Most Sunday afternoons, there’s a crowd of people queued up in front of the Conrad Sulzer Regional Library right before it opens. Like addicts waiting for a fix, they pace and fidget, alternately glancing at their watches and the library’s front doors. When the portals finally open at one they stream inside and head for their departments of choice.
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Andrews says she visits the Sulzer branch a few times each week to do research and possibly to bump into something interesting. “I like starting somewhere and finding these clues and going from one place to another and finding something that refers to something else, like a scavenger hunt. That’s one reason I don’t like using the computer as a tool so much. There’s not so much of an ability to cross over between things fluidly.”
One of Andrews’s favorite finds was a book of librarian humor that included a cartoon depicting a restaurant customer ordering a meal using the Dewey decimal system. “It’s like a whole little world of librarians, which I’m not even sure exists, but I like to think it does, like a secret librarians’ club,” she says. “It seemed like they had this real identity thing going on, where they fit in–and the whole marm problem.”
