Sunday, December 23, 2007

"How to Hold Up a Bank"

On the issue of "Unfortunate book titles": On World Wide Words some Henry Willis contributes a recollection: “Thirty years ago, when I was a desk clerk at the library of the US Department of the Interior in Washington DC, I was given the job of organising all the check-out slips for the previous three years in Dewey decimal order. (This, by the way, was punishment for being caught reading the books that were being returned; I was told that doing so was ‘inappropriate’ for someone in my job.) One of the slips was for ‘How To Hold Up A Bank’. That intrigued me enough to get me to descend a few floors into the stacks on my lunch break to find it. Unfortunately the book wasn’t there, but I was able to get an idea what it was about from the other books on that shelf, all of which concerned soil engineering.”

No comments: