Happy National Library Week last April (or next)

Before viewing this video, you should know two things about me. I'm a retired librarian who has worked in all kinds of libraries, from a coastal California bookmobile to a tiny New England town library; from a huge Canadian university research library to elementary school libraries to a biggish eastern city public library. The second thing you should know is that in all those years I never, ever remembered to celebrate National Library Week on time.

The third thing (beside the fact that I can't count) is that I've always treasured an old Herb Caen column in the San Francisco Chronicle that he wrote about libraries. It was probably during an actual long-ago National Library Week that he told us about the book that had been returned to the San Francisco Public Library with a piece of bacon in it that had apparently been used as a bookmark. I don't know if it was a need to protect books or a love of bacon, but from that moment on I knew where I wanted to work.

There. Now you can watch this video.