A "book train"??!!

Oooh, I want one!

Someone I know has just put up a picture of the "book train" at the New York Public Library and I have train envy...again. 

I like trains. I have like trains since I was very small kitten. I had one of my very own once. It was a clockwork Hornby. It was green. Mum must have welcomed that present almost as much as I did. It kept me occupied for hours.

But this train, the one in the library? It is there for transporting books from one place to another of course. I think there may have been another one at the Bodleian before they moved so much material to what a friend describes as "Elsewhere" - a storage facility at Swindon. There might be similar "trains" in other libraries I suppose.

It would certainly save some work. 

When I began my law degree we were taken into the Law Library and shown around. As a curious little cat I had already ventured in and prowled around...and felt overwhelmed. It was on three levels, all of them groaning under the weight of books, much of them sets of law reports dating. Some of the material in them dated back to the fourteenth century.  (On one occasion we had to trace a case back as far as we could. Most of the students gave up sometime in the 1800's. My late friend C.... and I went back to one in the fourteenth century. It was written in Latin. I used it as an example when tutoring first year students later in my career.)

We would be given reading lists. They were often long. We were expected to do them before the lecture. I know some of the younger students never opened a book. They relied on the lecturer to cover all the necessary material. We "mature age" students - anyone over the age of twenty-six - took it a bit more seriously. We read...and read... and read again. We took great piles of books from the shelves, looked up the case in the reading list and read it. There was the joke about needing to do a degree in weight lifting before you did your law degree. The piles would be returned to big "return" trolleys. They were emptied several times a day. It was heavy work.

I am sure the staff responsible for returning the books to the correct shelves would have welcomed a book train.