The Story: This book, shockingly, did not get discovered while weeding. We hadn't gotten to that section yet. No, no. We discovered this book because someone checked it out. I'll let that sink in for a moment as you take a look at the age and condition of this title.
So, somebody saw this haggard old thing with yellowed, brittle pages, a strong rotten-book smell, and a gross misunderstanding of the word, "modern", and said, "Yes, this is the book for me.". I'm sure at one point in its life, namely 1934 when it was published, this book would have been considered modern. Now, however, anything whose published date starts with "19-anything", cannot rightly use the word "modern" to describe it.
What is more strange about this book still existing and actually being checked out is the fact that someone wanted to convey the message that they enjoyed it, so they wrote "good book" multiple times on it in barely disguised handwriting all from the same person throughout the front matter (a couple examples pictured above). Like this glowing review is going to save this book from being ditched the second a librarian lays eyes on it.
As you can see, the book is in horrendous shape. The pages are so yellow that they're brown, practically the same color as a wooden desk.
Aside from the one check-out which alerted staff to this book's existence, the thing hadn't been checked out at all since we moved away from stamping books in the late '90s. What gets me is that at some point, someone had to add a barcode to this thing and create a digital record for it. Nobody ever paused to think, "Maybe this title's not worth it."
1934, the year our library officially opened in its present building location, is the copyright date of this book.
Surprisingly, it has one color plate illustration in it, which I'm sure was very advanced technology for the time.
All condition notes aside, take a gander at the actual poems, intended for children, and their accompanying pictures. These poems are not even in an actual language, though bearing minimal resemblance to English, and by today's standards are horribly racist. For instance, the poem above teaches children to call a person from Italy a Dago, which is a racial slur. From the point of an Italian, they got mad when someone called them a Dago, but then accepted it and called the name-caller something back. In this case, they called an Irish person a Mc (pronounced "Mick", but characterized in this poem as "Meeck" because they're making fun of the Italian speaker's accent), which is another racial slur. The previous poem compares the music and marching of a white band and a colored band marching down the street, basically saying that the white people play music better but the black people dance better and make it more fun. Not all pictures of black people in old books are necessarily offensive caricatures, and it's hard to say if this one is originally intended to be, or if it was an accurate representation of what it looked like at the time, the black band in a parade, but it likely would not fly in the present political climate.
And here we have a final illustration of both the awful physical condition of the book, and the bizarre nature of the poems themselves. I mean, who writes a poem about a dog who breaks his leg or a mouse being chased out of its home? They're just weird.
The Lesson: You'll find bad books when you least expect it, and patrons will sometimes amaze you with what they choose to borrow. No resources for this post, as no amount of library literature will prepare you for the quirky-at-best books you'll discover in an old collection. I've found a number of truly terrible books in my time, and I'm trying to do a better job of documenting them for my own amusement and hopefully that of my fellow librarians.
