Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
comic strip overdue media

Tuesday, September 23, 2003

Wired News | Dewey Decimal Owner Sues 'Library' Hotel

Wired News | Dewey Decimal Owner Sues 'Library' Hotel

The Curmudgeony Librarian passed that story along, as well as his discovery that the hotel didn't get its numbers right, and he got them dead to rights. Hello! It runs from 000 to 999. I mean, I realise they don't apparently start their guest rooms until the 3rd floor, but whay start with the 300s and...circle around, giving the 000s, 100s, and 200s totally new numbers. Like, I could undertand if Parnormal was in any way related to its rightful 130s...the 1st floor, or the 4th (if you started the 000s on the third). Why not just make things thematic without worrying about floor corresondences. You could line the dining rooms walls with cookbooks. You can still have your erotica package. Why start with the 300s, for pete's sake? Why take a concept from a system and muck with it? Librarians will twitch everywhere. We are born, not made! We will defend the canon! Well, okay, maybe we're freaks of nature, but messing with the DDC is not negotiable. Oooh....I hope Melvil haunts them. It's like in the comic book Epicurus the Sage where Plato and his cronies creep up behind Pythogoras and his followers and start shouting random numbers during their chants. 'Unclean numbers! Unclean numbers!' Maybe they should have gone with Library of Congress classification. At least that would have been in the public domain, although the letters would probably make their brains hurt.