New York Public Library - Peculiar Questions and Practical Answers: A Little Book of Whimsy and Wisdom from the Files of the New York Public Library

The New York Public Librarys mission is to provide free access to information and resources. Generations of students, job seekers, scholars, and a curious public have come to the Librarys ninety-two branches, including four research centers across three boroughs (Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island) to access NYPLs vast collections and to take advantage of its librarians expertise.

The questions posed in this volume are selected from a cache of those written on file cards between the 1940s and the late 1980s, as far as we can tell from the dates on each card. When the staff of the Library discovered them a few years ago in a small gray file box, they inspired awe, laughter, and, most importantly, the box provided a snapshot of the interests of people coming into the Library. Some clearly reflect the times and particular concerns of the day while others could just as well be asked of NYPLor Googletoday.

Since The New York Public Library opened its doors in 1895, its librarians have been greeted with an unending stream of questions. The people of New York Cityand beyondhave a voracious appetite for knowledge and, for more than a hundred years, the Library is where they have come for answers. In the 1920s, staff provided instructions on how to shear camels and directed patrons to prints illustrating fourteenth-century corsets. In 1956, a schoolteacher phoned to learn the signatories to the 1888 Suez Treaty. The Librarys highly trained staff has even sought an answer to what makes mud stick together.

Providing these answers can be a time-consuming endeavor. To meet growing demand, the Library started the Telephone Reference service in 1968. This later became Ask NYPL with email service added in 1996. In September 1999 the Library developed a website that would allow online visitors to, submit questions to librarians via an online form [and] browse and search through the archive of questions and answers. Ask NYPL staff developed its own question software with Ask Librarians Online, on November 6, 2000.

Currently, the service is administered principally by a dedicated staff of twelve (with modest assistance from librarians throughout NYPL). A chat service is staffed by NYPL librarians Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. These chats are generally brief and the questions asked are usually of a directional or referral nature. In July 2017, the Library transitioned to platforms that allowed the team to also answer questions via Twitter and Facebook.

Despite the myriad ways, online and off, that exist today to search for answers and guidance, the Librarys resources are more popular than ever.

We have not found any books that dramatize the lowly bedbug. Bedbugs, though traumatic to many who encounter them, are rather undramatic insects. They quietly drink blood, leaving itchy bites on their victims, but are not known to transmit or spread disease. They are certain to make one uneasy though. One would like to think that, in Melvilles Moby-Dick, Ishmael and Queequeg take turns harpooning bedbugs, but as we know, they turned their attention to a certain whale.

As with any job, you need to have the right skills to apply (e.g., know how to swim, and how to coax oysters to cough up pearls) and a good rsum. Connections help as well! While we cant offer swimming or shucking lessons, NYPLs Career Center should be able to help find employers, write a rsum, and make industry connections.

Since the sixteenth century, men could consult The Book of the Courtier by Count Baldassare Castiglione to polish their manners and perfect their charms. For todays aspiring gentleman, perhaps M. Marshalls Charm School for Guys!: How to Lose the Fugly and Get Some Snugly (2007) could be of use.

Yes, but they require a lot of work and you better keep a tight lid on their tank. Octopuses are excellent escape artists. A good place to start your research is The Octopus News Magazine Online (https:// www.tonmo.com ). Want to learn more about these creatures in general? You can find books about octopuses at your local library under the Dewey number 594.56.

We did not find a source that described in terms of horsepower all energy expended by machinery during the Second World War. One study that we found that may help you calculate a figure is The Mineral Industry of the British Empire and Foreign Countries, Statistical Summary 19411947, published by the Imperial Institute, in 1949. According to this, during the course of the war, the Allied powers produced about 4,581,400,000 metric tons of coal, and the Axis powers about 2,629,900,000, and the Allies about 1,043,000,000 metric tons of crude oil and the Axis about 66,000,000.

We cant say that these resources were all used for the war effort, but one could look for a baseline number during the years before the war, subtract a reasonable number based on civilian rationing, and then use the remainder to determine how many mineral resources were used. One could then calculate an answer based on those figures, and an average horsepower produced by each resource using machines from that time. You research this at NYPLs General Research Division. We leave the math to you.

Naturally, the exact answer depends on the exact specimen of Citrullus lanatus (watermelon), but sources we found state that there are 250750 seeds in the average American watermelon. Generally the bigger the melon the more seeds there are. Seeds come in many colors, black, red, white (these are developing seeds). Some recent varieties of watermelon are seedless. Which is a shame since theres great nutritional value in the seeds according to sources such as Foods and Food Production Encyclopedia by Douglas M. Considine. And dont be worried if you swallow a few. Our stomach acids ensure you will not be growing a watermelon in your stomach.

Its complicated, depending greatly on the specific movement and the context in which it is placed given that the Hawaiian hula is a sacred ritual dance in which every movement of the performer is codified and deeply symbolic. As definitive a book as it gets is Mahealani Uchiyamas 2016 The Haumana Hula Handbook for Students of Hawaiian Dance, which describes in depth the origins, language, etiquette, ceremonies, and the spiritual culture of hula. Ultimately though, the full significance could never be communicated in writingto paraphrase the famed apothegm, writing about hip movements is like singing about architecture.