrelated book, in Turkish, seemingly about the late Middle Ages. I'm almost surprised things like this don't happen more often.

3 comments:

Matt said...

Often libraries take books and re-bind them. This is especially common when the get a paper-back: they'll cut the covers and spine off, bind it in a hard back, and glue the covers to that (or some variation on this.) This might be how the mess-up happened. I'd almost have a desire to look up the book making up the insides of the book you wanted and see if the book you wanted isn't suck inside the skin of that one. (Of course, it might well be some other sort of screw up.)

Withywindle said...

Perhaps it is a book about Unknown Horrors, from a Long Gone Age, With Tentacles?

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Matt,

I remember the binding world vaguely from my days (well, closer to a year) shelving at UChicago, but had never seen an error of this kind. And I did immediately go look if the Turkish book's binding contained the book I was looking for and... no book with that call number was to be found, nor was there another copy of the one I was looking for. Hmm.